COOPER VISUALLY COMPOSES

FAMOUS AMERICAN COUPLE SHOWN TO BE TRUE LOVE BIRDS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Bradley Cooper creates a moving visual composition using the energy of musical whimsy to tell the story of world famous American composer Leonard Bernstein.

Maestro (2023) co-stars Carey Mulligan as Felicia (Bernstein) Montealegre. Mulligan exhibits a lot of happiness as the wife of the first internationally famous orchestra conductor from America. Felicia was an artist in her own right as a Broadway stage actor, making her all the more a match with the musical genius of Bernstein.

Cooper also stars in front of the camera as the lead biographical character. The opening scenes build in silent anticipation toward Bernstein’s conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.

This 2 h 9 m runtime literally just sings by during some scenes with that musical energy of the famous compositions driving the acting, such as that composed for the Broadway play, West Side Story (1957), which was turned into a movie in 1961, and was reimagined in 2021.

The dramatization of the life story of one of the most famous composers keeps a bit inside the musical genre with this building anticipation that Cooper and Mulligan will quickly break out into song and dance, at least by the next scene sequence, anyway.

Essentially, Leonard and Felicia are two love birds whose closely bonded relationship is so full of love as to have inspired at least one or two musical notes.

This film and just about every scene therein is visually appealing, with several scene advances created with visual aesthetics. Cooper also uses sound advances to move an entire sequence of scenes forward.

The director also utilizes visual ellipses, such as when the lead characters travel to the orchestra hall in compressed time and the sets change rapidly, perhaps even chaotically, as the time and distance shortens.

The scene photography is often creatively framed, particularly in the first half of the narrative shot in black and white. Cooper begins in black and white for the budding romance scenes occurring during the 1940s. And then, once the plot reversal has been established, the director shifts to technicolour for the twilight years, which would have become available for filmmaking by that time.

Many scenes are also three dimensional with the actors in front of a deep background or the actors behind a deep foreground. The architecture is also showcased with one scene sequence occurring in a New York apartment accented by lofted ceilings while the gigantic balloons of the Thanksgiving Day Parade float by the floor to ceiling windows.

The tone and atmosphere are similar to that of the West Side Story in which the characters are happy, singing and dancing, as if on the street in the wet under a heavy rain, even though the city neighbourhood they live in is a tinder box of emotional hatred between rival immigrant gangs.

Leonard and Felicia are genuine characters with not too much to complain about after achieving international success. The script contains thoughtful dialogue that describes the inner, heart felt motivations of both Leonard and Felicia. Cooper broaches several delicate subjects with the correct balance of candor and truthfulness.

Cooper often shows the happy love birds to be truly in love frolicking from scene to scene as they transition from play to work and also among their many friends and associates at lavish house parties.

The narrative is linear with two parts running parallel to each other. The advancing professional careers of Bernstein and Montealegre run side by side, while also simultaneously adjusting to, the love story.

Cooper puts on a nose prosthetic to appear as Leonard while also remaining Bradley with hair and make up appropriately applied to depict the different ages of the character moving from a young twenty something novice conductor to a graying and slightly withered widow.

The telling truth of the film is that life is a bit like a Bernstein musical composition with the shocking end filled with more and more deafening silence as the happiness succumbs to the ravages of life, more common in the world than one would like to imagine.

Maestro currently has a limited theatrical release with a streaming debut on Netflix on December 20.