Cooper’s impersonation of the great composer is eerily exact, and gets to the heart of the sacrifices great artists feel they need to make
ust last year at Venice, Cate Blanchett was introducing us to the tormented fictional conductor Lydia Tár by watching old childhood VHS tapes of her mentor, the great conductor and composertalking about the way music triggers in you emotions you didn’t understand and of which you didn’t know you were capable.
Poor Felicia has to come to terms with her megastar husband sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere and with the humiliation of his many indiscretions with young men and this is a compulsively fluent film, with Cooper and Mulligan grinning and scatting and chirruping their way through many extended and overlapping dialogue scenes. Cooper has already got into trouble for “Jewface” - though not for “Gayface” - in that he is a non-Jewish man playing a Jewish role with a big prosthetic nose.
In the early part of the film, shot in luminous black-and-white, young Bernstein is a bundle of pure creative energy, but no soigné self-indulgent European. He is solidly American: muscular, frank, direct, almost like an athlete away from the track, and with a prodigious workrate that he never agonises about. His voice at this stage is light and rather high, as opposed to the gravelly gravitas of his middleaged self. And his attraction to men is just one of the things he’s relaxed about.
As the years go by, the crisp monochrome is succeeded by a rich colour which interestingly makes many shots look like Sunday newspaper colour-supplement spreads and somehow feels seedier and less innocent than the black and white.
In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners. Bernstein was never going to compromise who he was, no matter how much he loved his wife. There is a sad, wintry acceptance of that.
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