Many have rightly handed Bradley Cooper an Oscar already, must weigh in on the maestro then!
Bradley Cooper as conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in the film Maestro
How interesting it would be, I wonder—after catching Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (on Netflix), twice—to observe Cooper, 48, on the film’s set, where he convincingly channels musician Leonard Bernstein, ageing between 25 to 69.
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And then for Cooper, in prosthetic make-up, to slip out of this trance-like state, off and on, giving practical instructions to cast and crew, as director—going back inside Bernstein, as the camera rolls again!
Magical, yet schizophrenic, no? That’s what I might wanna ask Cooper to explain. To be fair, I have briefly met/interviewed him once. Although that doesn’t count—given this was on the sets of Todd Phillips’s The Hangover Part II, in Bangkok, circa 2010.
As it is, that bro-code franchise, I guess, may be harder to top, in such times when humans are measuring their worth by the size of their virtuous outrage.
The actor in A Star Is Born
If their creativity went along the same route, however, both Cooper, and Phillips—who later made the disturbingly menacing Joker (2019)—would’ve forever been known for the hungama, Hangover: the world’s unlikeliest blockbuster!
In the same way that Bernstein (1918-90), Cooper’s subject in Maestro (2023), gets most identified with the musical, West Side Story. I walked out halfway into that full-blown Broadway production in Mumbai, recently—realising that West Side Story hardly has as memorable a soundtrack for such a popular, long-running musical.
Bernstein was a multi-hyphenate in music—conductor, composer, teacher/mentor, pianist, author… As actor-writer-director, also producer (along with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg), Cooper isn’t so interested in Bernstein’s professional biography as his delightfully complicated relationship/marriage with Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
Focusing on one thing. Which is just as well. You can basically rattle off a well-known public figure’s Wikipedia-like background (early to later life), career, achievements, etc, over a string of sentences, for expository dialogue, anyway.
As Maestro cleverly does. What remains, therefore, is a wholly intimate film, where you actually meet Bernstein, the man inside, instead.
It’s still the big biopic, so to say. Its size determined by its depth, rather than merely scale—with events from Bernstein’s life, so finely cross-cutting on the edit, seamlessly structured around Bernstein’s music, both as foreground and background score!
I’m told Spielberg offered Cooper to direct Maestro, while he was still watching A Star Is Born (2018), the star-actor’s insanely emotional directorial debut.
I suspect Spielberg’s own interest in Bernstein could’ve emanated from the fact that he eventually filmed West Side Story (2021). What do you sense in common between A Star Is Born and Maestro?
That they’re about artistes, of course. Centred on music, yes. That they’re about love; less transactional, inherently melancholic. That they examine inner lives of talented people in such a way that you begin to question if talent/genius itself is often a burden—it demands much from self, also because the world relentlessly does the same.
One of my favourite casually delivered lines in Maestro being when Bernstein (Cooper) tells wife Montealegre, during a domestic squabble: “[You remember] the Chamberlain movie we saw last week? He said, ‘How could I compete with the man you think I am?’”
You’re bound to disappoint. We arrive at this perspective both in A Star Is Born and Maestro, because they strike at the heart of grief.
It’s only when you view life in the context of death—that it’s merely a distraction from—a lot of the petty egos, controlling impulses, and expectations, from peers and partner, start to make sense for what they really are. The partner sees it similarly.
I don’t know how much you can see of yourself in Maestro. But there’s a conflict at the core of Bernstein’s life that I tend to grapple with, sometimes.
Bernstein is a conductor, with an altogether external life. He’s also a composer, that involves creation, hence immense solitude. Bernstein is self-admittedly a people’s person. He finds that interfering with his creative output. But, he’s okay with it!
Either way, both as performer and writer-director, Cooper seems to have delivered a masterpiece with Maestro, sufficiently balancing Bernstein’s own dilemma himself.
Maybe because I end up looking at everything through an Indian lens, for the longest, I’d think of Cooper as a Ranveer Singh kinda figure in Hollywood, while Ranbir Kapoor seemed more inspired by Ryan Gosling!
It’s only when you learn more about vulnerable jock Cooper’s own life—his personal anxieties over talent, potential, ambitions; consequent substance abuse (he quit drinking in 2004)—that you figure what makes him such a sensitive star filmmaker, to pull off an incredibly empathetic double-bill. He’s so uniquely shorn of being judgmental towards his naturally flawed lead characters.
Whether as the depressive alcoholic, country-singer Jack, progressively drowning in the well of jealousy and self-doubt in A Star is Born. Or as Maestro’s polyamorous bisexual, Bernstein, equally in love with his wife, he’s 100 per cent honest with. How does Cooper direct, simultaneously?
On Hangover sets, Phillips says in a Directors Guild interaction, Cooper would follow him around like an obsessed lover. He was learning his craft.
He would’ve learnt a thing or two from Clint Eastwood, 93, who would’ve died as Dirty Harry too, if he didn’t direct some great films—two of them, American Sniper (2014), and The Mule (2018), with Cooper as his muse, after all!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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