Maestro

[Britpopbaby]

I didn’t know anything about LB and his wife before going to see the film but I enjoyed it. I found some of the dialogue a little mumbly and hard to make out but otherwise I thought it was a good film with good performances by everyone involved.

We saw it last night. DH hated it. I found it really boring but well acted.

Can't wait to see it but am going to watch it on Netflix. It looks a bit too much like Oscar bait but am looking forward to it anyway.

I like the main actors, but the run time of a bit more than two hours puts me off so may wait until it’s on Netflix next week to watch so I can pause half way through.

Mumble, mumble, mumble. The difficulty in hearing key dialogue really spoiled it for me. As an example, the scene where they first met and she is explaining her background.

Carey Mulligan is very good however

@mrsogrady I am glad it wasn’t just me who found it mumbly.

Well acted but not exciting.

The performances seemed quite artificial to me…the acting just felt like ‘acting’. I couldn’t connect with it on an emotional level at all.

The cinematography was beautiful though.

I was very tired last night but I just dropped off to sleep in it. It seems a bit like a vanity project. There's some great moments in it but I am so distracted by all the cigarette acting and arty shots of smoke rising.

I found I got into it more half way through. Maybe I adapted to the mumble.

The smoking! I can’t believe how
much smoking there was!

I haven’t seen it but am looking forward. Fun Guardian article about making here, about the original recording in Ely cathedral, and recreating it for the film with the LSO playing themselves 50 years on, the men asked to grow beards etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/13/maestro-leonard-bernstein-bradley-cooper-pope

I want to watch it, but I am frightened that it will be all Great Man, with the woman characters being diminished by being portrayed just in relation to him.

Is it like that? I'm getting so, so fed up with this that I will skip the film rather than put up with it, but that would be a shame because from a documentary I saw of LB decades ago he seemed a wonderful person.

@GoodOldEmmaNess I personally felt that it was not the case.

Well, I loved it. Thought second half particularly was excellent. Carey Mulligan is mesmerising (I thought at times she had a Vivian Leigh look about her). Thought it really portrayed a realism about their marriage and his life - and I could see how magnetic he was. Only gripe - wished they could have shown a bit more about him writing West Side Story - still my favourite musical and the music in it is really sublime.

Thanks, Britpopbaby. I might risk it then.

I felt this, it was quite luvvie and I can't think of a single shot where he didn't have a cigarette between his fingers or lips, it became quite irritating

I'm watching it at the moment and struggling... apart from the Bradley Cooper LOOK MA! I'M ACTING!!! vibe that this film screams... what exactly is the point of it? Is it to encourage more husbands to be homosexual? I'm wondering why this was made and if it is a story worth telling?

In short, I'm finding it quite boring.

I finished watching it. The second half seemed to have more about music in it and i liked that better. I liked the short scene of his teaching towards the end and could have done with more of that.

I guess it refused to define much about his sexuality, just that he had relationships with men and women and loved both. Apparently this script has been knocking around for decades so perhaps that had more dramatic value in the past.

I've had to stop and will give the rest another go tomorrow. Why don't they make films in 95 minutes or less like in the old days? I hate this trend for these long, rambling 2hr plus films that have so many inconsequential scenes or characters that have nothing to do with the story and just feel like filler.

I don't know much about Leonard Bernstein but he's coming across as an insufferable self obsessed bore (is that the point of this film?) and as someone else mentioned both main characters are very 'luvie' like - theatre people. They both have a very smug pompous way of chattering or repeating what the other has said that is very irritating. Carey Mulligan's mid Atlantic accent is stunning and it is a shame that the characters are so hollow, directionless and presented in a not very interesting way.

De-Lovely, the Cole Porter biopic (2004) has the same story - married gay man who was a musical genius - and at least that movie was entertaining.

I really enjoyed it, and it made me want to know more about the Bernsteins, which I guess is a good sign in a biopic. I agree it would have been good to know more about his creative life, but I knew that it would be focusing on the marriage.
Felicia was the real star - as evidenced by Carey Mulligan getting top billing, above Cooper.
Bernstein himself may not have been likeable, but he was certainly fascinating.
It was beautifully filmed - especially the switch from black and white to colour.
And the Mahler performance in the cathedral was spectacular.
The constant smoking was a bit distracting, but I guess that's how it really was over all those years.
Definitely one I'll be watching again.

I did not like the movie. It felt like a collection of disconnected scenes which was filmed in a way to scream 'I am a serious actor and director'.
I just don't know what the movie was about.

There were some good bits, especially when he conducts or the two scenes with David Oppenheimer (one when he meets Felicia and then the walk), that were probably worth exploring more.

Edit: This review is a good summary of main issues:
With Maestro, his sophomore directorial effort, Cooper confirms that he’s incapable of directing a film that isn’t ultimately a showcase for his acting ability.
Maestro sees Cooper doubling down on all the insufferable elements of his first film. (...)
He wants to show how he can have chemistry with his female co-star, so there’s the perfunctory meet-cute. He wants to show he’s not afraid of gay material, so there’s a brief interaction with Gideon Glick as Tommy Cothran. (For a film about a gay icon, the film is stiflingly heterosexual.) And of course, he wants to show that he can hold his own on screen in a big Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style fight, so we get an even draggier version of the “You’re just fuckin’ ugly” bathtub scene from A Star Is Born, this time under the watchful eye of a Snoopy Macy’s parade balloon.

I also thought it was too long. Agree that Carey Mulligan was outstanding. I was also sad that they just glossed past West Side Story, surely his greatest achievement. I wanted to see his relationship with Sondheim - but then I'm a musical theatre geek!

I finally finished it and also didn't enjoy it at all.

Apparently it has slipped out of the Netflix top 10 list and I can totally understand why. Surely there would have been more interesting things to depict about Leonard Bernstein. I felt the whole thing was a bore and I am still wondering why it was made, apart from to showcase Bradley Cooper. One of the worst biopics, I have ever seen.

Several years ago, there was a glut of Truman Capote biopics (a 3rd one is due to be released in 2024) but at least they dealt with an interesting episode in his life - the writing of his masterpiece In Cold Blood and his 'Swans.' The new film is about his 'Swans' and his writing of Answered Prayers.

The Bernstein biopic could have been handled in the same way and anchored around the making of West Side Story, one of his most famous works, where B could be having an affair with a male dancer while torn between love and loyalty to his wife and children - basically anything with some tension and drama instead of a collection of disjointed, random family scenes, with a few scenes of his composing and conducting thrown in...

I did enjoy it, it was hard to hear and understand, loved Carey Mulligan, some of it was hard to follow, the cinematography was excellent. the smoking was off putting. so much of it.
wonder what his family thought of it?

Very much in approval I think. They gave him the rights over a competing screenplay by Jake Gyllenhaal, and were consulted beforehand and throughout. They even wrote a public letter in Cooper’s defence when the prosthetic nose controversy came out.