Like for many of my generation - I was born in the early 1950s - Leonard Bernstein was known as the handsome, dynamic young American who tried to make classical music accessible to children of all backgrounds across the nation with his televised version of the New York Philharmonic's *Young People's Concerts*. (Walter Damrosch had done the same thing on radio a generation before for my mother's generation, but that were very different. Damrosch was European with a German accent. Bernstein, though the son of Russian immigrants, was all American - even if, as the movie suggests in one fast sentence, Bernstein started with such an accent himself and then worked to divest himself of it.) The man we saw on tv, and the imagine built up around him, is not to be found in this movie about a flamboyant, insecure, and self-centered individual who is too often weak to others' detriment as well as to his own. If you are looking for the Bernstein of your childhood, don't expect to find him here.
Nor, from what I understand, should you look for the facts of his life here. This isn't a documentary, and doesn't pretend to be one. So I don't understand previous negative reviewers who fault the movie for not being historically faithful. Evidently it is not.
But then, what is this movie about? As presented here, it's the story of a gay artist who, for reasons never made clear, allows himself to become married to a young and not particularly tolerant actress, and then has to spend the years of his marriage hiding his gay life not only from the public at large - which was the case for most gay artists of his generation and before - but also from his own children. This movie never explores why he did this.
Nor does it consider contemporary cases of the same thing. The most obvious would be Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic just before Bernstein, who was also gay but who never married. It's strange that Bernstein never for a moment in this movie refers to him as a possible model in that respect.
Nor does it really consider why actress Felicia Montalegri would have convinced him to marry her. She has a line about the smell of Bernstein reminding her of the smell of her father's coat, and that she associated that smell with security. But we don't know why she felt insecure without him - if she did - nor why she would enter into such a mariage, which was unlikely to provide emotional security.
In short, the two main characters' motives for marrying are never really explored.
At one point, near the end of the movie, there is an extended scene between the two in which, among other things, she blames him for not being honest with himself and developing his gifs, which she evidently saw to be his composing. But then, shortly afterward, when he talks about telling his teenage daughter that he is gay, she tells him he can't do that. So he should be free of what others do to limit him, but not free from what she does to limit him? The script, the character development, is often similarly muddled.
I didn't expect to learn anything new about Bernstein's artistic life from this movie. That's now how it's being presented. But I didn't learn anything about why he allowed himself to have such a complicated personal life, either. And that is what the movie would seem to exist to present to us.
So, what did I get out of this movie? Not much, to be honest.
Would this movie be of interest to those not already familiar with Bernstein's musical career? Probably not. Especially in the early, black and white part, there is a LOT of name-dropping of people in the New York arts scene in the 40s and 50s. Aaron Copland, Jerome Robbins, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, etc. That would shut such viewers out altogether.
If Bradley Cooper made this to discuss the life of a gay man trapped in a homophobic straight world, he would have been better of doing what the producers of Tár did: create a fictional conductor who resembled Bernstein in some ways but not others, and then created his situations and characters accordingly. Pegging this situation to one recent musician whom so many potential audience members feel they knew just created openings for distracting criticism and limited - but not too much - what he could do with his material.
As it stands, I don't understand what he wanted us to get out of it, and don't see how it will attract many viewers that stick with it to the end.
Nor, from what I understand, should you look for the facts of his life here. This isn't a documentary, and doesn't pretend to be one. So I don't understand previous negative reviewers who fault the movie for not being historically faithful. Evidently it is not.
But then, what is this movie about? As presented here, it's the story of a gay artist who, for reasons never made clear, allows himself to become married to a young and not particularly tolerant actress, and then has to spend the years of his marriage hiding his gay life not only from the public at large - which was the case for most gay artists of his generation and before - but also from his own children. This movie never explores why he did this.
Nor does it consider contemporary cases of the same thing. The most obvious would be Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic just before Bernstein, who was also gay but who never married. It's strange that Bernstein never for a moment in this movie refers to him as a possible model in that respect.
Nor does it really consider why actress Felicia Montalegri would have convinced him to marry her. She has a line about the smell of Bernstein reminding her of the smell of her father's coat, and that she associated that smell with security. But we don't know why she felt insecure without him - if she did - nor why she would enter into such a mariage, which was unlikely to provide emotional security.
In short, the two main characters' motives for marrying are never really explored.
At one point, near the end of the movie, there is an extended scene between the two in which, among other things, she blames him for not being honest with himself and developing his gifs, which she evidently saw to be his composing. But then, shortly afterward, when he talks about telling his teenage daughter that he is gay, she tells him he can't do that. So he should be free of what others do to limit him, but not free from what she does to limit him? The script, the character development, is often similarly muddled.
I didn't expect to learn anything new about Bernstein's artistic life from this movie. That's now how it's being presented. But I didn't learn anything about why he allowed himself to have such a complicated personal life, either. And that is what the movie would seem to exist to present to us.
So, what did I get out of this movie? Not much, to be honest.
Would this movie be of interest to those not already familiar with Bernstein's musical career? Probably not. Especially in the early, black and white part, there is a LOT of name-dropping of people in the New York arts scene in the 40s and 50s. Aaron Copland, Jerome Robbins, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, etc. That would shut such viewers out altogether.
If Bradley Cooper made this to discuss the life of a gay man trapped in a homophobic straight world, he would have been better of doing what the producers of Tár did: create a fictional conductor who resembled Bernstein in some ways but not others, and then created his situations and characters accordingly. Pegging this situation to one recent musician whom so many potential audience members feel they knew just created openings for distracting criticism and limited - but not too much - what he could do with his material.
As it stands, I don't understand what he wanted us to get out of it, and don't see how it will attract many viewers that stick with it to the end.