Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

One of the many posters on Facebook said he didn’t see where the drama was in Bradley Cooper’s film about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro. Here was an enormously successful and talented guy who had one artistic triumph after another who managed to hold onto his family and still shtup whoever he wanted. Where were the obstacles drama requires?

Many people only see the obstacles outside of a character. In adventure movies, the obstacles may be mountain peaks, oceans, prison cells, deserts, and other non-conscious entities. Then there are the obstacles of villains. Alan Rickman in Die Hard, Basil Rathbone in Robin Hood, Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. Thwarting the villain and triumphing is the main agenda. And no, Lenny in Maestro faces no big villain and is intimidated by no desert or prison cell.

But allow me an anecdote (which I may have told before, but what the hell). Stephen Sondheim once told me that Boris Aronson told him that he and George Furth didn’t understand what they had written when they created Company. Sondheim replied indulgently (this was Sondheim describing himself), “OK, Boris, you tell us what we’ve written.” And Aronson said that when he was a young boy living in a village in Russia, he knew he had his life pretty much mapped out for him. He would live in that place and he would marry one of the few girls available there and he would go nowhere else. There were few options so he would have few choices to make. In contemporary Manhattan, Aronson continued, everybody had many options. There was so much to do and there were so many people you might connect with! In fact, having so many options, many could not bring themselves to choose. They were paralyzed. That, Aronson told Sondheim, was what their show was about. And Sondheim said, “He was right.”

I mention this because it seems to me the drama of Maestro is that Lenny indeed has a wealth of options. It doesn’t induce in him the paralysis that Aronson described, but it makes him constantly aware of the things he is not doing. The torture of the things he knows he could do brilliantly that he doesn’t do is maybe something most people don’t understand, but it’s something I have seen at close range a few times. (I knew Jonathan Miller a little, and I think he also was torn between many mutually exclusive pursuits at which he could excel.) Now, compared to the problems many people have – avoiding violent death or starvation – it may seem to some that this is the kind of torture that only the gifted and privileged have the luxury of experiencing. But it is still a misery for those in this position. Many of us have been grateful for the various gifts Bernstein gave to the world – a lot of extraordinary music, frequently brilliant conducting, and decades of remarkable teaching – so, yes, what it cost him is of some interest to us. For a lot of us – particularly Jewish kids who loved the arts – he was one of a handful of towering figures who defined our cultural world.

Being torn in different directions professionally was one thing. Add to this being torn in different directions personally. The civil war that raged in him constantly is what I think is the central idea of the film. Yes, there are important figures missing among the characters, and there are significant events not dramatized, but you could probably make a number of possible films about Bernstein. This is the one that Bradley Cooper wanted to make, and, though I have problems with the baldness of some of the exposition, I think it’s a surprisingly successful film.

Maybe this might have been clearer to some if Cooper had chosen to use the parody of the Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin song, “The Saga of Jenny,” that Stephen Sondheim wrote for one of Bernstein’s birthdays under the title of “The Saga of Lenny.”

The film is also about the price bourn by people in the orbit of the talented. Leonard Bernstein was not only an individual, he was a huge enterprise surrounded by collaborators, people who tended the business aspects of his various enterprises, and, yes, family.

I am an admirer of Side Man, a play Warren Leight wrote based on his father, a gifted but moderately successful jazz musician. Part of the point of the play was that Warren’s father had the satisfaction of those moments when he reached excellence in performance, but he was able to enjoy those moments at the cost of sacrifices made by the whole family. The sacrifices drove his wife (Warren’s mother) nuts. And she got none of the satisfaction her musician husband got. She didn’t have the thrill of creating moments of spontaneous genius and reaping the applause of a few dozen people in a jazz club. She just tried to keep the family going with too few resources and fell to pieces under the pressure.

Similarly, the great ship Bernstein sailed on because of the cooperation, compromises and capitulations of the people around him. The people associated with him on a professional level had some degree of choice. His family had less choice. His wife, Felicia, brilliantly played by Carey Mulligan, had the most demanded of her on a personal level. And the film can’t help but ask the question whether we in the audience think it was worth it. Evidently, despite what she was put through, Felicia thought it was worth it. (Jamie Bernstein has said she thinks the marriage shortened her mother’s life.)

Perhaps because I have chosen a life in the arts, a film that asks what the price of the artistic life is and whether the price is worth it strikes me as quite dramatic, thank you.