BFI LFF 2023 | Movie Review: Bradley Cooper's "Maestro" Biopic Is Brilliant
12/12 ForReel Score | 5 Stars
Bradley Cooper has taken his time to release a follow up to 2018's mega-smash A Star Is Born, but it's finally arrived in the form of Maestro about the life of musical composer Leonard Bernstein, starring Cooper himself as the titular figure alongside the always-reliable Carey Mulligan as his long-suffering but loyal wife. On paper, it doesn't sound incredibly exciting, but then neither did yet another remake of A Star Is Born - and look how that turned out.
Image courtesy of Netflix
The cinematic landscape is completely overstuffed with endless boring biopics, but with Maestro, Cooper has proven himself once again to be an incredibly playful and imaginative director. His mise-en-scene is packed with personality, and the blocking of his ensemble is play-like and creative. A number of the film's dialogue-heavy scenes situate the camera in a stationary position for the entirety of the three or four minute sequence, the action driven entirely by character and speech. One such scene is punctuated hilariously by the arrival of an enormous Snoopy balloon during a Thanksgiving parade - it might not seem like the place for it, but there's plenty of humour to be found in Maestro.
The film's visual style emulates classic Hollywood, with warm, generous lighting washing adoringly over our stars, and the construction of each shot being decidedly traditional. Cooper's directorial instincts are unbound, and he's stretching his filmmaking legs more than ever. It's an incredibly strong start to his career, and leaves us gasping with anticipation for whatever his next project may be.
It's interesting that Cooper has selected another story set within the world of music - and he was right to do so, because he's excellent at it. The musical numbers are some of the film's very best scenes, a second-act orchestral rehearsal in particular being simply electrifying in the way the camera swings and loops in and amongst the instruments. It's reminiscent of the equally enrapturing musical sequences of Tár, just as intense and evocative, and filmed like we're in an action thriller rather than a biopic drama.
Image courtesy of Netflix
The story itself is interesting enough, but the source of the film's brilliance is the pair of central performances delivered by Mulligan and Cooper. Each actor delivers a complete powerhouse performances, immediately amongst the very best of either party's career with several scenes being simply breathtaking in how impassionately they are delivered. There's an unbridled chemistry between them, wrapped alongside an unsettling sense of bubbling tension. They embody their characters with a stunning sense of force, and whilst neither performance could be described as subtle - garish, outlandish or extravagant would be more appropriate adjectives - there's nothing about the film which aspires to be subtle. Their acting is Old Hollywood-reminiscent, deliberately so, with melodic trans-Atlantic accents and theatre-like delivery. They throw themselves into the melodrama, and it suits both of them perfectly. It's almost hard to imagine Mulligan in the modern world after watching Maestro, such is the authenticity with which she plays a mid-twentieth century woman.
Maestro is the product of esteemed filmmakers a-plenty - Scorsese and Speilberg are credited as producers - collaborating to create something brilliant in the place of something that could have been deathly boring. But boring Maestro most certainly is not, and if there was any doubt left after A Star Is Born, it cements Cooper as one of the most intoxicating directors of our time.