Maestro (2023).....Wecome one and all to awards season......which brings out the Oscar bait like this film.
Oscar bait? Whazzat?
They arrive like gathering storm clouds toward the end of each year, mainly to keep themselves fresh in the minds of audiences and awards organizations and their voters.....
What binds these films together is their unabashed lust for awards validation, sitting up and begging for various statuettes like hungry puppies eyeing a bag of bacon treats.
And they'll always feature aggressively strident, top-of-their-lungs performances from both their lead and supporting actors.
Bradley Cooper's maintained an exhaustive but still futile awards quest for years now.....and 'Maestro' ,which he co-wrote, directed and stars in, represents his most ambitious effort yet to snag some shiny hardware for himself.
His choice of material seemed surefire......the larger-than-life story of gifted composer conductor Leonard Berstein.
Quite a daunting task.....filling the screen with the creatively turbulent life of a 20th century icon, whose music and love of musical performance contributed to the soundtrack of a decade.....(with the music of 'West Side Story, 'On The Waterfront', 'Candide', 'Wonderful Town' and many original classical compositions....)
A massive, expansive story to tell......and Cooper, to everyone's surprise, chose not to tell it.
In what many critics (and bored stiff audiences) didn't much understand or care for, was Cooper's decision to focus solely on Bersnstein's rocky, tempestuous marriage to actress Felicia Montelegre (Carey Mulligan).
Bernstein, a people loving extrovert and a joyous bi-sexual, freely indulged himself with young boy toys, And that's Cooper's chosen entry into Bernstein's life, and how it chipped away at his wife's psyche in countless hurtful ways.
Even though it reduces and shrinks the movie into a soap opera-ish slog, no one can fault Carey Mulligan's contribution here. It's a brilliant, exquistely modulated performace from an actor a the very peak of her gifts.
Cooper's portrayal of Berstein, though.....another story altogether.
Actor-ish, in your face and over the top from the first minute on, Cooper's elaborate makeup and meticulous mimicing of Bernstein's speech patterns reeks of awards begging. He doesnt' want you to take your eyes off him for even a second when he's launching fully into his Bradley-as-Bernstein impersonation show.......
His work here may strike some as brilliant, dazzling, eye-catching , yada, yada......but for BQ, combined with the film's overall leaden pace, Copper's 'look-at-me, look-at-me' showboating came off as detached from the film itself, and weighs the film down.
Count 'Maestro' as one of the Oscar contenders we're NOT rooting for. 2 stars (**).
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