“Maestro” is biographical drama film that centers on the life of composer Leonard Bernstein and his relationship with his wife.
Let’s find out some trivia and facts about the film.
- Maestro is a 2023 American biographical drama film
- The film centers on the relationship between American composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre
- It was directed by Bradley Cooper
- From a screenplay he wrote with Josh Singer
- It was produced by Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Fred Berner and Amy Durning
- The film stars Carey Mulligan as Montealegre alongside Cooper as Bernstein
- Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, and Sarah Silverman appear in supporting roles
- Maestro premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2023
- There it was nominated for the Golden Lion
- The film received a limited theatrical release on November 22, 2023
- Before being released on Netflix on December 20
- It received positive reviews from critics
- It was named one of the top 10 films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute
- It has also been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards
- The project had been in development at Paramount Pictures
- With Martin Scorsese initially planning to direct the film
- He stepped down as director to work on The Irishman
- Allowing Bradley Cooper to join the film in May 2018 as director and to star as Bernstein
- Scorsese continued as producer alongside Steven Spielberg
- Spielberg was also initially considering directing the film and had approached Cooper to star
- But offered the director position to Cooper after a screening of A Star Is Born
- In January 2020, the project was moved to Netflix, with filming expected to begin in 2021
- In September 2020, the project was given the title Maestro with Carey Mulligan joining the cast
- It was also announced that filming would begin in the spring of 2021
- In October, Jeremy Strong joined the cast as John Gruen, but later dropped out due to scheduling conflicts
- In March 2022, Matt Bomer joined the cast
- Bomer would be confirmed in April, with Maya Hawke also announced as being cast
- In June, Sarah Silverman was announced as playing Bernstein’s sister Shirley
- In February 2023, Michael Urie was announced to be appearing in the film as Jerome Robbins
- In April 2023, it was reported that Miriam Shor was a part of the cast
- Filming was expected to begin on April 5, 2021 in Los Angeles
- However, it instead began in May 2022
- Production occurred at Tanglewood between May 21 and 26, and in New York City
- Filming also took place at Ely Cathedral in England between October 20 and 22
- Although Netflix does not publicly report box office grosses, IndieWire estimated the film made about $200,000 from eight theaters in its opening weekend
- And a total of $300,000 over the five-day Thanksgiving frame
- This would make it the most successful debut for the company since at least 2019
- On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 81% rating
- Based on 227 critics’ reviews
- With an average rating of 7.5/10
- The website’s consensus reads: “Led by a pair of powerful performances, Maestro serves as a stirring overview of a tremendous talent’s life and legacy”
- Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 78 out of 100
- Based on 58 critics
- Indicating “generally favorable” reviews
- Cooper’s use of a large prosthetic nose to portray Bernstein, who was Jewish, was criticized by some as an example of “Jewface”, following the release of photographs from the set of the film in May 2023 and the subsequent release of the trailer in August
- The chief television critic of The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg, criticized in a Twitter post the casting of Cooper
- Along with the British gentile Mulligan as a Costa Rican-Chilean converted Jew, as “a LOT of ethnic cosplay for one movie”
- English Jewish actress Tracy-Ann Oberman wrote that if Cooper “can’t [play the role] through the power of acting alone then don’t cast him – get a Jewish actor”
- She felt that as Cooper had portrayed Joseph Merrick, a 19th-century British man who had severe facial deformities, without prosthetics, “then he should be able to manage to play a Jewish man without one”
- Bernstein’s children defended Cooper’s use of prosthetic makeup to portray him
- Stating that they worked with Cooper throughout the filmmaking process and that their “dad would have been fine with it”
- The Anti-Defamation League noted historical media portrayal of Jews as “evil caricatures with large, hooked noses” but said that “this film, which is a biopic, … is not that”
- In September 2023, Kazu Hiro, who created the prosthetic, said that he was surprised by the criticism but was “sorry if [he] hurt some people’s feelings”
- He added that “our only intention” was to portray Bernstein “as authentically as possible”
- The New Yorker published an essay defending the special effects make-up used by Hiro in the film and numbered him as among the top three or four special effects make-up artists of the past fifty years
- Maestro features Bernstein compositions that were handpicked by Cooper
- Those pieces were performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with a few choral performances by the London Symphony Chorus, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin who also served as Cooper’s conducting coach
- The soundtrack was preceded with an excerpt from the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” as a single on October 20
- The full soundtrack was released by Deutsche Grammophon digitally on November 10 and was released physically on December 1
- The music played by Bernstein at the piano during the prologue comes from his 1983 opera A Quiet Place which depicts a dysfunctional family, including an estranged gay son whose mother has just died
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