Carey Mulligan

MAESTRO: not what she bargained for

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Photo caption: Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, in MAESTRO. Courtesy of Netflix. Cr. Jason McDonald/Netflix © 2023.

Maestro is the dramatization of the marriage between legendary conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper, who also directed) and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). As portrayed in Maestro, the marriage was shaped by three factors:

  • The two shared deep affection for each other, along with interests and sensibilities.
  • Bernstein’s career, driven by his genius, soared into superstardom.
  • In the first decades of the marriage, the mainstream would not accept a public figure who was gay or bisexual, which Lenny was.

Lenny was the prodigious talent and the celebrity, but Maestro is really Felicia’s story, because she faces the major conflict and because of Carey Mulligan’s sensational performance.

Indeed, although I’m lukewarm about Maestro, Mulligan is one of the two best reasons to see it. The second is a magical six-minute scene in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in 1973; it is as spectacular cinema as we’ve seen (and heard) this year.

Bradley Cooper’s Lenny is a jumble of ebullience, creative energy and conflict-avoidance; he was always, perhaps compulsively, the life of the party. Sharing her life with a guy who sucked out all the oxygen in the room was enough of a roller coaster ride for Felicia. Felicia was pretty open-minded about her husband’s dalliances with other men; but his wanting to bring his male lover (Tommy Cothran, played by Gideon Glick) into her family was a bridge too far.

It seems that Lenny primarily valued Felicia for having his children and accompanying him to trendy parties; the NYT’s Manohla Dargis impeccably describes those as “those fabulously glamorous New York parties that mostly exist in old Hollywood films or in biographies of very important dead people.” He didn’t need her as a business adviser, a creative partner or even a muse, but she was much more than his beard. Her admiration for his artistry wasn’t that of a wannabe or a groupie – Felicia, as a working New York theater actor, was an accomplished artist herself.

So, as was common in the era, its was Lenny who defined their relationship, not he and Felicia together. Carey Mulligan inhabits a character who enjoys the initial exuberance and who slowly observes that Lenny is not going to deliver what she believed that he originally committed to.

Bradley Cooper is an excellent director, as demonstrated by A Star Is Born. Here, he is very cinematic, switching aspect ratios and toggling between black and white and color.

Sarah Silverman is delightful in a very small part as one of Felicia’s friends.

Back when the trailer was released, there was a tempest in a teapot about Cooper’s prosthetic nose, to make him resemble Bernstein, a familiar figure. Bernstein’s his family stepped in and quelled the silliness. But, I was distracted by another prosthetic, the folds of wattles and neck fat on Cooper playing the old Bernstein

I’m decidedly not a fan of classical music (although I did like Amadeus); The Wife likes classical music, and she liked Maestro a bit more than I did. We were both engrossed when Mulligan was onscreen, but I was bored when she wasn’t.

This is a BIG, ambitious movie, and all of my favorite critics liked it more than I did. It’s the kind of movie (like Kramer vs. Kramer or Spotlight) that may garner lots Oscar buzz (with Netflix support), but that we won’t remember in a few years. Maestro is in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

The Great Gatsby: flashy, hollow and lame

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Carey Mulligan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in THE GREAT GATSBY

Let’s start with director Baz Luhrman’s decision to present The Great Gatsby in 3D.  The source material, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, is so compelling because it is character driven.  Luhrman’s 3D cannot enhance the characters, but can only augment wild car chases and zooming camera shots that zip us down skyscrapers and across bays.  So to use Gatsby as an excuse to launch some action sequences really misses the point of the story.  See The Movie Gourmet’s Ten Really Bad Movie Ideas.

Indeed, there’s lots of eye candy in Luhrman’s Gatsby, but to what effect?   The story seems set, not in the 1920s, but in a modern  1920s theme park where tourists waddle around chomping on churros while peering at flappers and Duesenbergs.

