I went to see Maestro, and it was a collection of excellent scenes. It had excellent dialogue and acting and artistic execution. Everything about it was great except for the… whole? I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was flattening in a way that was somehow ungenerous. Not because it portrayed certain aspects of his life and personality in unflattering ways (as the New Yorker review pointed out, it actually pulled quite a few punches on that front that arguably shouldn’t have been pulled!) but because the emotional drama of it felt so disconnected from the concept of music and art as a driving force in this person’s life. I kept thinking of this passage from Gore Vidal– not the person you usually go to for generous portrayals of other public figures, but here we are–

And yeah, this is goofy, but it’s a portrait of someone who cares so deeply about music that he wants to sit up all night talking about it with a hooker, that he’ll happily entertain calls from politicians as long as he can get them talking and thinking about music, and that was not the person I saw in the movie. I’m not sure that character was interested in talking about music with anyone. And Bradley Cooper did a genuinely great job in the conducting bits! But it was kind of just… a movie in which Bradley Cooper is surprisingly adept at conducting Mahler, with an infidelity-and-cancer-laden soap opera superimposed on top, and not much thematic connection between the two.