First Look - Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein- Page 5

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 12:28am

This didn’t work for me. Hated nearly everything about it. Knowing nothing really about Bernstein I found him to be a really unlikeable character and it was a chore to sit through. 

[MrsSallyAdams]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 9:40am

Carrie's acting up a storm in a cliched "long suffering wife" role. Cooper's showing us his homework but the script gives me no idea of who Lenny is or what the film is about. 

The film's not interested in his music so it's got to be about the marriage. But the marriage never makes sense. Why would a gay man in the theater feel pressured to marry a woman? Why stay with her after Stonewall? If he's bisexual and genuinely attracted to her, than what's motivating all these off screen affairs? We'll never know the real reasons but a film should pick some.

Matt Bomer's character in Fellow Travelers had a high stakes career keeping him in the closet. Cooper has one old man tell him that conductors need to live clean lives. And suddenly he's marrying Carrie while drooling over chorus boys?

Updated On: 1/3/24 at 09:40 AM

[EvanstonDad]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 10:19am

Thought this movie was a slog. Cooper's screenplay is terrible. He chooses to make a movie about all of the most mundane things about Bernstein's life (oh shocker, a famous artist has a toxic marriage), and the result is that this biopic is just like every other bland, boring biopic ever made. If you don't already know why Bernstein was legendary, you're not going to learn it here. Of course it will be nominated for a bunch of Oscars, because the Academy loves nothing better than to heap nominations on middlebrow movies about famous people where everyone wears a lot of prosthetic makeup.

[rattleNwoolypenguin]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 10:55am

Straight guy made a movie about Bernstein and it showed.

[TheQuibbler]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 12:34pm

Well, I liked it. 

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 12:51pm

I also loved it. My late musician father unintentionally introduced me to Leonard Bernstein when he took me to see the 1980 Broadway revival of WEST SIDE STORY at the Minskoff Theatre when I was 15 years old. I immediately went into a Bernstein obsession and devoured his composing work from the fabulous FANCY FREE ballet, CANDIDE, to MASS so this biopic had a quite emotional resonance for me - especially the musical link I have that connected me to my late father. Whenever strains of Bernstein’s work as composer came up in the film, my eyes just teared up. Knowing his history on my own terms, I enjoyed the film for showcasing his personal life with Felicia. Bernstein’s 3 children were involved with this film so that’s good enough for me. 

[ElephantLoveMedley]

Posted: 12/21/23 at 2:56pm

I absolutely loved this film.

[Lot666]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 11:04am

My husband and I attempted to watch this yesterday afternoon, after Stephen Colbert RAVED about it, and we couldn't even make it through the first hour before turning it off (something we rarely do). 

"Maestro" plays like a non-stop montage of bad home movies in which drunken people simply engage in idle chatter while smoking a nauseatingly endless supply of cigarettes (I actually started daydreaming about them dying of lung cancer) with a camera running. Everyone mumbles and talks over everyone else, and while tone and expression might suggest that they're being either terribly profound or terribly clever, no one really has anything meaningful or diverting to say.

The script and direction are sorely lacking; there is no background, development, or context to place Bernstein in what appears to be a tortured, angst-riddled life. We are told that he was once serendipitously called in at the last minute to replace another conductor, and from that night on he had the world by the tail. A brief voice-over by a faceless interviewer indicates that Bernstein quickly became a great success and enjoyed universal acclaim and adoration from all within his orbit, yet he is soon reduced to just another alcoholic, chain-smoking, tortured artist cliché. There are only passing references to his work with Stephen Sondheim on West Side Story and Candide, which the film inexplicably declines to depict.

Why and how did this man's life become such a tragedy? Is it because he was gay and married to a woman? Even that old trope holds no water here, as "Maestro" would have us believe that gay couples in the 40s and 50s danced blithely cheek-to-cheek next to straight couples at parties. Shortly after beginning his relationship with Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein eagerly introduces her to his on-again, off-again boyfriend and suggests that they all get together soon. Later, he kisses the erstwhile boyfriend in broad daylight outside Central Park, and mumbles something about passers-by wondering if "it was him". One almost has to laugh at the implausibility of such a scene; could society have been so insouciant about public displays of homosexuality in pre-Stonewall New York?

It doesn't help matters that Cooper's acting is almost never convincing. I would be hard-pressed to cite a single scene during which we didn't consciously think about the fact that we were watching Bradley Cooper "acting" the part of Leonard Bernstein. Cooper seems preoccupied with ensuring that his character continuously comes off as charming and beloved, even while the film gives us no reason to think of him that way. It doesn't even give us a reason to pity him.

