Maestro on Netflix: what is the biopic by Bradley Cooper worth?

Five years after A Star is Born, the actor-author continues his study of the difficulty of reconciling art, fame and intimate life, by making the wife/actress Felicia Montealegre the true heroine of his biopic of Leonard Bernstein.

There’s the elephant in the room and there’s the fake nose in the middle of the face. If Bradley Cooper made the head of Leonard Bernstein, using relatively crude makeup, it is not so much to resemble him as to signal a distance and signify that he identifies less with the figure of the “maestro” than he incarnates it. Interior/exterior, the nuance is important, as the film seems to extend Cooper’s intimate obsession with all the pacts (sinister or not) that artists/stars must sign to realize their dreams and accomplish their goals. fate.

Bernstein is less known in France, but in the United States, he was a constant presence in every home for a quarter of a century, a cracking conductor, a composer who entered the collective unconscious (West Side Story, all the same) and incidentally cultural guru and TV superstar of the 60s and 70s. There is this impossible face (the nose) and this recognizable voice (nasal, of course) that Cooper imitates with delight but remains well hidden behind his prosthesis. He is him, I am me, he seems to say. And she is her, namely Felicia Montealegre, actress, wife, muse, bodyguard and safeguard played by Carey Mulligan, to which Cooper offers the film on a platter. The star will be her, the woman behind the great man, the actress as the hypothesis of the great film.

CODEPENDENCE

This identification of a woman as the keystone of an artist’s destiny derails the biopic towards something else, the exploration of a relationship of codependence that is both sentimental and creative, like the Fosse/Verdon series or this one. what a film about the Gena Rowlands/John Cassavetes couple could look like. Hence a certain imbalance, desired but not always controlled. Portrait of a man under the influence, Maestro threatens to empty itself of its substance as soon as Bernstein leaves his wife’s orbit to sink into the volutes seventies (drugs, homosexuality, egomania), his parts of shadow and light uninhibited, for better and for worse.

Who was the “maestro” Leonard Bernstein played by Bradley Cooper?

In these passages, the film finds itself like the character, orphaned from its center of gravity, from its reason for being. One half in black and white (youth), the other in pale green and brown tones, like a gently sloping autumn (maturity), Maestro never quite succeeds in unifying the two Bernsteins, the family man sincere and the emancipated gay. There is a rare romantic power in this hero who is prevented from being at the same time the two things which constitute him, just as he proves incapable of obtaining the same success as a composer of “great music” as as a conductor. orchestra and pop icon.

Here again, a self-portrait emerges that Cooper tries to hide as best he can, he who has made the price of fame his favorite subject, no doubt because he contemplates it every morning in his mirror. This exciting film is in its image, brilliant but lame, very sentimental, too sentimental, to the point of over-played mourning where its flaws end up showing too much. Like the nose in the middle of the face.

By Bradley Cooper. With Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer… Duration 2 hours 09. Available December 20 on Netflix