Maestro

Grade: B-

It bothers some critics, but I enjoy when a movie plays around with aspect ratios. Most of Maestro is in what’s called Academy ratio. That’s a boxy, middle-of-the-screen square, as opposed to the traditional 4:3 rectangular aspect ratio that utilizes the whole theater screen. I try to pay attention to the exact moment it switches up, but I always forget to clock it by the time it happens.

Bradley Cooper previously directed himself in A Star Is Born, and does so again with Maestro, in which he stars as composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein. You’ll have to get used to some avant-garde flights of fancy, but he has inventive ways of crafting scenes. A viewer may be accustomed to a scene starting off with a wide shot, followed by some inevitable close-ups when the dialogue gets going. But no, he’s not afraid to let the whole scene be that wide shot, with the words speaking for themselves, as if the camera is a distant fly in the room that just happens to be privy to this conversation.

Maestro works as well as it does because of the committed performances from Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan. Cooper is one of the few biopic stars who masters the delicate balancing act between maintaining the intention from an acting standpoint while keeping up the voice of the person he’s playing. I never caught him drifting back to the way he talks in real life. And at the same time, it’s not a shallow impression like you’d see on a sketch comedy show. The way he conducts will make you think of Tár, and there’s an astonishing scene that encapsulates his passion in that department. He is never far from a cigarette, and rarely without one. His volume of smoking rivals that of Helen Mirren in Golda.

Mulligan – as Felicia Montealegre, the woman who would become Bernstein’s wife and the mother to his kids – puts on a curt, clippy, proper affectation to her character voice here. I know her from Inside Llewyn Davis, Mudbound, Promising Young Woman, She Said, and Saltburn, and she sounds different every time. She and Cooper create fireworks onscreen together. There’s a great scene where they are arguing, and it almost has the rhythm and feel of a piece of music. You take turns listening to each side, with the other feeling like a counter melody in your musical peripheral vision. It’s another wide shot, and appears to be one continuous take. The film would have fallen flat – and sometimes nearly does anyway – with lesser actors.

Rather than go through all the significant professional accomplishments one by one in predictable biopic fashion, Maestro focuses on Bernstein’s family life, and the catharsis he obviously got whenever he set foot on that conductor’s podium. It’s probably the most perfect way to do a movie about Leonard Bernstein. Maestro is somber, heavy-handed, and often full of itself – but then again, so was he.

Grade: B-