Maestro

Director: Bradley Cooper
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper, Matt Bomer, Vincenzo Amato, Greg Hildreth, Michael Urie, Brian Klugman, Nick Blaemire, Mallory Portnoy, Sarah Silverman, Zachary Booth, Maya Hawke, Gideon Glick, Josh Hamilton
Running Time: 129 min.
Rating: R

**The Following Review Contains Major Plot Details For 'Maestro' **

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

Mocked by some for being calculated Oscar bait, actor/director Bradley Cooper's long gestating dream project covering the life of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein does share certain similarities with traditionally familiar biopics. But in condensing the essence of this towering, troubled figure into barely over two hours, Maestro also takes some big swings that will probably rattle purists only interested in Bernstein's process as an artist. This focuses more on the moments, as Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer cleverly forego the nuts and bolts of the man's career to focus entirely on his rocky marriage.

Spanning decades, Cooper's selective in what's covered, displaying an incredible grasp of time and place when exploring the challenges of being caught in the orbit of a conflicted, complicated talent who never feels satisfied. After a deliberate start, it only gets better, building momentum before landing a devastatingly painful and realistic final blow. There's a Kane-like quality to how this all unfolds that extends past its monochrome opening, as Cooper makes adventurous creative choices both in front of and behind the camera. Held up by Matthew Libatique's astounding cinematography, the makeup, costuming and production design, the film's a marvel to look at, and for all the jokes about Cooper's self serious intentions, it's the results onscreen that speak loudest.

It's 1943 when 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) fills in for an ill Bruno Walter, with the performance earning strong enough accolades to launch the young talent to considerable fame. While still in a casual relationship with clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), he soon meets aspiring actress Felicia Montealagre (Mulligan) at a party, eventually leaving him to date and marry her. 

Together the couple have three children, with Leonard composing several successful Broadway musicals as Felicia's stage career flourishes. With the 60's wearing on, his affairs with men and dependency on drugs and alcohol become impossible for her to ignore, taking a toll on their marriage and tearing the family apart. But after finally rediscovering his love for Felicia and his work, unimaginable tragedy strikes, altering the remainder of Leonard's life.  

The story kicks off in black and white with an energetic opening sequence that sees Leonard jumping out of bed and sprinting to Carnegie Hall as the strains of his On the Waterfront score blast over the soundtrack. It grabs you right away, moving a mile a minute before settling into a slightly more predictable rhythm when he first meets Felicia. The first of the film's visually spectacular sequences comes with a rehearsal for On the Town where he all but announces his bisexuality to Felicia, even as it's clear she's fallen too hard to take the hint. Headstrong as Felicia is, her naivete lies in believing her future husband's vices won't matter if she can just keep him in line. 

Cooper plants the seeds early that Lenny's a man constantly craving the presence of others, to the point he can't even be in a bathroom without the door open. For him, the solitary nature of composing is a struggle compared to the satisfaction he gets conducting, which comfortably places him at the center of attention. Part egomaniac and insecure basket case, Cooper conveys these contradictions while also physically capturing Bernstein in eerily accurate ways, such as his nasally vocal inflection. As for the prosthetic nose, it's a lot of fuss about something that would hardly get a second look if not for all the manufactured controversy. 

Kazu Hiro and his makeup team deserve credit for flawlessly aging Cooper into the 70-year-old Bernstein who appears in the bookending scenes. And true to the period, get ready to see enough cigarette smoking for the film to justify its own Surgeon General's warning, which is almost comical considering how the notoriously safe and family friendly Steven Spielberg co-produced. 

The shift from black-and-white to 60's and 70's Technicolor accompanies the dramatic momentum when Lenny and Felicia's marriage crashes amidst his addictions and infidelity. Mulligan's sensational in this section, portraying the pain of a woman unable to continue standing on the sidelines as he flaunts his escapades in her face. When they eventually have it out in a Thanksgiving screaming match at their New York City Dakota apartment, their argument ends with a brilliantly surreal cameo from a cartoon icon that speaks to Cooper's directorial talents and his understanding of the absurdity found in everyday life. 

