PicoBlog

Much has been made of writer-director-actor Bradley Cooper’s visual take on the famous 20th-century composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

Specifically, his prosthetic nose.

That nose, whatever anybody thinks, is the least of our concerns with “Maestro.” A title like that implies brilliance. Cooper, as an actor and director, tries hard and occasionally succeeds artistically.

Yet the claim of this title is too much for the film.

Quickly I lost track of what this movie was trying to be about, and once that happened, there was no turning back. The movie pre-empts such a reaction with a cop-out epigraph, featuring a koan-ish quote about art not answering questions but only asking them — thereby sidestepping critical examination by telling me that I shouldn’t try to find any statement at all within, and just instead that I should enjoy the showbiz within.

Lovers of this movie’s slapdash collection of scenes, as it whirls from the 1930s to the 1980s in just two hours, might call the script’s method “loose.”

I would, however, call it “disorganized.”

The thematic inquiries are quick and thereby facile, moving from questions about music composers versus orchestra conductors, to popular images of celebrity artists versus their private lives. None of these topics are given much of a throughline; they are introduced, then whisked away, like a poor performer at an audition.

What I came down to deciding is that “Maestro” says that Leonard Bernstein was possibly a closeted homosexual, which his longtime wife Felicia Montealegre knew well about, and that he reveled privately in that “secret” for decades.

Descriptions of this movie call Bernstein a “bisexual,” yet the movie is oddly clear on a few correlations that perhaps challenge that label. One is that Bernstein was successful, career-wise, when he switched from hidden 1930s homosexual relationships to a monogamous relationship with Montealegre, whom he married.

Secondly, Montealegre hated his dalliances with male lovers throughout their lives, yet their children probably didn’t know about dad’s homosexual affairs, as one key scene in the ‘70s with his older daughter suggests.

That makes “Maestro” a cheating-husband-with-a-heart-of-gold tale, as Bernstein shows his “true” “love” for Montealgre late in the film — both of those words strongly deserve quotes that question them, given his frequent cheating — when she suffers and dies from breast cancer.

Yet before you know it, she’s dead and he’s out clubbing with male students, red-light dancing to Tears of Fears’ “Shout.”

Given all I know about Bernstein — not much, but enough to be dangerous — “Maestro” thereby reduces this complicated artist’s life down to a 30-year-long mess of a love story with his wife. Those of you expecting “West Side Story” or “Candide” won’t be happy, though they are in the soundtrack. Those of you expecting Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” story about Bernstein fashionably courting Black Panthers will have to wait for the next Bernstein biopic.

The film takes a wild, piecemeal tour of Bernstein’s adult life, beginning with his 1940s call to conduct the New York Philharmonic, to his 1970s private life. The first forty minutes are in black-and-white, with a 4:3 aspect ratio, depicting the glory days of the ‘40s to mid-’50s as jubilant and peppy. By contrast, the colorized 1970s material — 60% of the film — is what the ‘70s tend to be in popular culture: gaudy and tension-filled. Most of this section, as well, is in 4:3 ratio, for who knows what reasons.

“Maestro” thus skips right over the years 1953 to 1971. Read anything about Bernstein and you know we’re missing out on several movies’ worth of material, including hundreds of famous people he hob-nobbed with.

The movie tries to induce thematic patterns that are introduced and then forgotten about later. Shots repeatedly show Bernstein in private, then moving, fantastically as in magical realism, onto a public stage. The first shot seems to give us Lenny privately playing piano in the 1970s, only for the camera to peek around the corner of a doorway, to show that just over the piano is a large camera crew.

This idea, thereby, is seemingly to demonstrate that all of Bernstein’s private life was directly connected to his public life. He’s even given this advice early on — to make “my life and my work agree.” As I said, though, his male-lover dalliances were the private parts that made no public appearance, according to the movie’s script.

But not according to the movie’s contradictory visuals. A bad mistake this movie makes, I believe, is to show Bernstein petting various men in public, as if no bystander is outside the frame noticing his homosexual passes. The movie itself has no clear rationale on who could’ve seen what; it expects us to believe these public gestures had no incentivized eyewitnesses. For example, how could his children have missed out — according to the script — on him inviting young males to their house and petting them?

“Maestro” thereby skirts right over the private-public persona question, and it even more quickly elides the composer v. conductor question. As you know, Bernstein was both. In a key moment, he talks about the composer being an open public persona, yet the composer is the quieter creator and introvert — a key psychic split for him. He complains he doesn’t do the latter as much, and in the 1970s section of the film, he tells an interviewer that he has spent too much time on public works and not enough on creating new music.

Even that fascinating contrast — private creator versus public conductor — is passed over and forgotten, as the last parts of the movie are about Bernstein’s love lives. It’s impossible for me not to think of one of the best movies I’ve seen this decade, TÁR, which was about so much that this movie dabbles in and more, including the public v. private question involving a changing and perhaps decaying artform.

To be sure, director Cooper shows off plenty of potent cinematographic wizardry. The dynamic shots in the early-going are often special, as is the crisp black-and-white. “Maestro” even seems to want to be a light-hearted showbiz film. Its best parts are in dance and music numbers, either delightful or breathtaking.

Yet I think, ultimately, the script’s major flaw was to base itself on a real and massive persona, a musical giant of the 20th century. Why not instead choose to write a story about a fictional famous conductor? Picking Bernstein, and focusing on the narrower love-story, means that you’ve omitted a considerable amount of the social, political, and religious aspects of his life. Had the main character been fictional and Bernstein-like, so much more artistic license would have been afforded to the script.

As is, Bernstein’s biography is going to be big baggage for many viewers.

The script’s needless reductionism means we get lines, as spoken by his wife many years into his marriage, that utter romance cliches. “It’s so draining to love somebody who doesn’t love and accept themselves,” she whines to Lenny in the movie’s one depiction of a marital spat.

What would that even mean? We’ve seen her jealous about Lenny’s boyfriends. Is this character then saying that Bernstein’s flaw was that he wasn’t openly, even flamboyantly, bisexual or homosexual? And except for the question of his hidden male lovers, the movie isn’t clear at all that Bernstein doesn’t love and accept himself, whatever that means.

Given the depiction of Montealgre as jealous wife, that corny line makes little sense to me. It’s arguable that “Maestro” is even a weird argument for monogamy and the hazards of venturing outside of it.

Still, I don’t think this movie is even about that. It’s not about Bernstein’s music. It’s not about his stunted creativity. It’s not about his sociopolitical complexities. It’s not about his lasting creations. It’s not about classical music. It’s not about celebrity culture in the 20th century. It’s not about Bradley Cooper’s fake nose. It’s not about . . . ad infinitum.

It is, at best, about the grandiose showiness of showbiz.

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