Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic is stranger than you’d expect, filled with ambitious filmmaking and showy performances—some of which work, all of which are ponderous.
is its ambition and energy, the way it isn’t afraid to try things out. So an early one-shot—in reality a composite of different viewpoints—finds Bernstein sitting on his bed, talking on the phone, for what seems an eternity, framed in almost total obscurity by daylight framing a curtained windowpane.
Here, the camera whizzes around the atrium, before zipping back to Cooper as his good face radiates delight. This is fairly high-wire filmmaking, a little bit showy and perhaps trite in the way it signifies its intentions—but the showmanship works, because it is matched to a man who was as outsized as this.
There’s more: ballsy time-hopping scene transitions; an explanatory dance sequence; a finely written argument filmed in one-take, featuring an unexpected cameo by Charles Schulz’s Snoopy, and a few audacious musical sequences that take their merry time, demanding commitment from the viewer. Throughout, in fact,tests audiences’ staying power, particularly with a number of dialogue scenes filmed with a fixed camera, some of them at a startling distance from the action.
One disagreement between Felicia and Leonard is filmed from something like fifty meters away, their faces partly obscured by bits of garden: Why? What is intended here? Spectators can make up their own minds, but undoubtedly there’s a stubbornness at play here; a desire to do things differently. For instance, what a bizarre decision it is to foreground Bernstein’s heterosexual relationship: It pays off, eventually, but it feels like arriving at the character from an oblique angle.
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