The story is about the Coolest Man in the World, the impenetrable Jay Gatsby, whose savoir faire, personal mystery and lifestyle splendor completely seduce his neighbor Nick Carraway, the story’s narrator.  Now you would think that putting Leonard DiCaprio in impeccably styled white and pastel pink suits would take you a long way toward Cool.  But this Gatsby is a little too anxious. And the screenplay dumbs down the story, and we learn too much about Gatsby’s real past too early and too easily.  Similarly, Tobey Maguire as Carraway brings a yippy dog energy to a character that should be more observant (like Sam Waterston’s laconic Nick in the 1974 Gatsby).

Gatsby, the acme of the self-made, is driven to at long last possess Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the girl who got away (and who is now married to the boorish jock Tom Buchanan).  The novel deeply explores Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy.  Can someone with New Money penetrate the Old Money set?  Did Daisy really love Gatsby when they were younger, or was he just a girlish flirtation?  Does Daisy love Gatsby now, or is she just flattered by his captivation and impressed by his bling?  Can Daisy escape her class?  Can Gatsby’s success buy him everything that he needs and wants?

Sadly, Luhrman reduces The Great Gatsby into a sappy melodrama of obsessive love.  That’s kind of like turning The Sun Also Rises into a bullfight story or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a river raft travelogue.  It doesn’t help that Carey Mulligan’s Daisy is more neurotic than fickle – and just not that sexually fascinating to begin with.

The one good thing about this movie is Elizabeth Debicki’s turn as the celebrity golfer and jaded party girl Jordan Baker – her every glance commands the screen.

Luhrman made lots of other choices in this adaptation.  Some work out (to my surprise, I didn’t mind the 21st century music) and some don’t (the odd and nakedly commercial casting of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim).  But the resulting totality is a hollow, somewhat vulgar misfire.  It’s the flashiest version of The Great Gatsby, but strangely not even as vivid as the written word.

In the novel, Daisy and Tom Buchanan are “careless” people – their Old Money has insulated them from the consequences of their selfishness and irresponsibility.  Fitzgerald describes them thus:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

The Great Gatsby is almost 2 1/2 hours long.  That means about four hours of your life, if you count driving to the theater, parking, buying popcorn beforehand and returning home afterward.  The novel is only 192 pages, so I strongly suggest that you take the four hours and read the glorious book instead.

Drive: noir action in vivid LA

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Drive is a movie that you haven’t seen before – a stylishly violent noir tale unfolding on a brilliantly filmed canvas.

Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver by day, criminal getaway driver by night.  He hardly talks and doesn’t emote.  Indeed, his character is listed in the credits as “Driver” and sometimes referred to in the dialogue as “The Kid”.  He is motivated only by his pursuit of adrenaline rushes and the opportunity to do something good for a vulnerable mom (Carey Mulligan).  Indeed, Gosling is superb.

But the real star of Drive is its Danish writer-director,  Nicolas Winding Refn.  The film has a noir plot but Refn eschews the shadowy black and white of traditional noir for especially vivid scenes of Los Angeles.  For example, early in the film, Gosling enters a convenience store and the screen is filled with the garish colors of junk food packaging.  It’s one of the most artfully lit and photographed scenes in the last year.

Drive abounds in nice touches. While being hunted by the cops, Gosling’s driver is listening to both the police scanner and a radio broadcast of the Lakers game; unexpectedly, it turns out that there is an essential reason that he’s listening to the Lakers.

This movie contains some extreme violence – violence that is intentionally extreme for its effect.

The cast is excellent, with especially memorable turns by Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Oscar Isaac.

(I admired Refn’s 2008 Bronson, the story of a Britain’s “most dangerous convict” who parlayed a seven-year sentence into 34 years (30 of them in solitary) by repeatedly taking hostages and beating up the SWAT teams that rescue them.   Roger Ebert called Bronson “92 minutes of rage”.)