That showdown and Lenny lying straight to college-aged daughter Jamie's (Maya Hawke) face about his infidelities hit in powerfully different ways, but his conducting of Mahler's second symphony at England's Ely Cathedral is the picture's pinnacle. It's a euphoric and moving six-minute sequence that sees Cooper enthrallingly recreate the maestro's sweaty 1973 performance with tireless physicality, hypnotizing us as the sensation of pure cinema courses through our veins.

If it's hard to buy the claim this is Felicia's story when she's rarely given a scene without him, Carey Mulligan still makes a great case for her being his equal, adding depth and dimension to a thoughtfully written part. That it comes in support of someone else is fine since Lenny's supposed to suck up all the air in the room as she laments his inability to change, or rather a refusal to. The script doesn't evade Lenny's moral shortcomings, but gives him the redemption of being there when needed most, as Mulligan owns the last act with her heartbreaking portrayal. The grim cancer diagnosis is unflinchingly difficult to watch, with the actress continuing to display the character's same grit and stubbornness, even as she fades away in her family's arms. 

There's no mistaking this is a showcase for Cooper, but it's also his career best, touching on more than a few elements that run parallel to the star's own career. Directing this as if he really has something to prove, it's an intriguing quasi-prequel to 2022's Tár, which centered around another embattled conductor, albeit a fictional one. And now her idolization of Bernstein strangely makes even more sense after this. If that film had the market cornered on provoking debate, Maestro is all about feelings and vibes, giving viewers a peek into the tormented genius whose life seemed to flash before everyone's eyes.                                                                               

The Nice Guys

Director: Shane Black
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley, Yaya DaCosta, Keith David, Beau Knapp, Kim Basinger, Jack Kilmer, Ty Simpkins
Running Time: 116 min.
Rating: R

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

There's an early moment in Shane Black's buddy cop comedy, The Nice Guys, that immediately convinced  me I'd love it. It's when a bumbling private eye played by Ryan Gosling meticulously attempts to break into a nightclub. And just from our initial glimpses of the guy, we can tell this might be the first time he's ever arrived prepared for anything. He carefully wraps his fist and arm measures up the glass window before putting his fist through it. Within minutes, blood's shooting everywhere and the ambulance takes him away. It's the perfect introduction to this character and into the retro world of the movie, which is filled to the brim with subtle jokes that continually keep paying off as its delightfully absurd plot takes shape. Everything the movie does just feels effortless, cruising along for a two hour length that most other comedies would be struggling to fill.  It knows where it's going and all the detours it takes in getting there are actually welcome because they're hilarious and even at times unexpected.

Delivered in a style and tone more reminiscent great, unearthed 70's cop show that never quite made it to air, it's witty and sharp, mining its laughs from quirky characters traits and period nonsense instead of sight gags or toilet humor. And it may be time to start getting scared because if Gosling's capable of bringing this much to what on paper should have been your average mainstream American comedy, there's no telling what else he's capable of. Russell Crowe is superb as his straight man, and while no one could have predicted this pairing would yield such a result, it's Gosling who really surprises with comedic chops few guessed he had, even while generously taking into account his previous work in Crazy Stupid Love.

As if all this isn't enough, Black manages to accomplish the impossible in successfully incorporating a child into the narrative in a major role that feels completely essential. Far from being a third wheel of any sort, the actual performance and discovery of the actress giving it feels like a genuine eye-opener, as she goes much further than merely "holding her own" opposite experienced, powerhouse co-stars. Rarely did a scene pass in The Nice Guys when I wasn't either laughing or smiling, regardless of how little casual buzz it may have generated among moviegoers following its May release.

It's 1977 Los Angeles and frequently drunk private eye Holland March (Gosling) is hired by the aunt of recently deceased adult film star Misty Mountains to investigate the possibility she's still alive after supposedly spotting her following her death in a car crash. A highly skeptical March takes the job but gets a beat down from hired muscle Jackson Healey (Crowe), who warns him to stay away from his only lead in the case, a missing girl named Amelia Kutner (Margaret Qualley). But when Healey is targeted by a couple of thugs regarding Amelia, he teams up with March and his wise beyond her years 13-year-old daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice) to locate Amelia before those guys do. The disappearance of Amelia and how it relates to the LA pornography world and even reaches the highest level of federal government is something this crime solving odd couple will have to crack, with Healey and Holly attempting to protect March from his worst enemy: His drunken incompetence as a detective and frequent deficiencies as a parental figure.

