Review: ‘Maestro’ portrays a brilliant but deeply flawed Leonard Bernstein

Some musician friends have gotten all hot and huffy over the new Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro.

Dismissing the film on Facebook as “one of the worst hit jobs on Leonard Bernstein’s legacy,” one friend added, “I could have settled for fewer tawdry scenes of Bernstein snorting coke or fondling conducting students (consensually) and instead greater demonstrations of Bernstein’s humanity and deep reverence for beauty and music.”

The movie’s star — and co-writer and director — Bradley Cooper does portray the American conductor-composer-pianist-guru as an often out-of-control bundle of ego and id, with an underdeveloped superego. He’s brilliant, and passionate about music and knowledge and communication, but also a compulsive smoker even as emphysema worsens, probably an alcoholic, sometimes a drug abuser and definitely a sexual compulsive.

He may be the smartest guy in the room, and he won’t let anyone forget it. In his personal as well as professional life, he desperately craves approval.

People become more of what they are as they age, and the real-life Bernstein became more narcissistic and intemperate with accumulating years. Some performances became increasingly exaggerated, with movements like the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony and the “Nimrod” of Elgar’s Enigma Variations stretched to near stasis.

He was a physically flamboyant conductor who produced performances of visceral intensity, sometimes brilliance. He was an accomplished pianist. Talking to audiences, live and on TV, he could put music into words with a clarity rarely if ever equaled since. As a composer he could brilliantly meld influences from Stravinsky to pop.

A complicated marriage, and sidelines

His increasingly tragic foil was Felicia Montealegre, the Costa Rican-Chilean actress who was Bernstein’s wife from 1951 until her death in 1978. As compellingly personified by Carey Mulligan, Montealegre first attracts Bernstein with her smarts and wit as well as beauty; they also share progressive political passions.

In public, she gives him heterosexual credibility as well as extra glamour. But, although they go on to have three children, by the time of their marriage Montealegre is aware of Bernstein’s homosexual activities.

Early in the movie, we meet Bernstein in bed with David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), a handsome young clarinetist at the Boston Symphony’s summer festival Tanglewood. A few years later, running into Oppenheim with his wife and baby, Bernstein proudly tells the infant, “I slept with both of your parents.”

Bernstein seduces star-struck young musicians hoping for career boosts (although he reportedly was more obsessed with the conquest than the actual sex). When you’re famous, he believes, they let you do anything.

Between the sexual competition and Bernstein’s all-consuming international career, Montealegre feels increasingly sidelined, depressed and bitter — “a slow descent,” the Bernsteins’ daughter Jamie has written, “into a mute, existential despair.” But in an angry confrontation, as a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade goes by outside the Bernsteins’ Dakota apartment, Montealegre yells, “You’re going to die a lonely, bitter old queen.”

After a separation, Bernstein returns to Montealegre when she’s diagnosed with breast cancer, which metastasizes. Whatever the tensions that have grown between them, there has always been a basic connection, a love of whatever kind. As Montealegre slips away, Bernstein is visibly gripped by guilt.

As Bernstein, whose badly abused body finally gave out in 1990, retreats further into history, some of this may be news to some viewers. But it’s been documented in books by Joan Peyser, Humphrey Burton and others. In the music world, rumors and reports of private — and public — excesses had circulated for decades.

This image released by Netflix shows Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre, right, and... — This image released by Netflix shows Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre, right, and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in a scene from "Maestro."(Jason McDonald / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Episodes of career and life

We do see recreated episodes of Bernstein’s career. There’s overnight celebrity when, as the New York Philharmonic’s young assistant conductor, he’s a late substitute leading a nationally broadcast concert. A rehearsal for the ballet Fancy Free, with a particularly handsome young dancer, sparks a fantasy with Bernstein and Montealegre joining onstage. Mahler’s Second Symphony reaches a grandiose peroration in England’s Ely Cathedral. (Cooper’s orgasmic conducting would befuddle many an orchestra, but Bernstein’s podium manner — which I witnessed a few times in Boston Symphony summer concerts — could be extravagantly eccentric.)

This image released by Netflix shows Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in a scene from... — This image released by Netflix shows Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in a scene from "Maestro." (Jason McDonald/Netflix via AP)(Jason McDonald / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

No, we don’t see the Young People’s Concerts and Omnibus TV programs that made Bernstein a media celebrity. West Side Story, a musical adapting the Romeo and Juliet story to New York gang rivalries, and perhaps his greatest accomplishment, is hardly noted. Nor are we reminded that he more than anyone made Mahler standard rep. Even Vienna had rarely heard the symphonies before Bernstein programmed and recorded them there.

Buoyed by the advent of stereo recordings and later music videos, Bernstein became a formidable musical figure around the world by dint of brilliance but also obsessive work. He drove himself mercilessly, at exorbitant cost to his family as well as his own health.

Maestro is not hagiography, or musical history, nor should that be expected or required. No, it’s a set of vignettes — imagined, but mostly well documented — of an extraordinary, complicated, often messy life. It’s an exploration of the man, and woman, behind the celebrity.

That Bernstein managed his demons as well as he did, to accomplish what he did, may have been his greatest achievement. Looking remarkably convincing as the young as well as aging Bernstein, what Bradley Cooper presents us, compellingly, is not a marble statue, but a brilliant human being who also happened to be terribly flawed. That’s much more interesting than a statue.