Shame: sex all the time without any fun

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Michael Fassbender plays a fit, handsome guy who has a way with women, a well-paying job and a Manhattan apartment with a glorious view.  He is also a sex addict – someone who is compelled to think about sex and to have sex constantly.  His life is filled with masturbation, Internet porn, magazine porn, live sex chats, hookers and the odd quickie.   At home, at the office and out on the town.  He doesn’t seem to enjoy any of it.

For the rest of us, sex is the expression of passion and/or the satisfaction of lust.  For this guy, it is just something that he is driven to do, like some people chain smoke.  When he tells a woman that his longest relationship was four months long, you just know that it was really four days.  It’s very telling that the one time he can have sex resulting from a normal attraction, his plumbing fails him.

His sister, played by Carey Mulligan, moves in uninvited.  She is an emotional basket case, with a history of self-cutting, suicide attempts, hospitalizations and a trail of too easy sex and loser boyfriends.  For some reason not made explicit, this brother and sister are quite damaged.

Shame is a remarkable portrait of a sick, sick guy, and is centered on a brave and able performance by Fassbender.  Still this portrait is only a snapshot.  We are left wondering how he got this way and how will he navigate the rest of his life?

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

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Again, Oliver Stone makes the movie equivalent of one of those glossy fashion editions – kinda fun to page through, but really nothing there.  But it is glossy.

Stone sets this drama at the onset of the 2008 financial collapse, but really doesn’t have anything much to say about it, other than Josh Brolin’s character is an especially bad man.

Here’s what really ticks me off (modest SPOILER in this paragraph only).  The screenplay keeps raising the issue of moral hazard (whether to bail out people from the consequences of risks that they knew they were taking).  Yet, at the end, the two flawed main characters each get exactly what they wanted at the beginning of the film despite making risky or evil choices throughout.  The movie’s payoff (things will turn out OK no matter how badly or foolishly you behave) is exactly opposite of the movie’s sermonette.

Michael Douglas is excellent in another delicious turn as Gordon Gekko, but he isn’t the main character.  The protagonist is played by Shia LaBeouf. Will someone explain to me why Shia LaBeouf seems to be a movie star?  I just can’t figure it out.

Once again, Carey Mulligan is good as the moral center of the story.  Unfortunately, the power of her performance is undermined by the improbable and inconsistent happy ending.

Another problem is Stone’s use of nuclear fusion as an example of renewable energy that would save the planet if the bad money guys would only invest.  There are very promising alternatives in renewable energy, but fusion ain’t one of them.  It’s an insult to folks who are serious about being Green.

New Trailers: Wall Street and Funny Story

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First, the big Hollywood release Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps:  I wasn’t a huge fan of Wall Street, and I’m not a fan of Shia LaBeouf, but this trailer makes the sequel look really good.  Having Carey Mulligan helps.  Michael Douglas’ fine performance in Solitary Man looks to be an excellent tuneup for another turn as Gordon Gekko. Releases September 24.

And now the indie It’s Kind of a Funny Story. It’s a dark comedy set in a locked psychiatric facility by Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson, Sugar).  It’s hard for me to find humor in psych wards, but I found the trailer to be winning.  Keir Gilchrist stars with Zach Galifianakis and the very promising Emma Roberts.  Also releases September 24.

Hollywood's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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Hollywood's Mikael Blomkvist

 

There’s some good news about the upcoming Hollywood versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy.  First, David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) will direct, and Fincher’s track record suggests that he is the perfect guy to pull this off.

Second, Hollywood is planning to make all three films (instead of just the first or compressing them into one movie).

Third, Entertainment Weekly reports that Daniel Craig will play Mikael Blomkvist.  If you’ve seen the gritty British crime drama Layer Cake, you know that Craig can play the smart and understated Blomkvist.

Still, the success of the project depends on who will play Lisbeth Salander – and we still don’t know.  My first choice is the Danish actress Noomi Rapace who has originated the role, and she speaks English well; but on the extra features of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo DVD, Rapace says that, after living with Lisbeth for 18 months of prep and filming, she is done with the character. Carey Mulligan has been quoted that it won’t be her, either. So we watch and wait.