Calgary Herald

A SYMPHONY OF THE HEART

Maestro's stirring portrait of union makes its own beautiful music

When Bradley Cooper made A Star Is Born in 2018, more than a few skeptics smelled a dilettante — a typical pretty-boy actor with clichéd aspiration­s. Cooper dispelled those reservatio­ns. With Maestro, he proves he's no one-hit wonder.

In this lively, sometimes deliriousl­y scattersho­t biopic about the conductor Leonard Bernstein, Cooper tells us what he thinks matters most about Bernstein's life: his relationsh­ip with his wife, Felicia, the bisexualit­y he largely hid, his compulsive curiosity about people and

MAESTRO

★★★★1/2 out of 5

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan

Director: Bradley Cooper

Duration: 2 h 9 m

the ecstatic bursts of creativity that sustained him.

All of those values come to bear on Maestro's exquisite opening chapter, a balletic, kaleidosco­pic representa­tion of Bernstein's meteoric rise, which started in 1943, when he was called at the last minute to conduct the New York Philharmon­ic after Bruno Walter fell ill. Deftly moving Bernstein — played by Cooper — from the bed he shares with clarinetis­t David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) to the aisles of Carnegie Hall, Cooper does a dazzling job of compressin­g time and space.

Cooper, working with cinematogr­apher Matthew Libatique to signal time periods with shifting frames and moving from blackand-white to colour, evinces similar skill in later scenes, when Bernstein meets the actress Felicia Montealegr­e (Carey Mulligan), and the two embark on an epic affair. The contradict­ions of a gay man falling in genuine love with a woman — while retaining his attraction to men — are captured in a lovely passage using Bernstein's score for the ballet Fancy Free (which became the Broadway musical On the Town), turning the dance into a metaphoric­al pas de deux.

These are the grace notes that make Maestro not just prose, but poetry; if some audiences might miss the more workmanlik­e details of Bernstein's career, they would be missing what turns out to be a piece of exhilarati­ng, inspired visual storytelli­ng as well as a profound portrait of a marriage.

Lenny is the free-spirited, wildly charismati­c star of his and Felicia's lives, but it's Felicia who grounds him, and the movie: Mulligan's portrayal of this paragon of cosmopolit­an elegance is restrained, tasteful, and quietly crackling with repressed anger and confusion. Although Cooper doesn't depict Bernstein as a tortured soul (he's far too self-involved for that), he's attuned to the costs of reconcilin­g the truth of one's deepest desires with the equally powerful pull of love, loyalty and trust.

Is Felicia an avatar of classic denial or wifely duty? Neither. She's trying to accept the man she loves for who he is, while trying to make it all fit into society's most oppressive and pointless expectatio­ns. Maestro doesn't have a happy ending — how could it? — but its honesty and tenderness are inescapabl­e.

Maestro's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinatin­g people at its centre.