I’ve been posting about Maestro (2023) since the last week of December, which isn’t what I had in mind when I made that first post. I thought that would be it, but this that and the other and I’m still thinking about it. Then, yesterday (actually, it was a day or two before, but what’s the diff?) I noticed that Netflix had Jack Black’s School of Rock (2003). I had pleasant if somewhat vague memories of having watched it on TV at some undefined time in the past. “Why not?” thought I to myself, “Why not?” So I did. It was a heart-warming laugh-riot, which Maestro was not.
One thought I had immediately: Why wasn’t there more of this in Maestro? By this I mean the sheer physical joy of making music. Without that, no Lenny, no New York Philharmonic, no London Symphony, no overwhelming performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony (aka Resurrection). It’s like my musical compadre Rick Rourke said, “It’s the closest you can get to really being, feeling totally happy with yourself.” I mean, it may not look like it with the jumping and the grimacing, but Lenny was having a riot up there on the podium, and the orchestra was into too. That’s what made him great, no? YES!
That’s what I was getting at in my 3QD piece about Maestro. I’m talking about Mahler’s First Symphony:
Loved the slow third movement; didn’t even realize that it was based on “Frère Jacques” until I read it somewhere. (Color me red with embarrassment, but not as red as Cooper’s make-up, not THAT red.) But the fourth movement, someday I’d love to play principal trumpet on that one, just drive the orchestra into the ground, through the earth, and come out somewhere in the South China Sea where we could zing Xi Jinping’s nose.
What I had in mind was the role of lead trumpet in a big band. While I have played lead in college big bands, I was mostly playing second, the so-called “ride” chair (at least that’s what it was called in olden days), for the trumpet soloist. But I once had that kind of experience playing with the Sage City Symphony, a community symphony in Bennington, Vermont.
We were performing Variations on “America” (originally written for organ). There’s a movement where the principal trumpet plays the melody in the middle register. Nothing complicated or tricky, just the melody, straight. I wasn’t playing principal. While I was playing second, that part was cued in, so I decided to go for it. And I did (I’m talking about the section that starts at about 06:12 in the linked recording, something of a “shout chorus” in big band terms). What fun. And no one was harmed, though some of the string players looked back at us (trumpeters) with wide-open eyes and raised eyebrows as if to say “WTF?” Yeah!
And that’s how Jack Black played his rock guitarist man-child in School of Rock. His lead guitar gyrations make Lenny look like a model of afternoon-tea decorum. Since Black is a musician, I assume that’s really him singing and playing in this clip from the opening of the film:
Watch him starting at 01:25. Over the top? Yes, I suppose, maybe. But not for rock and roll. Fun? Hell yeah!
How would you get that kind of energy into a movie like Maestro? Beats me. That’s not my job. Were they trying for it? I don’t know. If not, should they have been? Yes. Why? Because without that, no real, deep down, music. I don’t care what the genre. That’s where music lives and breathes. Getting that into film. Not so easy.
Especially when you have a complicated story to tell. And the story in Maestro, the story of the marriage, the story of the marriage mixed with performing, was certainly complicated. But that’s why those guys make the big bucks, to tell complicated stories, and tell them well. And I’m not sure how well they told the story, whatever the story is. Judging from what I’ve heard in some of the review clips, I missed major story points the first two times I watched Maestro. Now that I know what’s going on, at least I think I do, I picked up on it the third time through. But if you don’t already know more than a little about Bernstein’s life – which, I suspect, excludes much of the audience for the film, many of whom were born after Bernstein died (in 1990) – then piecing things together from the scraps strung together on screen, that’s going to be hit or miss. Maybe that matters, maybe not. Sure, if you’re concerned with biographical truth, it matters, but there’s artistic truth, which may well diverge from biographical truth. And, at some point and at some level, that’s certainly true for Maestro. Still, I don’t know. It’s complicated.
In contrast, School of Rock is straightforward. Dewey Finn, man-boy guitarist and vocalist, gets kicked out of his rock band. He lucks into a gig as a substitute teacher at a toney private school. There he decided to get the kids to form a rock band so he can place a band into the Big Competition. The kids are into it. Of course, they have to keep this secret from the rest of the school and from the parents. This leads to inevitable complications. It is inherent in such films that the complications will break down just before the climax. And it is equally inherent that they will be overcome. The kids do well in the competition, which they enter on the sly. They don’t win, but the parents have crashed the show (well, they do pay for their tickets) and are won over by the kids (& Dewey in short pants). Everyone is happy.
It's a straightforward feel-good family film. Which Maestro is not. There we have a big climax about 3/5 to 2/3 of the way through, the performance of the finale to Mahler’s Second. That creates a technical problem: Now what do we do? We watch Bernstein’s wife die is what we do. He’s with her at the end, and then... You see the problem.
Two different kinds of film. Two different sets of technical problems. Those in School of Rock are well-known, and the solutions taken are imaginative and fun. Those in Maestro...I don’t know. Does the film work, dramatically? Not sure.
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BTW, Sarah Silverman has a supporting role in each film.
And at about the same time School of Rock was being filmed and actual honest to God School of Rock was established as a business. The causal relationship between the two is not clear (judging from the Wikipedia article), but the school is open in fourteen countries. There’s a branch in Hoboken, NJ, where I live.
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