Maestro

Maestro is the true story of Leonard Bernstein and his relationship with love and music. I found it to be more about love than music, personally.

I’ve seen a lot of hate for this film online. People think Bradley Cooper, who stars in and directs this film, is trying way too hard to win an Oscar. I say, so what if he is (I didn’t get that impression). He really gives his all to the performance and you can tell how much went into it. I thought the directing was especially poignant. This, plus A Star is Born, proves to me that Cooper is a great director. I’d like to see what he could do if he makes something he doesn’t star in.

The other lead of the film, Carey Mulligan, who portrays Bernstein’s wife Felicia, steals the show, especially toward the end of the film. I kept wishing we would spend more and more time with her character, and even found myself wanting the film to be about her instead of Leonard.

All Hollywood stories are apocryphal, but the tale of how Cooper got the job directing this goes that Steven Spielberg (who was going to direct this himself) passed the torch to Cooper after watching an early cut of Cooper’s A Star is Born. Apparently, he thought Cooper better suited to make this film than himself. I wonder how the film would be different with Spielberg directing. (Apparently the legendary Martin Scorsese was also attached to direct at one point). Instead, both Spielberg and Scorsese produced the film.

Where the film fell apart for me was the script. It is very disjointed and too jumpy. Things happen that have no consequence to the story, and it really feels like they need to. It is cause without effect on a massive scale. I wasn’t sure if the script was like this too or if major scenes had been cut – so I endeavored to find out. I tracked down the script online (you can do this too with a simple google search) and found that surprisingly the script was exactly like the film. Nothing seemed to have been cut from script to screen, which is not – in my experience – typical when you read a script after watching the film.

I’m not sure what the message of this film was. I feel like there were plenty of opportunities for them to have a strong point of view and have a theme or something to say about the world, but it felt like the film chose not to. It is a biopic, so ultimately they’re just telling the story of someone’s life so a message like “family is important” for example isn’t necessary – there was a ton of set-up for this to be the message but the film didn’t go in that direction whatsoever.

With a better and more structured script, I sincerely think this could be one of the best films of the year for me. Instead, it ends up somewhere in the middle of the pack. I’d give it a score of 7/10.