Perhaps all of these questions and shortcomings are addressed in the latter half of the film, but after one hour of near-continuous boredom, we no longer cared.

[GiantsInTheSky2]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 11:23am

This film had so much potential, sadly it was boiled down to Oscar Bait and a closeted man’s ego. Maybe we’ll get a great Bernstein film in a decade or so.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 12:01pm

The extreme love/hate reactions to this film are fascinating to me. I’m in the “loved every second of it” camp but I do enjoy reading people’s reviews who felt the opposite. 

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 1:07pm

GiantsInTheSky2 said: "This film had so much potential, sadly it was boiled down to Oscar Bait and a closeted man’s ego. Maybe we’ll get a great Bernstein film in a decade or so."

Unlikely, unless it’s a documentary. His 3 children control their dad’s estate and were Executive Producers of this film and support Bradley Cooper, his creative choices, and the film itself. All the Connecticut portions of the film were actually filmed on the real Bernstein property. 

[DramaTeach]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 2:24pm

I agree with the above poster and believe that’s a major part of the reason for the story being so watered down. Jake Gyllenhaal’s version was denied by the kids, and perhaps that had more meat to it.

This was bare bones. It’s like they assumed the music itself would be enough, and while the music was thrilling for me in the scene where they visited On The Town rehearsals, that novelty wore off very quickly, and no plot was actually developed. No relationships felt real or developed. Matt Bomer’s character who initially seems jealous to meet Felicia is then totally fine that both he and his wife have slept with Bernstein and Bomer continues to kiss him in public in the 50s/60s? No biggie. Bernstein’s kid who was happy to hear her father deny he was gay and then never found out the truth on camera, so casually comments, “I don’t want to hear this” when he did start talking about a love interest? No biggie. Where is the conflict? Drama? Emotion? Felicia supporting her husband through successes ain’t cutting it. It really was like flipping through a family photo album. Bradley does not deserve an Oscar for this one, as actor or director. A true disappointment.

[inception]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 2:58pm

I saw this in an almost empty theare two weekends ago.  I thought & understand many of the criticisms, but I ultimately enjoyed it.  I didn't know anything about Bernstein's Mass before.  When I went to the Ooera Saturday I bought a copy of a newish recording inbthe gift shop & look forward to listening to it.  I also found the scene where he is conducting Mahler's Second very thrilling. But I love Mahler.

An older gentleman at the other end of the row I was in  wept loudly during the scenes when his wife was dying of cancer.

[Robbie2]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 5:56pm

The Bernstein Children on ‘Maestro’ Siblings Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein on conducting the Venice Film Festival audience, re-living their mother's death on screen, and why Bradley Cooper was the perfect embodiment of their conducting legend father: "He and our dad are so much alike." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/leonard-bernstein-children-bradley-cooper-maestro-1235768461/

 

We are catching it on Netflix tonight

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 6:16pm

...the scene where they visited On The Town rehearsals

That was a rehearsal for Jerome Robbins' 1944 ballet FANCY FREE.  The dance section we see Bradley dancing are from this ballet.  This ballet, of course, is what inspired their Broadway musical ON THE TOWN several years later.  

[DramaTeach]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 8:20pm

BrodyFosse123 said: "...the scene where they visited On The Town rehearsals

That was a rehearsal for Jerome Robbins' 1944 ballet FANCY FREE. The dance section we see Bradley dancing are from this ballet. This ballet, of course, is what inspired their Broadway musical ON THE TOWN several years later. "

Thanks for the info! Beautifully done, but can’t say the same for the rest of it.

[Fan123]

Posted: 12/26/23 at 11:45pm

I didn't have a strong reaction to this film either way, but I did find the progression of the relationship to be a bit confusing. (Spoilers) Leonard and Felicia seemed happy together, then there was a time jump, and then we saw tension between them. As I recall, we jumped from Felicia being quite accepting of Leonard's male lovers, to "You're getting sloppy" and "Don't you dare tell her [our daughter] the truth", but it wasn't entirely clear why. There was a bit of retroactive explaining of this in Felicia's dialogue later, but it would have been nice to have seen this change dramatised. It didn't seem as though Leonard was breaking any 'rules' that they hadn't already implicitly agreed could be broken. Was the problem that he was now risking exposing their arrangement to other people? But that wasn't set up early on as something Felicia was particularly firm about, to my memory. If it was instead a matter of Felicia thinking that she could be okay with the arrangement, and then gradually realising over the years that she couldn't be, then again, it would have been good to dramatise that rather than skip over the change and just talk about it later.

