"Bernstein's Wall" - documentary review. & Bradley COOPER doing a movie on Netflix (not "netflick")

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https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/bernsteins-wall-review-leonard-bernstein-1235041678/

‘Bernstein’s Wall’ Review: A Bracing Documentary Captures How Leonard Bernstein Became the Superstar of American High Culture
It takes you back to a time when the figure of the orchestra conductor was a force in American life.

.... Bernstein was the first American celebrity conductor, the first to attain the kind of prestige associated with European maestros like Herbert von Karajan and Leopold Stokowski. The time was right for him, and he was right for the time — as was clear from the moment of his rocket to fame. It was November 1943, and Bernstein had recently been hired as the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, a position in which one could slowly drown, since the scheduled conductors tended to never get sick. One day, though, Bruno Walter did. The 25-year-old Bernstein had been up all night partying and had to step in and conduct a 3:00 p.m. concert with no rehearsal. But from the moment he walked onstage at Carnegie Hall to conduct a Schumann overture, the crowd was enraptured. He got a standing ovation, and the concert was reviewed the next day on the front page of The New York Times. ....

Bernstein launched his career as a composer almost simultaneously to his rise as a conductor, and one flaw in “Bernstein’s Wall” is that the documentary takes his identity as a writer of musicals and ballets far too much for granted. The tale it tells of how “West Side Story” came into being is fascinating (Bernstein and Arthur Laurents had shelved the Romeo-and-Juliet-in-the-inner-city idea years before for being too dated; then, while sitting around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, they read reports of the ethnic riots in Los Angeles and instantly saw that it could be done). But how did someone like Bernstein, born in 1918 and steeped in classical rigor, suddenly find the ability to compose songs as fancy free as the ones in “West Side Story”? What popular music was he listening to? (Even Paul McCartney had scores of influences.) We don’t learn a bit about any of this, so the film makes it feel as if “West Side Story” just…happened. ....

“Bernstein’s Wall” tries to frame Leonard Bernstein as a humanitarian who lived for activism as much as he did for music. But to me, at least, a little of his imagine-all-the-people ’70s liberalism goes a long way. It now sounds naïve. (Bernstein in Israel: “It’s just riveting to see Jews and Arabs mingling. I mean, this is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”) And while the film is honest as to how badly Tom Wolfe’s infamous 1970 inside-party portrait “Radical Chic” tainted the Bernsteins, with its scathing portrait of the contradictions of upper bourgeois radicalism, the movie gets a little defensive about it. It winds up siding with Bernstein in suggesting that Wolfe ultimately took a cheap shot (which I don’t believe he did). It’s not that I think Bernstein’s compassion was anything less than real. It’s that his music = compassion homilies were too simplistic to represent the grandeur of what music meant to him.

What the documentary captures, profoundly, is that Leonard Bernstein was a fierce hedonist who worked hard to live the life he wanted. The film closes with a clip of him performing, and simultaneously conducting, the ebullient third movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and the grin on Bernstein’s face is as joyful as anything in the Ode to Joy. Speaking of which, we see him conducting that one in Berlin in 1989, on the day the Berlin Wall fell, and his gravitas on that podium is painfully moving. He would die just one year later, though one of the things I can’t help but wonder is: If Leonard Bernstein had lived in a less repressive society, where he didn’t feel like he had to hide who he was, maybe he wouldn’t have smoked so damn much — and maybe he wouldn’t have died at 72. He packed as much life force into those years as any artist you could name. He wrote some timeless songs, but his ultimate gift was to show us that the life force of art lives inside us too.

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