The Current Cinema - David Hare on the de-gaying of Leonard Bernstein "as both man and history" in MAESTRO (Bradley Cooper, USA, 2023)

Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein
Maestro

Watching Maestro last night, two things struck me, especially as the movie entertains several formal nods to "old fashioned" movies like the Academy ratio and B&W, then color treatment for the major history of the story.

The first is the notion that the Bernstein/Felicia Montealegre union was what they used to call a "Manhattan Marriage". Or what was in more brutal terms a marriage of convenience between a closeted gay man and a willing female supporter. The Lenny/Felicia alliance was more than simply a sham but the film fails because of what I believe is a profoundly underwritten part for Carey Mulligan playing Felicia, whose own very substantial life as an activist is barely hinted at in the picture.

The other equally crucial thing that's lost in the picture is the sheer volume and often the commitment to Lenny's male lovers that barely gets past occasional "gift" shots of Lenny and whoever kissing or holding hands in the wings. One of his most important lovers, the clarinetist David Oppenheim (played beautifully by Matt Bomer) is hinted at but not opened out in any meaningful way.

In fact, although I hate to say it the screenplay has simply de-gayed Bernstein as both man and history. Maybe, maybe not are the Bernstein children the cause of this bowdlerization, just as the similar Manhattan Marriage in a 1947 film, Humoresque with Joan Crawford as a wealthy arts patroness married to a wealthy gay philanthropist played to a T by Paul Cavanaugh was nearly strangled by the Breen Office. Or maybe the producers now feel that the material needn't go into any greater depth as though the whole "gay thing" has been so culturally re-processed for the millennial generation that anything more sordid than a kiss in the dark is unnecessary.

I don't know, but in any case the screenplay also omits the whole body of Felicia's activism including the famous Black Panther party hosted at their Dakota apartment during the Panthers' FBI seek-and-destroy phase. One of the guests there was Otto Preminger who shared Lenny's own hopes for a secure Israeli nation (then in the mid-late sixties). None of this is in the picture.

And so the film flounders I feel on two inadequately written characters. This manifests in the two leads' performances which drastically compromises them. Mulligan is an actress I've always liked and she always makes you care about her characters but here she's given a confusing, unstable accent and an obviously underwritten part.

As for Lenny, the schnoz I believe is a big mistake because it has the effect of altering Cooper's cheeks and eyes to make him look like he's perpetually awake. His eye colors are also, as a friend has noted, not semitically brown (like my own) but blue.

The moments are there and they're wonderful, notably Lenny's conducting of the last few minutes of the Mahler 2 which is gorgeously staged, played and directed. As are so many of Lenny's moments of solitary contemplation.

But this is a movie in which the creation of arguably the most important American stage musical of the twentieth century, West Side Story, is simply not given any space, nor its creation in toto by four gay men, two of them (then) closeted - Lenny and Robbins - and two “out” - Sondheim and Laurents.

A real lost opportunity.