I Can Only Give High Praise to “Maestro” & Leonard Bernstein
It feels and reels so right to me, having grown up with him large in my life
True American Greatness is Suffused with Humanity
I doubt that Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro” will win the Best Picture Academy Award. But on an emotional as well as musical level, it grabs that honor from me. The movie enchanted and touched my soul, intellect and heart. And sang in a way to my musical muse where the creative breezes of the classics, Great White Way and the rock, pop and soul music of the 1960s and after plus so much more swirl together. In a year blessed with some stunning works of cinema, it merits a few more hosannas even beyond the accolades and awards it has and may win.
It’s only natural that the movie moved me so deeply, as Leonard Bernstein was a towering and pervasive presence in my home as I grew up. My father’s dearest passions were classical music and opera; he served on the board of a fine regional opera company, and appeared on its stage, as I also did once as a lad. The sound of an orchestra tuning up and the pungent aromas of greasepaint and cold cream backstage were part of this church choirboy’s weekends in my youth. In a musical way, Bernstein helped father and mentor me. And I am hardly alone in that among m-m-m-my generation
Mom’s love of music leaned towards the best popular music of her youth and the current day along with the great Broadway musicals. Our home had a cornucopia of soundtracks going from our parents and my brothers and I enthralled by the musical supernova unfolding on our transistor radios, 45s and LPs.
And astride it all, like a contemporary colossus, was Maestro Bernstein, an icon. Yet somehow seeming touchable, one of us, with as much passion for the glorious rainbow of music and true artistry as any public figure. As I watched Cooper recreate the ardor, genius, drama and effusive humanity of the heralded composer, conductor and so much more, it hit dead home, right on the bullseye for me. Not just robust thespian greatness; he channels the man.
As I also read a Slate article about the “‘Jewface’ conspiracy” of the prosthetic nose Cooper used for his character, I felt like scratching my head with both hands. The nose completes Cooper’s truly fulsome transformation for me. lt likely aided Cooper in acing the role. So the issue would be…? (Yes. some Jews have prominent noses. As do a number of goyim.)
I didn’t know Bernstein. Yet he still felt like someone I knew; credit “West Side Story” arriving just as I was coming into consciousness, and his Young People’s Concerts series and other shows on TV as I came of age. Through them Bernstein turned me on to the splendidly visionary and now sadly all-but-ignored New York Rock & Roll Ensemble in 1968 (the group’s Michael Kamen went on to compose superbly smart film scores). On another show, I first heard Janis Ian; click the link to enjoy Bernstein’s warm and knowing introduction.
I feel like I knew Leonard Bernstein somewhat well, in a way, though I never met the man. Did meet his daughter, Jamie, a very prominent character in the film. It was a double date. She was seeing my very musical writer friend Brian Cullman. He fixed me up with his cousin Claudia. We all went to hear music at the landmark Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, NY, in 1982 or ‘83 – neither Brian nor I can recall whether the act was Talking Heads, The B-52s or Peter Gabriel (we saw a lot of shows back then).
Jamie was cool, delightful, and likely an even smarter gal in the proverbial room with two rather brainy lads. She and her sivlings now preside with grace over her father’s staggering artistic legacy. (Coincidentally, but rather natural in My Weird Life®, back in the 1990s I also met in passing the father of the actress who plays Jamie, Maya Hawke, daughter of Ethan. This is not the first time someone I’ve met or known outside my entertainment journalist duties is portrayed or appears in a film or is closely connected.)
I can think of no better review of “Maestro” than what Jamie eloquemtly wrote in Time magazine about the movie. “As Bradley worked on this enormous project, my brother, sister, and I gradually realized how much like our father he actually was. We recognized that intensity, that hyper-focus and perfectionism — but what resonated for us, more than anything, was the all-embracing warmth Bradley brought into every space, and to every person. That was the Lenny-est thing about him. Bradley’s hand was right over his own heart, throughout the making of Maestro. Nothing could have moved us more.”
When the film shows Bernstein and his brood with the family station wagon, it summoned up the same image of my own family. Classical music and the Saturday Metrpolitan Opera radio broadcasts played as we rode.
As much as “Maestro” is about an illustrious man of music whose creativity and personality suffused my younger world, it’s even more so a story of love and family. A largely musical biography of Bernstein would make a rich and illuminating TV series to follow how this feature film sets the tempo.
His love for the woman he married, actress Felicia Montealegre – played with humanity and feminine magnetism, charm and empathy by Carey Mulligan – is a strong through line to Bernstein’s story, even if another one was his dalliances with men. I don’t know if the maestro defined himself bisexual, gay, pansexual or whatever; no matter. Such fluid sexuality is an eternal fact of human nature and character, much as today’s closed-minded conservatives and faux-Christians strive to repress if not blot out that immutable aspect of humanity (in contrast to how this lifelong Whiskeypalian perceives how Jesus might regard sexuality that isn’t fully hetero).
Ironic how it’s said that today’s conservatives want to take us back to the 1950s. Because even then, gayness was all around, just more discreet. As I grew up from the ‘50s into the ‘60s, the gay couple who conducted and directed our local opera were a part of the crowd at the parties my parents hosted. To my youthful self, those two men who worked and lived together being a couple didn’t seem all that unusual. The tenor lead singer in the Benjamin Britten cantata “Saint Nicholas” in which I sang the part of the Boy Nicholas was, I believe, also gay. Yet the only “grooming” – a notion at the center of the right-wing “moral” panic about homosexuality – from these men if at all was to be a better singer. (Unlike the predatory pedophile who owned a summer camp I attended, who was a conservative Southerner and ex-Marine – a matter I shall address in a future missive.)
I find it interesting that the film I’d lay money on taking home Best Picture, the stunningly deserving “Oppenheimer,” hinges on a historical paradigm shift the first atomic bomb blast heralded of the future we all now live in. And then in the years to follow the nuclear family began to more publicly mutate; Bernstein in a way was a pioneer who shows us in “Maestro” how a man with strong homoerotic passions had an ardor just as robust for the woman he married and their three children. Lenny lived and created freely with his full self, fulfilling Bob Dylan’s maxim in song about how “he who is not busy being born is busy dying” – a mission statement for all of us who strive for actualization.
It’s also a movie about passions, most fulsomely expressed when Cooper nails Bernstein’s fervently zealous flair atop the conductor’s podium, feeling the music with a full-body brio that shows how the old musical warhorses can still brim with life and inspire in modern times. He saw the breadth of music as a thrilling field of play. And “Maestro” impels me to deep dive into his musical legacy.
Cooper’s direction is deft and canny, cleverly mixing color segments with black and white to show how Bernstein helped bring a rainbow of hues into the largely conformist era not just with music, but in who he was. That the Bernstein family second home in Conneticut on Long Island was used in the film only adds to its realness.
The maestro was a beacon of a life fired by music and the creative arts, and he helped guide me into a rich life with a fervor for music that I feel blessed to have enjoyed. It’s a neon-lit sign of how well Cooper captured the essence of the man in “Maestro” that Jamie and her sister and brother well approve of the film.
Leonard Bernstein was a man of his times, a man of the times to come, a man for all time. Yet for all his cultural greatness, the maestro who flew so high on the wings of music was as well very human and of this mortal coil, with all his flaws, foibles and seeming contradictions. The film feels as real as he was. And I will cherish it in my cinematic pantheon for the rest of my days.