Movie Review: MAESTRO

                                            (Movie poster borrowed off the Internet)

MAESTRO is a dragging mess of a few beautiful music-making scenes sprinkled with disjointed scenes showcasing skillful acting of two of the finest actors today.

The highs are truly high. No one can watch that Mahler scene in the cathedral and remain unmoved. “There is no hate in your heart,” Bernstein’s wife whispers in his ear after the performance, blessing and forgiving him for adultery done right in front of her, with lovers being brought in their home and introduced to their children. 

But the lows outnumber the highs.

Sadly, the overall message I got from the movie was that it was a defense for geniuses to spit in society’s rules, as if great gifts are any excuse for living beyond the pale.

It could have been so much more, indeed. There was no build up, no introduction of the main characters that mattered. It is as if the filmmakers assumed that the audiences already know who Bernstein is. We are told, not shown, that Bernstein and Felicia are talented individuals, but that Bernstein’s were by far the superior artistic gifts. The body language and smiles amid the chatter show the intimacy of lovers, but without giving the audience time to root for them. It’s almost a documentary in its quick succession of scenes and events. Fall in love. Raise a family. The challenge of infidelity. Sickness. Then Bernstein pulls through and cares for his ailing wife. As if caring for her at the end could make up for decades of sleeping around.

One of the last scenes shows Bernstein flirting with a man thirty? forty? years his junior in a disco club. And it struck this viewer as inexpressibly sad, especially when the end credits roll to the second movement of Chichester Psalms playing in the background and actual footage of the Maestro conducting near the end of his days. (By the way, don’t trust the Netflix captions! They said that at that point the overture of Candide starts playing, but no, it’s still Chichester.)

When we sang Chichester Psalms in college for Chorus class, what struck me was the purity of the soprano line (originally meant for a boy soprano, as there is no purer tone on earth as he sings “The Lord is my shepherd”) and how Bernstein’s infamous trademark leaps and minor sevenths seemed like someone reaching for heaven. And yes, there are parts in it that are truly of this earth (like when the male singers come roaring in, war-like, nearly shouting in the middle with “Why do the nations rage”), but then the boy soprano line returns and the choir echoes him, like souls who have lost their way but are ever straining to return to goodness. The sacred, and the profane. A fitting piece to end the film.

There are bits of the sacred in this movie, but sadly, the overall messaging belonged to the latter and not the former. 

I worry that the film will help Leonard Bernstein be remembered for the wrong reasons... or rather, for incomplete reasons.