At times feeling more 1970's than the 70's itself, the setting and period in which this takes place ends up being a huge selling point in writer/director Shane Black's capable hands. As he proved over a decade ago with his cult hit Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and even more recently with Iron Man 3, he knows how to write and direct comedy that's a cut or more above what we've come to typically expect from projects that could otherwise easily seem slight or unambitious without his touch. He's definitely not phoning it in here, rarely wasting an opportunity to poke fun of the absurdity of the porn industry setting and storyline, as well as the wacky characters inhabiting it. Everything from the production design to the costuming looks authentic to a degree you rarely find in comedies set in another decade.  And that's about half of what makes this all work. The plot may be played entirely for laughs, but it's played straight and taken deadly serious by these two characters, who could have just as easily slid into a sequel to Crowe's own L.A. Confidential.

The casting of Gosling and Crowe, two actors primarily associated with darker material, is a masterstroke in that we've never seem either apply their talents to something as comedic as this. It's a compliment to their talents how easily we could envision a dramatic inverse to this script with two rough and tumble bad-ass detectives trying to uncover a corruption ring in 1970's LA and it still working equally well. Crowe (who noticeably packed on the pounds for the role) actually plays it like this is that movie, even as ridiculous as everything around him gets. Most notably, Gosling's character. What's funny and to whom is such a subjective, acquired taste that it's all the more remarkable how frequently Gosling breaks those barriers with his performance as March, whether he's unintelligibly chatting up partygoers after having a few (or fifteen) too many or doing a spot-on Lou Costello impersonation sure to delight anyone who recognizes the tribute, and likely even those who don't.

Incorporating kids into adult comedies can be creatively troublesome as their characters tend to be annoyingly overwritten or cloying, quickly wearing out their welcome when placed in more sophisticated situations. Through little fault of their own, even the most skilled and mature of tween or teen actors can irritate if the material isn't there or the director has them precociously mug for the cameras since Hollywood's taught us that's what kids should do. Adopting a flawless American accent, Australian actress Angourie Rice doesn't only manage to not wear out her welcome as Holly March, she stands right alongside Gosling as the very best thing in the movie. It's a child star arrival and performance that's reminiscent of the talent Jodie Foster or Natalie Portman displayed right out of the gate when they first debuted. There's that much potential here.

As possibly the true parent in this father-daughter relationship, it's become Holly's job to keep her dad on the straight and narrow following the death of her mother. She seems up for everything, can read adults in an instant, but also has these scary moments in the midst of all the danger that jolt audiences into remembering just how young and impressionable she is. No kid, however street smart, could reasonably be asked to handle any of this and it's to Rice and the film's credit that this detail isn't forgotten. Nor is the fact that their relationship is so often built on the foundation that they have to take turns protecting each other. And Gosling provides these small moments where we realize that, for all of March's faults, he's both a better detective and parent than we initially suspected. Holly finds a worthy verbal sparring opponent in Healey and the friendship they form to keep her dad on track provides one of the more satisfying subplots.

Usually, when an R-rated action comedy enters its third act, the results are a mess as the narrative flies off the rails. This is one of those rare cases where everything only gets better as the plot becomes crazier, and the closing action sequence at the Los Angeles Auto Show squeezes the absolute most out of its setting and characters. Much of that can be attributed to an exciting cast of colorfully entertaining supporting villains played by Keith David, Beau Knapp and and an unrecognizably creepy Matt Bomer as hired assassin "John Boy." Kim Basinger also contributes as a chilly demeanored high-ranking government official whose interest in Amelia's disappearance is more personal given that she's her daughter.

Even with its unusual setting and offbeat sense of humor, it's still surprising The Nice Guys wasn't a bigger hit. While it's possible some of the really subtle, inside jokes flew over the heads of as many as it impressed upon its release, this is one of the few recent mainstream comedies that manages to not only tell a good story, but a few of them simultaneously. In a way, it would be kind of strangely disappointing if it was enormously successful, spawning a franchise of likely inferior sequels that would seem to violate the spirit with which this was made. This seems just fine where it is. A quirky, edgy cult comedy viewers will still slowly be discovering years from now.