Movie Review: Maestro

The new movie "Maestro" is one of those end-of-year movies that you know as soon as the film starts will have a great chance to win the best picture Oscar. For this movie, the quality of the cinematography and especially the amazing makeup making actor Bradley Cooper look exactly like the subject of this good biography - Leonard Bernstein are both huge standouts. The first half of this movie is in black and white and looks a great deal like movies that were made in the 1930s and 40s. The second half of this film is in color, and this reminded me of the famous movie "The Wizard of Oz", which was released in 1939, that also started out in black and white and finished in color.

The acting is also outstanding throughout, including Bradley Cooper who both co-wrote and directed this movie as well as starring Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan who plays Bernstein's long-suffering wife Felicia Montealegre. Throughout the relationship between Montealegre and Bernstein, Bernstein was constantly cheating on her with numerous other men. Over a long period and so many affairs, this story does a good job of showing how much all of this cheating was affecting Felicia. Standup comedian Sarah Silverman has a short but very good cameo as Bernstein's sister Shirley Bernstein.

The only problem with this film is that there is really no sequential story, just a series of scenes, some connected but most not connected. This lack of a sequential story might have been by design, along with the black and white then color idea, but for any film to hit a home run, there always must be a contiguous story. Otherwise, for some important reasons, the story becomes more of a documentary than a movie biography of Leonard Bernstein. I also thought there should have been many more scenes of Bernstein's musical genius and conducting and less of the soap-opera aspects of Bernstein's life.

I agree with the only good rating of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, mainly due to the screenplay and the lack of a sequential story that ultimately might prevent this film from winning the Best Picture Oscar. I do recommend this movie, mainly for the outstanding acting and the great makeup work on Bradley Cooper, which has to be a 100% guarantee for an Oscar.