davew-14

It's worth noting that at this past weekend's screening of "Maestro" for members of the Motion Picture Academy, the filmmakers received a standing ovation when they came onstage for the Q&A afterward. This from a crowd of around 800 folks who actually know what it takes to make a film, are willing to make the trek across town, and are not an easy group to impress to that degree. A standing ovation from that crowd is a rare event.

As others have noted, this is primarily a study of the relationship between two artists, one a well-regarded Broadway actress (played brilliantly by Carey Mulligan) and the other a once-in-a-generation musical genius. While others bemoan this approach to what some characterize as a biopic (it isn't really), I feel it was a smart way to let the audience in on Bernstein the man. Bernstein the musician is pretty easy to learn about - just check Wikipedia, YouTube and the gazillion recordings available.

Many major filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese & Steven Spielberg, have tried tackling a "biopic" of Bernstein, and struggled on the best approach; Spielberg essentially handed the project to the fresh-off from "A Star is Born" Bradley Cooper when Steven learned of Cooper's passion from childhood for conducting and his fascination with Bernstein. It didn't hurt that Cooper, even without the brilliant prosthetics (approved by the Bernstein children), looks remarkably like Bernstein, and was able to get his voice, accent and speech patterns down so perfectly that if I closed my eyes at that screening I would have sworn I was hearing the Lenny Bernstein I grew up watching on TV. Cooper, growing by leaps and bounds as a filmmaker with this one, serves his actors brilliantly, and leaves the viewer with a palpable sense of what maestro Bernstein was like as a human, flaws and all.

The two reviews posted in 2015 are critiquing a short that was never intended to stand on its own, and I suspect those viewers saw the fuzzy, bad copy on YouTube. I saw the original full project of four shorts that were all shot by film students who were brought by the producer Carl Foreman to the "McKenna's Gold" location and asked to each pick some aspect of the production and its location that they found interesting, and make a short film about that. I recall one of the films being about the horse wranglers, another about the producer - and then there was Lucas's impressionistic take on the desert location. The project was intended to he virwed as a whole, and as a whole it worked rather nicely. I saw it back in 1969 or 1970, broadcast on the PBS station for Los Angeles, and it stuck with me all these years.

One reviewer complained about struggling to hear the dialogue. This is due to a huge mistake made when the film was improperly mastered for DVD; some DVD players, especially if they are trying to create phantom surround tracks with a 2-channel stereo-only system, will play this superb film incorrectly. If you can, experiment with the sound settings on your A/V amplifier, and you will likely find something that works correctly. Perhaps someday someone will properly remaster this film for Blu-Ray. It's entirely possible the 5.1 version streaming on iTunes will play correctly - I haven't checked.

A reviewer from Turkey complained about everyone talking in Italian accents. This is absolutely not true, and, in fact, Margaret Sophie Stein, who plays Herman's Polish wife Yadwiga, is a native of Poland who had to work very hard to speak English for the film. As the sound supervisor on this film I know for a fact that the accents are very authentic.