Master-stroke Maestro might be the most sophisticated portrait of bisexuality ever filmed Review by Arnold Wayne Jones
Master-stroke
Maestro might be the most sophisticated portrait of bisexuality ever filmed
Review by Arnold Wayne Jones
Courtesy of Netflix
We all know that homosexuality didn’t exist until Uncle Miltie wore a dress, hippies started smoking weed and k.d. Lang won a Grammy. It’s caused by fluoridated water, Will & Grace marathons, gender-neutral pronouns and vegan options in public school cafeterias.
Yeah, right. Sadly, honest portrayals and discussions of sexual orientation have been suppressed for centuries – by the church, by society, by an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement by journalists and pop culture gatekeepers. Gay men were “confirmed bachelors;” lesbians “old maids;” queer love was “infatuation” or “sickness” … if acknowledged at all. The cascade effect of this imposed ignorance was more than to ignore, more to demonize – it was to make an entire subculture invisible. And when you can’t see evidence of a culture, even if you’re a member of it, you have no role models, no guideposts, no standards to live up to (or cautionary tales to avoid). That’s why most contemporary portrayals of gay life in America in the mid-20th century tend to focus on the covertness, the shame, or the dangers of being gay at certain times. Even good queer cinema (and period TV shows) like Brokeback Mountain, Fellow Traveler or Philadelphia tend toward emphasizing the tragedy. The pall over the protagonists’ lives go hand-in-glove with the genre itself.
On its surface, the new film Maestro looks like a traditional biopic about the great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein – both his professional achievements and his personal tribulations, especially his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. But anyone who doesn’t walk away from Maestro with the understanding that it is a towering and multilayered portrait of an unapologetically bisexual icon has largely missed its point. This is a low-key instant classic of gay empowerment moviemaking.
Courtesy of Netflix
As contemporary biopics go, Maestro is sweeping in its coverage. Starting from Bernstein’s first success as a last-minute substitute conducting the New York Philharmonic for a radio broadcast and becoming an instant darling of the glitterati, it tracks his long, impressive career as a conductor, composer, personality and husband and father. But all along, he was also happily bisexual. In many films, that would be a throwaway point, or entirely ignored (I’m lookin’ at you, Beautiful Mind!); here, it’s seamlessly integrated into the fabric of Bernstein’s life.
Its clarion point of view is evident as early as the second scene, when a young(ish) Bernstein receives the call that will launch his career. At the time, he’s in bed with his male lover and celebrates briefly by kissing the man on his posterior. If the lead actor (and director/co-screenwriter/producer) were a star less shimmering than Bradley Cooper, the casual sexuality of this scene, and many others throughout the film, would be omitted. But Cooper’s charisma, mojo and artistic boldness allow him the confidence to show Bernstein as a complete and complicated person – one who, despite having no template for how to be queer and in the public eye, managed to live his life, his way.
That’s admirable, but it certainly didn’t make it easy on his family. It wasn’t being bisexual that vexed his home life (though it was a part of it); it was the overwhelming Leonard Bernsteinness of him that did.
The film is called Maestro for a reason. It’s not merely that the term is the preferred honorific for an orchestra conductor, it’s that Bernstein was constitutionally incapable of being second chair to anymore. Friendships, colleagues, children, wife – they were all instruments to be orchestrated in service of his magnum opus: His own life.
Megalomaniac antiheroes are nothing new as biopics go, but few have come off as charming as Bernstein. The son of Ukrainian Jews who grew up in a Massachusetts mill town, Lenny reinvented himself as an urban sophisticate, graduating from Harvard and affecting a Mid Atlantic accent to seem as polished as New York society allowed. It was in this rarefied atmosphere that he met Felicia (Carey Mulligan), herself an immigrant who sounded as if she was exuded fully formed from the Upper West Side. Lenny never hid his bisexuality from Felicia (or, it seems, his friends and colleagues), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t create complications (serial infidelity will do that, no matter the orientation of the partner). All the while, Bernstein only begrudgingly admitted any culpability as he tried to charm his way around Felicia’s feelings. Different rules for geniuses.
And a genius he was. Maestro captures all the facets of Bernstein’s gifts, and Cooper embodies each brilliantly: The ease of his manner, the fearsomeness of his talent, the speed of his wit. The script (also by Cooper) sizzles with Old Hollywood glam.
Courtesy of Netflix
Cooper’s performance is exceptional, but he’s largely matched by Mulligan’s simmering wife. There’s less for her to work with, but as they said about Ginger Rogers – she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels – Mulligan makes it a duel. The best scene in the movie is a confrontation between Lenny and Felicia on Thanksgiving Day. In a medium long shot with no cuts, the two argue passionately, twisting the corkscrews deeper and from different angles, until it’s a draw. The realism not merely of the dialogue but of the way the words cascade out of their mouths, folding over one another in an unending tapestry of ideas.
