A Maestro For All Times
Why the look of excellent storytelling shouldn’t be perfect
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
— Marcel Proust
If you've seen The Mother and the Whore by Jean Eustache, you might recall the film looks green. It's a black and white film with green. There's a green tint in the coloring of the transfer, like oxidized copper or something. A greenness.
You might think Hey, shouldn't this movie be remastered?
Maybe it will be and they'll get rid of the green. Or maybe Eustache wanted that oxidized look. But you can tell — no, it wasn't Eustache. It's not meant to look like that. Something’s amiss.
The early part of Maestro comprises a nest of black-and-white episodes that introduce us to the wonderful chemistry of Fiona and Leonard, bringing us from meeting through courtship to coupling. It’s a sweet, unsentimental message, memorable for the delivery of its frenetic communications.
Though, the look of the black and white is distracting. Digital is crisp and looks artificial. Whereas celluloid transferred to the screen was kind of grainy and rich in definition, there's a flatness, a sort of sterile clarity to the quality of the black-and-white we get with digital shooting.
Digital shooting ripped some of the mystery out of David Lynch.
If everybody spoke Spanish, they wouldn't need to translate The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie into Russian or English, but I have English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. They don't have to be there, though to convey their message to speakers of other languages, subtitles are included so Russian and English viewers who don't speak Spanish can follow the story. But the characters have nothing to do with the subtitles — they speak Spanish. They don’t know the subtitles are there. Digital black-and-white is there, but it doesn't need to be there. The characters don’t know they're black and white-they see themselves in color.
Digital stock could have a grainy-rich appearance and be lit differently, so there's a darker contrast. Though the digital clarity of the black-and-white scenes is distracting, in the moment, it doesn't devalue the integrity of the performance.
This is a film of performance rather than thought.
The film looks at the love of a married couple, the difficulty of living with an artist, and the nature of creativity. There's a brisk and obvious way of the story is told.
People will be talking about Maestro for decades to come.
The Thanksgiving parade scene, the post-op scene of them lying on their right sides in bed, him behind her, both staring blankly ahead.
The Ely Cathedral concert scene.
There are several conducting scenes, and they're all really excellent — but there's one that's absolutely brilliantly shot. It's just very beautiful, and there's a really nice touch because the director could've had another close-up of the star toward the end of that scene to get the facial expression and show off the fabulous makeup and all that. Still, the director doesn't do that. He keeps the camera at a distance. So you see the orchestra players as much as you do the Bernstein character.
The crying scenes.
Nominations for best makeup, best leads, best director, and best picture, this movie will smash it at the Oscars.
There’s an obviousness in biopics where we get this familiar setup. You might have intimate knowledge of the subject — filmmakers will “meticulously recreate” a scene to ensure that all the characters wear the right clothes and say the right words to make the famous scene happen — what the viewer gets is painstakingly artificial.
Maestro has artifice, but it's not in how the characters interact.
The subject matter is sentimental because it’s looking back at a real person’s life, but the display is fresh. It’s like a sort of love letter to the main character, but it’s telling a story about the characters, their relationships to each other and their art.
The story is insular to the protagonist’s agenda, which is true with many films, but it’s also a storytelling bubble that’s broken by many films.
In Oliver Stone’s JFK, we have what’s going on with the characters, and we get peaks into the outside world. The movie follows an investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement in John F. Kennedy’s murder. Lots of things happen, and then Dr. King is assassinated. Later, Robert Kennedy is assassinated. While both men have a clear connection to JFK – this is deviating from the universe of Jim Garrison, the assassinations occurred outside of the protagonist’s agenda.
In The Dark Knight Rises, Occupy Wall Street is happening outside of Bruce Wayne's agenda.
In Nightmare on Elm Street, nothing happens outside of the world of the high school students terrorized by Freddy. Their agenda is survival.
In Maestro, nothing happens outside of Leonard Bernstein’s world as we see it. Ironically, this is broken in the Thanksgiving parade scene, but the characters don’t witness it, which is why it’s funny. They live within a diagenetic space, so the world is artificial because it is a movie world — the outside world doesn’t penetrate into it (strictly speaking, outside world penetration also leaves an artificial space because it’s not really the outside world, but an idea of the outside world).
Bernstein's preferences are intimated, but it's not so clear what his wife thinks about his bisexuality. We don't know if it's been accepted. We don't know much about the characters' thoughts until there's a conversation about rumors with his sister Shirley.
Shortly after, a conversation about the rumors with his wife unfolds to us at a distance. We're seeing them through a pergola in their backyard. They are part of the scenery obscured by vegetation. We're peering into their private world, overhearing the conversation as if we were neighbors. This is one of several times where Matthew Libatique’s lens is pulled away from the subject to get a broader impression of life. This is exemplary because the subject matter is deceased. These people are gone. So we’re witnessing a sort of domestic investigation into spousal sexuality from the perspective of an eavesdropper.
I’ve heard Bernstein was disappointed that he didn’t write as much “serious” music as he wanted to. Maybe you know better. We get a little bit of his anxiety about time earlier in the movie, but we don't see that at the end. At the end, we see a sort of libertine after-hours teacher.
How do you make a good biopic? Is it a movie about a talented, self-indulgent man who dreams of writing his own Mahler 2 while dancing to Tears For Fears with a man half his age who lovingly strokes his potbelly? Yeah, they leave that in.
He needs to get out more
