Maestro Review

The project sat at Paramount for nearly a decade with Martin Scorsese and then Steven Spielberg in line to direct; Bradley Cooper took over after Spielberg saw A Star Is Born, and it moved to Netflix in 2020. Cooper and Josh Singer set aside most of Bernstein's working life for his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), told as a love story with a third party always in the room.

Matthew Libatique shoots the early years in black and white and the later ones in color, and the camera shows off the way Bernstein did: a single move from his bed onto the Carnegie Hall stage, a Thanksgiving fight held in one take while a Snoopy balloon drifts past the window, and six unbroken minutes of Cooper conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral, which he spent six years learning to do.

Mulligan is superb, dry and wounded. Cooper's Bernstein, voice, posture and prosthetic nose, is a formidable impersonation that rarely lets anyone inside, and Richard Brody wrote that the film avoids the complexity of the people it portrays. It earned seven Oscar nominations, including best picture, actor and actress, and won none.