Review: Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Beautiful Babe
A few days ago, I finally got around to watching Maestro, the only one of this year’s Best Picture nominees I hadn’t yet seen. I liked the movie overall. Bradley Cooper is a good director, attentive to both the subtleties of performance and the inventive visual storytelling that cinema allows; for the first 40 minutes or so of his film, I was feeling pretty jazzed about it. But once the action shifted away from Leonard Bernstein’s wondrous career and to his troubled marriage—right as the image changed from black-and-white to color—the energy flagged and never fully recovered.
I respect the recent impulse to counteract the “great man” theory of culture and politics by giving fuller consideration to the women, and there are times when this trend has produced something great (Fosse/Verdon springs to mind). But the people telling these stories need to be able to shed some light on their subjects. I don’t think Cooper ever found that spark when it came to Felicia Montealegre B…
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