Producer Rick Rubin famously has one piece of advice for artists: make the art for yourself. The audience should come last. And as he explains, this is not because the artist should not care about the audience, but it acknowledges the counterintuitive notion that what the audience ultimately wants is not art about a particular subject matter expressed in a certain way, but the best art. And the best art always is that which is personal to the artist, that means something to the artist. There is plenty of art out there that is made for the audience, and it will be inevitably mediocre, because by its nature it is designed that way. The bigger the audience a piece of art is made for, the less special it will be.
I bring this up in the context of Maestro because it would appear to me that Bradley Cooper, an actor, who became a director and co-writer with A Star is Born five years ago is taking Rick Rubin’s advice. I’m not sure anyone was demanding a biopic about Leonard Bernstein or necessarily believed that Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper) would have been the man to do it. This movie seems to exist because Bradley Cooper thought it was interesting and wanted to do it. I generally agree with Rick Rubin that art developed in this matter is usually the best art. I didn’t know all that much about Leonard Bernstein’s oeuvre, conducting or composing (although I have seen Tar and Amadeus) or his personal history. Essentially, all I really knew of him was that he was famous and composed the score to West Side Story. That didn’t matter. I got what I needed to know from Bradley Cooper. One of the best things about following the work of good directors (and at this point, I am going to include Bradley Cooper in that list), is that it generally does not matter what the movie is about. If a movie is made by someone who is highly competent and cares about the work, it will almost always be worth the time to watch it. And the guidance of good artists is the best way to be exposed to new things.
Leonard Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper) is a man of many talents in the musical world: he conducts orchestras, he composes symphonies, operas, and musical theater, he plays musical instruments. He is also Jewish and a homosexual. He was born in 1918 and entered into the music business in the late 1930s. That would make him right on time to push the cultural envelope by keeping his surname (as opposed to changing it to Burns) but too early to be openly gay. Leonard marries a woman named Felicia Monteleagre (played by Carey Mulligan) who is content, at least at first, to be his beard, his muse, and the mother of his children. Their relationship in all its complications is really what this movie is about. Both Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan affect arresting performances. (Although this isn't completely relevant to whether Carey's performance was good, I was affected by how much she aged in the story-line. After all, Ms. Mulligan is my age and I've always thought of her as being young or generally young.)
Bradley Cooper is a good director. He shows a general competence with the camera in certain flourishes and the choice of different film stock. (The movie switches from black and white to color based on the time period). But more impressive is his choice to set the camera at a distance and to employ long takes for scenes that are especially intimate. One is reminded that we are witnessing the domestic strife of real people and that these scenes are intensely private in nature. They are so well done and the characterization of the people involved so well developed, one wonders how the details got related to the writers. I am told that in addition to the many public interviews both Leonard and Felicia took together or separately, the creators also spent a lot of time interviewing the children. I suppose it would be impossible to really know what two people who knew each other very well said to each other in any particular room on any particular day (there is one especially intense scene that is incredibly specific as to it time/place, it literally takes place during the Macy’’s Thanksgiving Day Parade), but some scenes are likely to have happened in the manner we see it. For instance, the conversation between Leonard and his daughter as to the rumors going around (that Leonard is cheating on his spouse with men) is not something I think a child would forget or misremember.
I think the best comparison to make for Bradley Cooper is Warren Beatty, another actor turned director that starred in the movies he made. Warren Beatty described such dual roles as exceedingly difficult to pull off. He said being a director required a lot of control, whereas being an actor is about letting yourself get carried away. And because the process was such an ordeal, Beatty only made a few movies this way. How many movies will Bradley Cooper direct and star in? We will see, but I am for him not taking as many starring roles in order for him to make more of his own movies.
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