Maestro (2023) Review
A couple days back I was able to check out Maestro, the next film directed by Bradley Cooper. This one wasn’t really on my radar until it started getting a lot of award love. So I was curious to see how well this movie was and if it deserved all of the love and praise it was getting. So what did I think of the film? Let’s get started!
The Good:
Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan are the two best things about the film. Both of them are some of the best of the year and will most likely both receive Oscar nominations. I wouldn’t be mad if either one of them walks away on Oscars night with the statue in their hand. I think both deserve and both are fantastic, for me this is one of Bradley Cooper’s best performances. Granted, I haven’t seen most of his dramatic work like Silver Lining Playbook, American Sniper, and A Star is Born and this movie made me want to watch those movies and experience Bradley Cooper’s dramatic acting side of things. Because I’ve really only seen him as Rocket in the MCU. Here, he just transforms and disappears into this role. You don’t see Bradley Cooper, all you see is Leonard Bernstein, and we see him through-out multiple years of his life, and he nails every phase of life he is in. Then you have Carey Mulligan who I’ve seen in a few movies over the years notably A Great Gatsby from 10 years ago with Leonardo DiCaprio. And in that movie she’s great and holding her own against Leonardo DiCaprio and here she’s holding her acting opposite Bradley Cooper. And really just shows how great of an actress she is, who’s playing this very complicated character who has this love for Bernstein but also see what he’s really doing, but goes along with it. So she has this very complicated relationship with Bernstein and you buy into both of their performances.
Another aspect that really stood out to me is it’s very clear that Bradley Cooper is a director with a vision. In a year with so many movies that are very totally bland with no singular vision. They feel like movies that were directed by a committee of people, and I watch this film and you don’t feel that. I don’t know how much of a passion project this was for Bradley Cooper but he very clearly knew the film he wanted to make and Netflix let him do that. I was actually looking into the behind the scenes of this film and apparently Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were attached to direct this film at different points. I guess Spielberg was on set of A Star is Born (2018) and saw rough cuts of the film and told Bradley “you’re directing Maestro”, that was back in 2017 or so. Cooper has been attached as the director for about 6 years and I think you can see that. There's a lot of very cool uses of the camera in here, mainly the way it transitions from scene to scene. Where you’ll have shots of Cooper and Mulligan running into a house and we see it from above, they go through the door and it’s a different building. It’s all done seamlessly, I don’t know how they shot it. There’s even this weird dance sequence, 30-40 minutes into the film taking place on a stage. That I viewed it was one thing, but after talking with my grandparents about it I realized it helped communicate what Carey Mulligan’s character was feeling and pieces she put together. It’s stuff like that, that proves how talented of a filmmaker Bradley Cooper really is.
I thought the movie also did a very good job of telling the story of Leonard Bernstein. I knew pretty much nothing about Leonard Bernstein and after watching the film, I felt like I knew more about him. And the impressive part is it’s only about 2 hours long. And you can contrast this with Napoleon that is almost 3 hours long, but told the wrong angle to tell this story. I left that movie not really knowing who Napoleon was, but here I felt like I saw Bernstein’s life and really understood who he was as a person. The movie spans several decades of his life, probably like 30-40 years of his life and we really understand who he is as a person plus his relationship with his wife. The movie spends a lot of time on his work life and personal life, so as you move into the back half of the film there’s a lot of big emotions that come from certain scenes.
Finally, the movie does a good job of transporting you back into a different time and place. What they wisely did for all of the past sequences was show the film in black and white. So you understand at what point the film is up to do with the present day because of it. But it’s not just that, the way the costume design and production designs are done makes you feel like you’re going back to a different time and place.
The Bad:
As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t really know much about Leonard Bernstein. I heard the name and knew he was a composer. Beyond that, his story was completely new to me. And the subject matter and the trailers didn’t interest me all that much. So I was hoping this film would make me more of a Leonard Bernstein fan, and helped me understand who he was. In a sense, I think the movie did a really good job of that. But it's still a movie that isn’t fully for me. The only reason why I would choose to watch the film was because it was getting so much award love, I’m sure it’ll get several Oscar nominations. And in a sense, that’s all that movie feels like. It feels like a movie designed to win Oscars and really nothing else. You could argue the same thing about Oppenheimer, but that film felt important and like it was trying to say something and it tried to be this blockbuster while getting Oscar buzz. This is a movie that is most certainly going to get Oscar nominations, but it’s the type of film that I don’t really ever see myself watching again.
The other thing with this movie is it felt like certain things were focused on more so then other things. What I mean by that is the movie focuses a lot on the love story between Leonard Bernstein and his wife plus, Leonard’s musical career. But there’s other parts that are touched on but not really explored. We learn early on that Leonard likes both men and women, and that’s set-up very early on but after the mid way point. Once we see Leonard Bernstein get married that gets abandoned out of the blue and it feels like it was just forgotten about. The other thing is he has two kids in the film, but the way they’re used they feel like such an afterthought and you forget that they’re even in the movie.
Final Thoughts: Overall, I thought Maestro was a solid film with two fantastic performances by Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan. But the movie feels too much like an Oscar bait and that means it doesn’t have a lot of entertainment value inside of it, it’s not one I’m wanting to rewatch. If you like this sort of thing, it’s a solid version of the thing it’s trying to do.
The Score: 8.3/10 (B)
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