Sex and cigarettes get equal billing with Leonard Bernstein's music in this biopic that spends as much time on his wife as himself. Featuring two strong performances from Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan it is one massive marital bicker that fails to focus on what made him famous, his music. And while Cooper seems to catch the mannerisms and style of the famous conductor, he fails him as the pictures director and co writer.
Young Lenny Bernstein gets the break of a lifetime when Bruno Walter calls in sick for Carnegie Hall . He gets rave reviews and the career begins as a famed world wide conductor and successful composer resulting in numerous, Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards along with worldwide recognition. Things however did not go swimmingly at home for the bi-sexual Bernstein who was less than discreet in his affairs that brought his marital discord to a high pitch..
Director Cooper turns Maestro into little more than a mid-day soap opera while glaringly failing to utilize or capitalize on his music. He allows scenes to drag, dreadfully stages a cancer diagnosis scene and for some reason in a couple of others moments frames in long shot that demands close-up which results in diluting the emotional power in both.
Late in the film Bernstein obliquely references Ken Russell work about the composer Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers. He would have been wise to study Russell more closely for he was a master of incendiary bios on composers (Mahler, Debussy, Liszt) and the way he gave life to these productions was through mainlining their music provocatively into the story which Cooper for some unknown reason fails to do here.
Young Lenny Bernstein gets the break of a lifetime when Bruno Walter calls in sick for Carnegie Hall . He gets rave reviews and the career begins as a famed world wide conductor and successful composer resulting in numerous, Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards along with worldwide recognition. Things however did not go swimmingly at home for the bi-sexual Bernstein who was less than discreet in his affairs that brought his marital discord to a high pitch..
Director Cooper turns Maestro into little more than a mid-day soap opera while glaringly failing to utilize or capitalize on his music. He allows scenes to drag, dreadfully stages a cancer diagnosis scene and for some reason in a couple of others moments frames in long shot that demands close-up which results in diluting the emotional power in both.
Late in the film Bernstein obliquely references Ken Russell work about the composer Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers. He would have been wise to study Russell more closely for he was a master of incendiary bios on composers (Mahler, Debussy, Liszt) and the way he gave life to these productions was through mainlining their music provocatively into the story which Cooper for some unknown reason fails to do here.