“Get Your Money’s Worth” Vol. 3

I’m averaging a movie a day on the year, having a blast getting to keep writing and using this outlet to do something I haven’t done in years. There’s some really cool stuff coming down the pipe for the website, subscribe to stay up to date and I really hope you read those pieces.

Below is the list of everything I watched since publishing last Tuesday night, but if you want to keep up to date with everything I’ve seen, you can do that through my letterboxd account here: https://letterboxd.com/redrankin/

The Holdovers, Alexander Payne, Peacock

L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson, Netflix

Maestro, Bradley Cooper, Netflix

Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, Max

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos, theater

Yentl, Barbra Streisand, Max

High Life, Claire Denis, Max

Lost Highway, David Lynch, Criterion Channel

Master Gardener, Paul Schrader, Hulu

This piece was written on January 22nd, and by the time it is released the Oscar nominations will have been published and we will find out if everything I’ve written about Bradley Cooper and his earnestness and quest for glory is true.

Maestro dir. Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper wears his heart on his sleeve. Through the entire awards cycle he’s seen crying while praising filmmakers like Michael Mann and Spike Lee; he’s told Howard Stern he would give up any hope of an Oscar for an Eagles Super Bowl; he operated a cheesesteak truck in Manhattan during the SAG and WGA strikes. He is so earnest in his desire to show his talent and be recognized for the feat of acting and directing he has put on screen. That earnestness and commitment can be a real turnoff for some folks looking for a different sort of project from Cooper, but I doubt we will ever get anything other than his entire heart and soul in a role.

Maestro is the embodiment of that earnestness and commitment. Cooper studied the Ely Cathedral performance ad nauseam and practiced for six months to execute that sequence to an extremely convincing degree. As a filmmaker, Bradley Cooper is clearly choosing characters that he doesn’t just identify with but that he can become. Jackson Maine is a man whose substance abuse gets in the way of his ability to be the sensation he was always meant to be. Leonard Bernstein is a man with a complicated and difficult private life that bled into his public life as so many personal obstacles inhibited him from making the art he was destined to make. 

And Cooper really does become Bernstein, adopting the vocal affectation, donning a prosthetic nose, and learning to become a conductor. He gives a masterful performance opposite Carey Mulligan as Felicia, Bernstein’s wife and often thorn in his side. Mulligan gets to give a similarly beautiful performance but I found that the film is often limiting what she gets to do; not in the sense that this film feels like the wife is unimportant, but rather because the film rarely has the time to flesh out any of these specific points. On the press tour, Cooper has mentioned that this film is meant to be a story of the family, really emphasizing how important Felicia is to this tale; but there are portions of the film where moments quickly whisk by without taking the time to communicate where Felicia fits into the story. Similarly, it glosses over some of the more long-lasting contributions that Leonard made to modern culture, with an offhanded reference to his work on West Side Story. It doesn’t make Maestro a failure as a film or even reflect poorly on any of the performances given. I just felt that the scope of the film outsized the runtime and script. 

While the film is ostensibly about Leonard Bernstein and his life and family, Maestro is really about how difficult it is to be Bradley Cooper and how much work it takes to make art that will stand the test of time. And it worked on me. For all my groaning about some of the failures of the script, I was so taken with Matthew Libatique’s cinematography, the film’s use of Bernstein compositions, Matt Bomer’s tush. It is a huge swing as a filmmaker to insert yourself into a project of this scale and take on the titular role and while it may not be a home run 5-star masterpiece for me, I couldn’t take my eyes off it as I watched the ball hit the back wall and Cooper round second.

Thank you to all of you for reading, thank you to Bradley Cooper for being very good at directing and acting, and thank you to my mom for editing everything I write. We’ll be back next week.