Starring: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper and Matt Bomer
Distributor: Netflix
Runtime: 129 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This American drama is a biographical film that focuses on the life of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein and his relationship with his wife Felicia.
Cooper takes the lead role in the film as Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), who is widely regarded as one of America’s great conductors. The film is directed from a screenplay written with Josh Singer, and co-producers of the film include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Cooper himself. The movie premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in 2023, and is Cooper’s second film as director and lead actor (after A Star is Born in 2018).
The film is essentially a love story about the relationship between Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean-Costa Rican and Broadway actress. The movie covers in detail the time Bernstein became conductor of the New York Philharmonic at age 25 up to his wife’s death in 1978 by lung cancer. Cooper is outstanding as Bernstein and he is matched by Mulligan as Felicia. The film is a fearless love story that depicts a life-long relationship that survived gay relationships that Bernstein had with his lover (Bomer) and others.
This is not a movie that says a great deal about the music that Bernstein created, but it captures his joys and pain as an extraordinary musical talent. The film depicts a marriage that continued through affairs that Bernstein had with many men. The film plays down Bernstein’s musical interactions with other artists such as Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins.
Mulligan’s Felicia is a tour de force. As Bernstein’s loyal and tortured wife she is exceptional. Cooper nails the talent of Bernstein, as a famous musician, while the emotional heart of the film resides more pointedly with Mulligan.
The musical talent of Bernstein is especially obvious in the film’s recreation of Bernstein’s legendary performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 5 at the funeral service for Senator Robert Kennedy in New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968. There are moments of great sadness in the film, especially in Bernstein’s refusal to sacrifice his art to preserve the relationship he has with his wife and family. The sadness of his resolve is not addressed by the movie, but the talent behind his resolve is captured well. The film uses a mix of black and white, and colour photography to great effect, especially in the way that it dramatises Bernstein’s life by expressing the tensions that characterised it.
In a Harvard lecture given in 1976, Leonard Bernstein said: ‘A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them’. This is a movie that artfully incorporates what he decreed.
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