Master-stroke

Maestro might be the most sophisticated portrait of bisexuality ever filmed

Review by Arnold Wayne Jones

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.

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.

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.

Master-stroke Maestro might be the most sophisticated portrait of bisexuality ever filmed Review by Arnold Wayne Jones