Maestro review – as heady and bombastic as a golden-age Hollywood musical

“Forget Visconti!” Lydia Tár tells the Berlin Philharmonic while rehearsing the ‘Adagietto’ of Mahler’s fifth symphony. There is a Germanic austerity to Todd Field’s TÁR, a film purportedly about Mahler but in which the composer’s music is only heard diegetically in short bursts. Tár’s instruction about Visconti, referring to the great Italian director’s masterful adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is one against the sensational and the florid, against the gushing emotionality of Mahler’s own music.

Bradley Cooper’s biopic of Leonard Bernstein is all Visconti. Mahler once said to Sibelius that “music must be like the world: it must embrace everything”. This is what happens when the ‘Adagietto’ floods into Maestro – the images become synchronised with the music as in opera, blending into a sublime whole, with the giant silhouette of Bernstein cast against the slight figure of his wife Felicia, played by Carey Mulligan. If TÁR is steeped in realism, Maestro is pure fantasia.

This total embrace is shown within every fibre of Bernstein’s being through Cooper’s performance. The film’s peak comes at the end of the second act in a restaging of Bernstein’s iconic conducting of Mahler’s second symphony, ‘Resurrection’, at Ely Cathedral in 1973. For six minutes of unbroken diegetic music, Cooper flails his arms about with sweat-soaked vivacity, building towards an onanistic climax in which Bernstein appeared to bare his soul to the world. Rather than hold him in mid-shot, as in the original filming, Cooper watches from the side, from the perspective of Felicia, and as he lays down his baton he rushes to hold her.

It is notable that Bernstein is conducting Mahler, not Bernstein, in this pivotal moment. The film’s soundtrack consists almost entirely of recordings of Bernstein’s own compositions, from his films scores for On the Waterfront and West Side Story to orchestral works like his third ‘Kaddish’ symphony and choral masterpieces including his Mass and the Chichester Psalms. But the thesis of the film is that Bernstein was never as great a composer as his heroes, and that his true talent was not only for conducting but for infusing in others his deep fervour for classical music. The film ends not with an opus of Bernstein, but with him teaching a student how to conduct Beethoven.

Mulligan acts as a delicate foil to Bernstein’s egoism, deftly handling their two-hander scenes with breathtaking assurance. She is never quite swept up in the hedonism of the musical world, and her final scenes bring the picture down to earth with devastating effect. Felicia is the black-and-white realism to Bernstein’s glorious Technicolor, with Matthew Libatique’s cinematography working the couple’s heightened emotions into the very fabric of the film. Every shot is crafted as a tapestry, some lingering unflinchingly from a distance as though through the eyes of their children, while others fly through the architectural spaces of Carnegie Hall at breakneck speed.

Maestro is a film to be swept along by, as heady and bombastic as a golden-age Hollywood musical. In one of its most breathtaking sequences, Bernstein talks through his early works in the form of a dream ballet, including the musical On the Town. If it lacks anything, it is perhaps Bernstein’s softer side, the subtler movements of his conducting and his music which get lost in Cooper’s vision of him as a character who only grew larger and larger than life as the years went on. But as an attempt to convince a new generation of the all-consuming power and beauty of classical music à la Mahler, it is second to none.