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.

I've just watched this on Netflix. I quite enjoyed it but it's not up there with my favourites. I enjoyed the music, and I thought Carey Mulligan was excellent. However, in some ways it suffered from trying to cram an awful lot into the time available, and therefore leaving the audience to make factual leaps - we were supposed to infer that Bernstein and his wife had separated without being told, and then somehow they were back together because she turned up at a performance in Ely, of all places, with no sort of back story to why she was there and why that led them to get together. The Wikipedia entry on Bernstein also suggests a degree of economy with the truth in the film.

It was nice to look at and any film about Bernstein is going to be interesting to watch with plenty to engage interest. Also any film about Bernstein is going to have to have a selective focus because he did so much and there are multiple aspects to him.

This one wasn't about West Side Story or about any of his compositions really - but there are other (documentary) films that deal with that. There's a fascinating one that's probably on the iPlayer (BBC re-showed it last month) about the Te Kanawa/Carreras recording for example. It also wasn't about his political follies.

This one focused on his wife and what it was to be married to Maestro Bernstein which necessarily includes experiencing the same musical enrapturement that all his audiences felt, and for that the cinematography was spot on and Carey Mulligan was outstanding.

I loved it.

I'm inclined to believe it's a relatively accurate portrait, more so than most biopix, since the period is so recent that many people alive now would have known him. Bradley Cooper does a great job at conveying his exuberant, even manic, energy, that it makes sense that he was able to sweep everyone along. I was surprised that it dwells much more on his private interpersonal life than his music (I was surprised they give no hint of was a big deal West Side Story was), but it does give you a sense of how wide-ranging he was. I didn't realize that Bernstein was a big deal for being the first major American conductor, but I guess that all the other big-time conductors of the time were European.

I thought it was great that movie is directed and cut with an energy mirroring Bernstein's, and the lightning-speed overlapping dialogue could have made Howard Hawks envious. I'll admit that the avalanche of passing characters, some barely identified (e.g. Comden and Green), wouldn't register, but I think it conveys how much was going on for him.

We watched it on Netflix at Christmas and enjoyed it. We put the subtitles on to solves the mumbling problem! I think others are right and it's more a portrait or a collection of important moments than a story with a beginning and end. I thought Bernsteins's charisma really came through. I saw him conduct at the Proms (in the 80s I think) and there was an amazing atmosphere.