{"id":96405,"date":"2024-02-23T11:58:29","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T11:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=786c88b2947736bc6275fc73be1bf5a3"},"modified":"2024-02-23T11:58:29","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T11:58:29","slug":"maestro-review-as-heady-and-bombastic-as-a-golden-age-hollywood-musical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/23\/maestro-review-as-heady-and-bombastic-as-a-golden-age-hollywood-musical\/","title":{"rendered":"Maestro review \u2013 as heady and bombastic as a golden-age Hollywood musical"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cF<\/span>orget Visconti!\u201d Lydia T\u00e1r tells the Berlin Philharmonic while rehearsing the \u2018Adagietto\u2019 of Mahler\u2019s fifth symphony. There is a Germanic austerity to Todd Field\u2019s T\u00c1R<\/a>, a film purportedly about Mahler but in which the composer\u2019s music is only heard diegetically in short bursts. T\u00e1r\u2019s instruction about Visconti, referring to the great Italian director\u2019s masterful adaptation of Thomas Mann\u2019s Death in Venice is one against the sensational and the florid, against the gushing emotionality of Mahler\u2019s own music.<\/p>\n

Bradley Cooper\u2019s biopic of Leonard Bernstein is all Visconti. Mahler once said to Sibelius that \u201cmusic must be like the world: it must embrace everything\u201d. This is what happens when the \u2018Adagietto\u2019 floods into Maestro \u2013 the images become synchronised with the music as in opera, blending into a sublime whole, with the giant silhouette of Bernstein cast against the slight figure of his wife Felicia, played by Carey Mulligan. If T\u00c1R is steeped in realism, Maestro is pure fantasia.<\/p>\n

This total embrace is shown within every fibre of Bernstein\u2019s being through Cooper\u2019s performance. The film\u2019s peak comes at the end of the second act in a restaging of Bernstein\u2019s iconic conducting of Mahler\u2019s second symphony, \u2018Resurrection\u2019, at Ely Cathedral in 1973. For six minutes of unbroken diegetic music, Cooper flails his arms about with sweat-soaked vivacity, building towards an onanistic climax in which Bernstein appeared to bare his soul to the world. Rather than hold him in mid-shot, as in the original filming, Cooper watches from the side, from the perspective of Felicia, and as he lays down his baton he rushes to hold her.<\/p>\n

It is notable that Bernstein is conducting Mahler, not Bernstein, in this pivotal moment. The film\u2019s soundtrack consists almost entirely of recordings of Bernstein\u2019s own compositions, from his films scores for On the Waterfront and West Side Story to orchestral works like his third \u2018Kaddish\u2019 symphony and choral masterpieces including his Mass and the Chichester Psalms. But the thesis of the film is that Bernstein was never as great a composer as his heroes, and that his true talent was not only for conducting but for infusing in others his deep fervour for classical music. The film ends not with an opus of Bernstein, but with him teaching a student how to conduct Beethoven.<\/p>\n

Mulligan acts as a delicate foil to Bernstein\u2019s egoism, deftly handling their two-hander scenes with breathtaking assurance. She is never quite swept up in the hedonism of the musical world, and her final scenes bring the picture down to earth with devastating effect. Felicia is the black-and-white realism to Bernstein\u2019s glorious Technicolor, with Matthew Libatique\u2019s cinematography working the couple\u2019s heightened emotions into the very fabric of the film. Every shot is crafted as a tapestry, some lingering unflinchingly from a distance as though through the eyes of their children, while others fly through the architectural spaces of Carnegie Hall at breakneck speed.<\/p>\n

Maestro is a film to be swept along by, as heady and bombastic as a golden-age Hollywood musical. In one of its most breathtaking sequences, Bernstein talks through his early works in the form of a dream ballet, including the musical On the Town. If it lacks anything, it is perhaps Bernstein\u2019s softer side, the subtler movements of his conducting and his music which get lost in Cooper\u2019s vision of him as a character who only grew larger and larger than life as the years went on. But as an attempt to convince a new generation of the all-consuming power and beauty of classical music \u00e0 la Mahler, it is second to none.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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