Bernstein as an off-Stage Performer
In Maestro, for the most part, time is a suggestion. We skate through decades, years, as though the interim never happened, but the way Cooper stages scenes, the way the dialogues are written and performed — that clipped, unrehearsed drawl, not finishing some sentences, repeating some, stuttering your way through another, often in long, uninterrupted takes — gives the sense that the film is not a collection of vignettes, that through these scenes, sometimes just hurting glares, sometimes a trailing conversation, the years off screen are brought into being, even if it is a hazy shape, and not a clear portal.
Take the scene where Felicia catches Bernstein kissing another man in the hallway. She walks off and when Bernstein catches up with her, she chastises him, “You’re getting sloppy.” Through this dialogue alone we are supposed to grasp that over the years, these indiscretions have been taking place, but outside of Felicia’s gaze. The film keeps doing this, as though plunging you into conversations, without introducing who is talking to whom, about what exactly.
Additions and elisions are par for course in the genre. A lot of the politics — of the claws of McCarthyism, the Black Panthers, which Bernstein helped fundraise for — and the becoming of Bernstein as an icon is left off-stage. The focus is the unsteady relationship between Bernstein and Felicia, but also of Bernstein as a performer. Long stretches of sequences see him conducting, and Cooper’s physicality inhabits Bernstein in a strange, almost psychological drift. The choice to shape Bernstein as a performer and lover — not a man of politics, neither a man of ambition — is a bold, reckless choice, because it holds its incompleteness on its shoulder as it struts around.
Other choices are a bit more baffling. In one of the most stinging scenes, Felicia warns Bernstein that he will die “a lonely old queen.” According to Bernstein’s biographer Humphrey Burton, however, Felicia predicted in fury, “You’re going to die a bitter and lonely old man.” Not queen; man. It stings more, because it is not just his loneliness, but his queer loneliness that is being ripped at. The camera is at a distance, though, and we don’t really see Bernstein’s face, just his slumped, defeated posture. That seems enough.
