Mae­stro review – as heady and bom­bas­tic as a gold­en-age Hol­ly­wood musical

“For­get Vis­con­ti!” Lydia Tár tells the Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic while rehears­ing the ​‘Adagi­et­to’ of Mahler’s fifth sym­pho­ny. There is a Ger­man­ic aus­ter­i­ty to Todd Field’s TÁR, a film pur­port­ed­ly about Mahler but in which the composer’s music is only heard dieget­i­cal­ly in short bursts. Tár’s instruc­tion about Vis­con­ti, refer­ring to the great Ital­ian director’s mas­ter­ful adap­ta­tion of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is one against the sen­sa­tion­al and the florid, against the gush­ing emo­tion­al­i­ty of Mahler’s own music.

Bradley Cooper’s biopic of Leonard Bern­stein is all Vis­con­ti. Mahler once said to Sibelius that ​“music must be like the world: it must embrace every­thing”. This is what hap­pens when the ​‘Adagi­et­to’ floods into Mae­stro – the images become syn­chro­nised with the music as in opera, blend­ing into a sub­lime whole, with the giant sil­hou­ette of Bern­stein cast against the slight fig­ure of his wife Feli­cia, played by Carey Mul­li­gan. If TÁR is steeped in real­ism, Mae­stro is pure fantasia.

This total embrace is shown with­in every fibre of Bernstein’s being through Cooper’s per­for­mance. The film’s peak comes at the end of the sec­ond act in a restag­ing of Bernstein’s icon­ic con­duct­ing of Mahler’s sec­ond sym­pho­ny, ​‘Res­ur­rec­tion’, at Ely Cathe­dral in 1973. For six min­utes of unbro­ken diegetic music, Coop­er flails his arms about with sweat-soaked vivac­i­ty, build­ing towards an onanis­tic cli­max in which Bern­stein appeared to bare his soul to the world. Rather than hold him in mid-shot, as in the orig­i­nal film­ing, Coop­er watch­es from the side, from the per­spec­tive of Feli­cia, and as he lays down his baton he rush­es to hold her.

It is notable that Bern­stein is con­duct­ing Mahler, not Bern­stein, in this piv­otal moment. The film’s sound­track con­sists almost entire­ly of record­ings of Bernstein’s own com­po­si­tions, from his films scores for On the Water­front and West Side Sto­ry to orches­tral works like his third ​‘Kad­dish’ sym­pho­ny and choral mas­ter­pieces includ­ing his Mass and the Chich­ester Psalms. But the the­sis of the film is that Bern­stein was nev­er as great a com­pos­er as his heroes, and that his true tal­ent was not only for con­duct­ing but for infus­ing in oth­ers his deep fer­vour for clas­si­cal music. The film ends not with an opus of Bern­stein, but with him teach­ing a stu­dent how to con­duct Beethoven.

Mul­li­gan acts as a del­i­cate foil to Bernstein’s ego­ism, deft­ly han­dling their two-han­der scenes with breath­tak­ing assur­ance. She is nev­er quite swept up in the hedo­nism of the musi­cal world, and her final scenes bring the pic­ture down to earth with dev­as­tat­ing effect. Feli­cia is the black-and-white real­ism to Bernstein’s glo­ri­ous Tech­ni­col­or, with Matthew Libatique’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy work­ing the couple’s height­ened emo­tions into the very fab­ric of the film. Every shot is craft­ed as a tapes­try, some lin­ger­ing unflinch­ing­ly from a dis­tance as though through the eyes of their chil­dren, while oth­ers fly through the archi­tec­tur­al spaces of Carnegie Hall at break­neck speed.

Mae­stro is a film to be swept along by, as heady and bom­bas­tic as a gold­en-age Hol­ly­wood musi­cal. In one of its most breath­tak­ing sequences, Bern­stein talks through his ear­ly works in the form of a dream bal­let, includ­ing the musi­cal On the Town. If it lacks any­thing, it is per­haps Bernstein’s soft­er side, the sub­tler move­ments of his con­duct­ing and his music which get lost in Cooper’s vision of him as a char­ac­ter who only grew larg­er and larg­er than life as the years went on. But as an attempt to con­vince a new gen­er­a­tion of the all-con­sum­ing pow­er and beau­ty of clas­si­cal music à la Mahler, it is sec­ond to none.