Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein

By ROB PATTERSON

I’d doubted that Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro” would win the Best Picture Academy Award. But on emotional, musical and cinematic terms, it grabs that honor from me.

It’s only natural that it moved me so deeply, as Bernstein was a towering and pervasive presence in my home as I grew up. My father’s dearest passions were classical music and opera. Mom loved the best popular music of her youth and the current day along with the great Broadway musicals. 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. In a musical way, Bernstein mentored me. 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 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 sing “Society’s Child.”

I didn’t know Bernstein. Yet he still felt like someone I knew. Did meet his daughter, Jamie, a very prominent character in the film, in the ear;y ’80s. 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.

Jamie was cool, delightful, and likely an even smarter gal in the proverbial room with two rather brainy lads. She and her siblings now preside with grace over her father’s staggering artistic legacy. In Time magazine, she wrote how :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.”

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. His love for the woman he married, actress Felicia Montealegre, played with 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.

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. 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.

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. 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 at least a few more hosannas even beyond the accolades and awards.

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.

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Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024

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