And it\u2019s important to be direct about what\u2019s happening here, and to understand it from a business standpoint. There\u2019s a reason so many biopics are getting made: because the film industry is only comfortable bankrolling that which is familiar, so the only way you can get funding for the kind of mid-budget, adult-oriented, character-driven dramas that they used to greenlight all the time is by wrapping it up in what amounts to IP for adults.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which is not to say that these two filmmakers aren\u2019t at least trying<\/em> to depart from the standard playbooks. As he did with his musical drama A Star is Born<\/em>, Cooper is doing his absolute damndest to shake the dust off of a tired genre and its exhausted conventions, and as with that film, the opening stretch is the most affecting: the offhandedness and genuine warmth of the Meet Cute scenes between Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and future wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), which emphasize character over plotting and dialogue over narrative. He\u2019s also clearly made the wise decision to ape the look and style of Citizen Kane<\/em>, deploying theatrical lighting and compression of space, using clever transitions between scenes (some of them imaginary), and a presentational aesthetic, even at one point, in a winking nod to Bernstein\u2019s own work, dropping his young couple into a dream ballet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s all mighty lively, thanks to Matthew Libatique\u2019s sumptuous black and white photography and Cooper and Josh Singer\u2019s script, where the dialogue sounds like conversation, natural give and take, not the horrid expositional pablum typical of biopics; instead, they find natural moments for backfilling of information (like a Person to Person<\/em> interview that simultaneously serves to show the first signs of strain in the union).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mistake they make, as so many other biopics (or \u201cbiographical dramas\u201d) do, is tackling a vast amount of time, and having to compress it into roughly two hours. For all of the ingenuity and playfulness of that first act, Maestro<\/em> still hits the beats: we open in color, with Bernstein as an old man, finishing up a piano song, overcome with emotion (\u201cI miss her terribly\u201d) before we jump back into black and white, certain (consciously or sub-) that we\u2019ll return to these golden years at the picture\u2019s conclusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mann and his Ferrari <\/em>screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin make the wiser decision, previously demonstrated by Steven Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln<\/em> and Ava DuVernay\u2019s Selma<\/em> and similarly effective in George C. Wolfe\u2019s recent Rustin<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> to magnify and focus, eschewing the fool\u2019s errand of telescoping an entire life into a feature film and instead focusing on a single incident or short period of time that tells us much about the subject. Save for a bit of faux pre-title archival footage, and a pair of mercifully brief flashbacks to key moments earlier in each of his primary relationships, the entirety of Ferrari<\/em> takes place in the key year of 1957. It\u2019s ten years after Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) began his business and a year after the death of his son Alfredo, whose crypt he visits near the beginning of the picture, which walks alongside him on a seemingly typical day. Enzo pours his heart out to his dead son, like a therapist \u2014 or, perhaps more accurately, confesses to him, like a priest. \u201cThere was a time I loved your mother, beyond reason,\u201d he admits. \u201cShe was a different creature then. But so was I.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The time he mentions has clearly passed; the first time we see them together, his wife Laura (Pen\u00e9lope Cruz) greets him with a gun in her hand. Her own visit to Alfredo\u2019s grave, moments after his, is markedly different: she doesn\u2019t say a single word, but it\u2019s no less powerful \u2014 a full emotional journey on her face and in her eyes. Laura acknowledges, and in some sense accepts, his \u201cwhoring around\u201d; he has not admitted the more hurtful truth, that he not only loves another woman, but has fathered another son with her, and keeps them as a second family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This candid and probing investigation of a philandering Great Man is the other common thread that binds Maestro<\/em> and Ferrari<\/em>, beyond their proximate release dates and designation (wanted or not) as biopics. And it is here that Mann truly outshines Cooper, despite the latter\u2019s best efforts. It\u2019s easy to tell, from the way the second half or so of the picture unspools, that Cooper made the deliberate decision to make Maestro<\/em> not about Bernstein and Montealegre\u2019s lives, but their relationship. The trouble is, one (or, at least, Cooper) can do either<\/em> a multi-decade narrative or a nuanced relationship drama, and in trying to do both, he does neither particularly well. As defined here, these characters and their conflicts only have so much juice, and they\u2019ve been given such simple defining traits that their arguments grow monotonous. It reduces them to a few spare, dramatic qualities, which is the frequent problem with films like these; the characters became placeholders, rather than people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/maestro2-1024x627.png\")
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