Maestro: "...about a third of the way in, the queer characters all but fade out."

Jennie Livingston, The False Note in Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’, NYTimes, Jan. 9, 2024.

Here:

The film gets right so much of who Bernstein was, allowing us to take in how he was, all at once, ahead of his time, a victim of his time, a gay man, a bisexual, a father, a nonconformist, a narcissist. “Maestro” is full of heart and craft, with riveting lead performances. It’s a film about a musician that doesn’t exaggerate or glorify the creative process, or suggest artists are either superhuman or subhuman. [...]

Although it’s clear that Cooper’s directorial hand is nothing less than breathtaking, the film becomes increasingly disquieting. In the first third of the film, the script sets up an intoxicating premise: a queer Jewish man inhabiting the already-antisemitic world of classical music falls in love with a woman. It can happen. It particularly could happen in a world in which gay artists were always in danger of being exposed and ejected from the institutions they depended on. In the ’40s and ’50s, when Bernstein and Montealegre met and married, psychiatry still considered homosexuality a disorder to be treated or cured. (A note on my language describing Bernstein’s sexuality: In an early letter, Montealegre tells Bernstein “you are a homosexual and may never change.” More recently, his daughter Jamie has referred to him alternately as gay and bisexual.)

And then here:

“Heterosexuals have never known what to do with queer people, if they think of their existence at all,” Carmen Maria Machado writes, in a memoir tracing the invisibility of certain narratives. I don’t want to believe that the director and his co-writer are incapable of writing well-rounded gay characters, but paradoxically, the failure to render Bernstein’s male lovers as three-dimensional people distracts from the central couple’s romance. I longed for more insight into the nuances of Bernstein and Montealegre’s conundrum, and details of his queer life could have provided it. Flattening Bernstein’s gay relationships to a series of knowing glances and brief encounters seemed to underline the main couple’s essential heterosexuality, rather than emphasizing their relationship’s complexity.

Because, in life, Bernstein kept seeing men — and not only at the events the film allows us to briefly glimpse. Ultimately, he left Montealegre for a younger man, Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), who worked in classical radio. If included, this risky decision could have been a great turning point in the film. Scenes of Bernstein attending the dying Montealegre are moving; they could have been more meaningful if we had understood the drama and sacrifice behind his loving presence at her bedside. He didn’t just drop out of one or two coke-fueled soirees; he left a relationship.

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