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.
==> this board is a nest of vipers <==
"Michael Riedel...The Perez Hilton of the New York Theatre scene"
- Craig Hepworth, What's On Stage