The heavy dialogue and emotional reality are Cooper’s best achievement as a director. His decision to film half in black and white and half in a faded approximation of Metrocolor seems a bit twee. This is also the second recent major film (following Saltburn) to shoot in academy ratio, which again comes off as an effort to suggest home movies that caught the actual events… so of course they become color once the 1960s arrive.
Interestingly, the film ends not with Lenny’s death (in 1990, at age 72) but soon after Felicia’s in 1978 – a choice that only underscores how the marriage of these two was the signature achievement of Bernstein’s existence. He wasn’t a gay man resigned to a marriage of convenience with a woman, but a true bisexual who contentedly straddled multiple worlds: Gay and straight, classical and pop cultures, orchestral music and Broadway, angel and devil. The film is as ambitious as the man himself.
Saltburn | Movie Review by Arnold Wayne Jones
Sick Burn
Saltburn Wallows in the Inevitability of Its Own Twisted Vision of the World
Review by Arnold Wayne Jones
Emerald Fennell has only written and directed two feature films, but that’s enough for her to carve out a distinctive style… but also enough to become slightly predictable. She seems to take Aristotle’s dictum – that the best stories’ endings are both surprising and inevitable – profoundly to heart. In her acclaimed debut, Promising Young Woman, she told the story of Cassandra (Carey Mulligan), a woman who turns past trauma into a mission to seek vengeance against any men who exploit or assault women. Cassandra isn’t a murderer (her revenge is more of the cautionary “taste of your own medicine” variety) but we know from the start she’ll save the best for a gloriously over-the-top last – that’s the”inevitable” part. (Fennell even named her after the Greek mythological seer, who prophesied the future even though nobody ever believed her.) What we are surprised by (spoiler alert here) is that Cassandra’s plan goes off course and she herself ends up murdered well before the denouement – that’s the “surprise.” Delicious ending? Sure. But also a little unsatisfying – a bittersweet dessert, like a dark chocolate torte or lemon pie.
Her latest, Saltburn, is more sure-footed directorially, but like PYM, the ending is not a great surprise, though the journey often can be.
Fennell has shifted her focus from a disturbed woman to an even younger, even more disturbed man. The great, unsettling Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a scholarship-kid attending Oxford University, surrounded by nothing but spoiled rich kids who can’t resist maximizing their dickishness whenever he’s near them It’s not enough that they are privileged brats who could afford to show a little grace; they’re also attractive and clever and cool, and Oliver longs to be included in their world. Like an abused mutt, he slowly ingratiates himself to the athletic ringleader, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Felix is gorgeous and charismatic but also a softie, and he becomes curious about this kid from the other side of the tracks. By social osmosis, Oliver is begrudgingly accepted into the fold by everyone except Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), himself a cash-poor relation of Felix, dependent in part on his family’s largesse. Oliver wheedles an invitation to Felix’s family estate, named Saltburn, for the summer, and there the sweet, unsuspecting naif mounts his grand scheme to be welcomed into class of the landed gentry.
None of this is unexpected – we suspect from the opening moments (the story is narrated by Oliver in flashback) that he had, and likely achieved, his master plan of social climbing. Many of the smaller twists along the way – specifically, Oliver’s life story predictably reveals itself as intentionally constructed, and not as dire as he pretends – don’t really catch us off guard, as Fennell’s track record or projecting her twists clues us in. And yet, the script does take some wild swings, basically by leap-frogging around plot points – even developments the audience may anticipate come at unexpected moments. (Calling the antihero lead Oliver Quick is a not-too-subtle mashup of Oliver Twist and his own improvisational machinations.) Ultimately, virtually every character ends up more or less where we would have imagined they would. But oh how fun it is getting there.
Fennell’s acid-tongued take on British society is so specific, it matters little that it might not be super fresh and inventive. She pulls no punches.
The first thing we notice is her decision to shoot the film in Academy ratio instead of widescreen, giving it the voyeuristic quality of a hi-def home movie. Then the tight editing, lavish production design and rich musical score elevate the proceedings.
Then, of course, there’s the dialogue, which crackles with secondary, even tertiary layers in the character-driven portrait of class differences. Unspoken tensions and rivalries lurk under the battle between the haves and have-nots. Throwaway lines end up being some of the smartest bits, and darkly funny meta commentary.
The casting, and the performances she extracts from everyone, push Saltburn from predictable social satire to compelling art film. Keoghan has only been around a half-dozen years, but since his breakout role in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and continuing through The Batman and The Banshees of Inisherin, he’s proven himself a resourceful and edgy character actor whose protean face both hides and reveals a tremendous amount of emotional depth. The Catton clan (Elordi, mom Rosamund Pike, dad Richard E. Grant, sister Alison Oliver) all function as “types” – rungs in Oliver’s ladder of success – but they deliver the goods. The homoerotic undercurrent suffuses the entire film with a dangerous, outsidery vibe.
Fennell may rely on a smallish bag of tricks to tell her tales, but Saltburn shows she’s talented enough to turn those gimmicks into something unusual in cinema today – an outcome that is as inevitable as it is surprising.
