Starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, this biopic is about Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein was a known political activist. Now the first reviews of Maestro are out. Let’s see what the critics have to say.
Maestro First Reviews and Reactions Are Out
Geoffrey Macnab ( The Independent) – A work of art does not answer questions. It provokes them, and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers, Bernstein famously said, in a quote that features in the film (produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg). Fittingly, then, we never learn exactly what makes Bernstein tick. Cooper shows us his subject’s mix of magnetism, volatility, and childlike egotism but he remains a strangely elusive figure. It’s left to Mulligan’s Felicia to crack the film’s sometimes too-shiny facade and to give its story some bruising emotional depth.
David Rooney (The Hollywood Reporter) – Amplifying its force with the thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be grossly over-simplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his beard. But Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a unique union, fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable – even when it’s broken.
Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) – In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices that art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners. Bernstein was never going to compromise who he was, no matter how much he loved his wife. There is a sad, wintry acceptance of that.
Richard Lawson (Vanity Fair) – “Though Maestro confronts queerness head-on, it is curiously silent on Bernstein and (perhaps especially) Montealegre’s political activism. The famous Black Panther Party event Montealegre held at the family’s apartment in 1970, which led to the writer Tom Wolfe sneeringly coining the term “radical chic,” is not mentioned at all in the film. Nor are any of the couple’s other noble causes. One gets the queasy impression that Cooper wants to keep his film free of those particular complications, lest they too rigidly define and contextualize these two lovers so fiercely vying for our affection.”
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