Road to the Oscars Review: ‘Maestro’ is a Masterful Depiction of a Complicated Love

Every year, in the time between when the Oscar nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for best picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot of the movies are now on streaming.

So far, she hasn’t made it through all of the nominees since the category expanded from five nominees to as many as 10, but this year, she intends to pull it off and write reviews of each movie as she goes through them. She already saw and reviewed American Fiction as part of the Denver Film Festival, and she already saw Barbie and it was reviewed by fellow OFM writer Ivy Owens. OFM writer Owen Swallow also already reviewed Poor Things. That leaves seven movies for her to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!

Rating: 94/100

In Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s biopic about the life of renowned composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, we’re invited to view the complicated relationship between Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). While scholars tend to take the position the Bernstein, despite being married to a woman, was a gay man and not bisexual, the film takes the position that, whatever his sexuality may have been, his love for his wife was genuine.

Starting with an interview with the conductor when he was approaching 70 and reflecting on his late wife, the film then moves into a flashback to 1943 when his career is first launched and, shortly after, he meets and falls in love with Felicia. As their relationship grows over the years, Leonard has multiple affairs with men, creating a strained relationship with his wife. But, after reuniting from a particularly difficult estrangement, Felicia is diagnosed with breast cancer that has metastasized to the lung and Leonard becomes a loving caretaker to his dying wife.

Maestro does an exceptional job of depicting the different historical periods that Leonard Bernstein lived through, with each era perfectly matching, not just the aesthetic of the era, but the film styles of that era. The portions of the film taking place in the ‘40s and ‘50s are filmed in black and white, with even the way the dialogue is delivered mirroring the style of films during that era. As the film moves towards the ‘70s and ‘80s it shifts to color, but with muted colors and a light sepia tint to everything. It creates a shockingly authentic depiction that really feels like moving through the decades of the 20^th Century.

The film has a number of important scenes which are shot in long takes, most notably a lengthy argument between Leonard and Felicia in which Felicia accuses her husband of having hate in his heart. The scene is done in a wide shot in one continuous take as the actors trade barbs, talking over each other in anger, creating a perfect rhythm that feels like a real fight. The moment when Felicia is given her cancer diagnosis is similarly shot in one take, creating an incredibly uncomfortable scene to watch. These long takes are very hard to pull off and take a lot of precision on the part of the director and the actors. To add to the difficulty, the director, Cooper, is also an actor in these scenes and has to stay on-screen during these long takes rather than sitting behind the camera. That requires an amazing amount of trust in the cinematographer and some tricky coordination between everyone involved.

It would be irresponsible not to point out that there has been some controversy around Maestro due to Cooper’s choice to wear a large prosthetic nose to play the famous conductor, which some have referred to as an example of “Jewface,” playing up the exaggerated characteristics associated with Jewish people. Some have even gone so far as to point out that the prosthetic was larger than Bernstein’s real nose. Cooper’s decision to use the prosthetic has been defended by many, but the most important of these defenses came form Bernstein’s actual children who worked with Cooper on the film and insisted that their father would have been fine with the choice.

Maestro has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, but the Vegas odds don’t predict that it will win anything except Best Makeup and Hairstyling. That seems a little ironic because that means that Kazu Hiro, the artist who created the controversial prosthetic nose, is likely to win an Oscar for it. But, while the film is likely to lose in the more talked-about awards like Best Picture and Best Actor—It’s basically the film deemed least likely to win Best Picture—There’s no doubt that it deserves, at the very least, the nomination in those categories.

Bradley Cooper didn’t receive a nomination for Best Director, which seems like a bit of a snub, but he does go down in history as the fifth person to ever direct himself to a Best Actor nomination, joining the ranks of Laurence Olivier, Warren Beatty, and Clint Eastwood. There’s no question that Cooper deserves the Oscar nomination for his performance as Bernstein as Cooper gets completely lost in that performance.

But, while Cooper did an excellent job, Carey Mulligan really steals the show as Felicia, particularly in the moments towards the end of the film when Felicia is dying of cancer. Mulligan receives her third Oscar nomination for this film, following previous nominations for An Education in 2009 and Promising Young Woman in 2020. It seems clear that, while this isn’t Mulligan’s year—The category seems to be a toss-up between Emma Stone for Poor Things and Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon—She’s going to take home an Oscar one of these years. It’s only a matter of time.

So, while it seems highly unlikely that Maestro will walk away from the awards ceremony with more than one Oscar, there’s no question that this movie belongs in the same conversation with the other nominated films. It’s a masterful depiction of a deeply complicated relationship that demonstrates that love can be many things, but it is always worthwhile.

Maestro is now streaming on Netflix.

Photo courtesy of Twitter