[Jarethan]

Posted: 12/27/23 at 2:33pm

I finally saw this last night.  I enjoyed it a lot, even though there were things I had issues with.  I thought that Cooper and Mulligan were absolute perfection in their roles.  Clearly, both will get Oscar nominations, but I think they both deserve to win.  I also think that Cillian Murphy deserves to win.  Were I a voter, I would definitely go with Mulligan, and I would struggle to decide re Cooper and Murphy.  Ironically, Cooper has many scenes that could be played at the Oscars, whereas Cooper has very few, because his is not a showy role.

My criticism of the movie, despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed it, was two-fold.

• I thought some of the direction was brilliant, e.g., the big fight in the bedroom as Snoopy suddenly passes by and the conducting in the Cathedral, to name two; however, there were a couple of times when I thought it was what I refer to as 'artsy-fartsy', perhaps a little too much for its own good.  Most of Cooper's choices, however, I felt were really excellent.
• I thought the script was not without its flaws.  A number of brilliantly written scenes, particularly those focused on Felicia, but I never knew anything about most of the other characters, e.g., how long and how serious was Bomer's character's relationship with Bernstein prior to their both getting married? if Bernstein really loved or even seriously cared about Felicia, would he really be that indiscreet at his own party?  Would someone as famous as Bernstein kiss a man on the street right across the street from his co-op?

On balance, however, I really enjoyed it, will undoubtedly watch it again in the next few weeks, and think that Bradley Cooper is continuing his growth as a force to be reckoned with.

[berniesb!tch]

Posted: 12/27/23 at 2:59pm

I watched this on Christmas with my mother who had no idea who Bernstein was. I'm kinda 50/50 about the whole thing. Certainly enjoyed it more than most biopics however. 

The good - the visuals! Wow, I thought the movie was gorgeous and had great editing. Such a treat to look at. I also thought the acting was phenomenal - especially Mulligan and Glick. I'm happy Gideon got used in an A-list project like this. 

The not-so-good - For an interesting man and story I was bored for certain stretches. I didn't mind it "not being about the music", but it just needed more dynamic writing to get me really invested in this marriage. I know it's cliche to say at this point but it's true, you could feel Bradley's Oscar desperation.

It did make my mom want to learn more about him and his work, so Cooper succeeded as far as she goes.

[inception]

Posted: 12/27/23 at 3:22pm

The scene that stuck with me is when

Spoilers

 

 

he brought his latest boy to the family home, & when his wife got upset he acted all innocent & suggested he was trying to set the tramp up with their daughter.  Pretty amazing that the family would be ok with that scene.  To me it showed  what a selfish person he was, & how little respect or genuine love he had for his wife or daughter.  

That his wife later forgave him made me think she was probably codependent. 

A great artist maybe, but a totally disgusting human being.

I listened to the first half of the CD of his Mass yesterday, and it is fantastic.  It's the Philadelphia Orchestra with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting a live performance from 2015.

The only thing I see the in the film absolutely deserving of an Oscar for is the makeup.

 

[All So Ozmopolitan]

Posted: 1/5/24 at 12:46pm

MrsSallyAdams said: "But the marriage never makes sense. Why would a gay man in the theater feel pressured to marry a woman? Why stay with her after Stonewall? If he's bisexual and genuinely attracted to her, than what's motivating all these off screen affairs? We'll never know the real reasons but a film should pick some."

Respectfully, a basic understanding of LGBTQ history in the United States would explain why gay/bisexual men felt pressured to marry women and appear straight in the public eye, keeping their affairs strictly "off screen". For starters, 1) Bernstein got married in the midst of the Lavender Scare / McCarthyism and 2) homosexuality wasn't decriminalized nationwide until 2003... Even the theatre isn't a shield from bigotry. 

Updated On: 1/5/24 at 12:46 PM

[JSquared2]

Posted: 1/5/24 at 1:49pm

inception said: "The scene that stuck with me is when

Spoilers

he brought his latest boy to the family home, & when his wife got upset he acted all innocent & suggested he was trying to set the tramp up with their daughter. Pretty amazing that the family would be ok with that scene. To me it showed what a selfish person he was, & how little respect or genuine love he had for his wife or daughter.

That his wife later forgave him made me think she was probably codependent.

A great artist maybe, but a totally disgusting human being.

I listened to the first half of the CD of his Mass yesterday, and it is fantastic. It's the Philadelphia Orchestra with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting a live performance from 2015.

The only thing I see the in the film absolutely deserving of an Oscar for is the makeup.

OUCH -- Meow!!  What happened?  Who hurt you? Did Lenny spurn your advances at The Townhouse??