I’ve been listening to criticisms of Maestro, the new Bradley Cooper movie about Leonard Bernstein. I liked the movie a lot – Cooper’s performance struck me as wondrous – but that’s not my subject. Reviews of any buzzy cultural phenomenon are a dime a dozen thanks to the Internet. Everybody and his cousin wants their opinion noted whether they can write or not and opinions cost nothing to disgorge. Twitter (now X) was to self-expression as Imodium was to digestion, unleashing an irrepressible flood. “Published writer” means nothing anymore except you felt like blabbing. I almost blush to publish, the activity’s so commonplace, but hey, we live when we live, and the Internet is where words end up, like it or not.

            Many criticisms of Maestro concerned a movie that never was. Viewers wanted to learn more about Bernstein the composer, the conductor, educator, bare-knuckled competitor, fashionable political radical (ridiculed by Tom Wolfe), about the origins of his homosexuality, about… the list never ends. So many movies might have been made about Bernstein. Why not a movie about me and Bernstein, from my first wide-eyed encounter with him in Carnegie Hall, where my grandmother had a box for the Friday matinees – I was eleven, he thirty-four years my senior, I yearning to be a composer/conductor/poohbah – to his introducing me to Mahler (that huge black-leather-bound collection of all nine symphonies with the inset metal medallion (of Mahler, not Bernstein)) – to the two times, when I was twenty-two, we played squash at Manhattan’s Yale Club (elegant on the podium, he was a clod on the court) – to… you get the point. Any life, even the simplest, is countless stories; the storyteller has to choose which story they’re telling, then trim away details that don’t fit.

            Cooper chose to tell the story of Bernstein’s marriage – to the actress Felicia Montealegre – a passionate, tender, giddy, heart-searing saga, excruciatingly played out in public view – a complex, all-too-contemporary tale about sexuality, celebrity, sincerity, love. I was moved, occasionally awed, by Cooper’s telling, but again, that’s not my topic. What interests me is how many critics – and we’re all critics nowadays – didn’t see what they were being shown, so disparaged the movie for not being what they’d expected.

            This is how humans judge – most of us mostly. We see by comparison. We compare an actuality to our expectation and rate the experience accordingly. A sonnet cannot be a good sonnet if we were expecting a plate of ravioli. Quiet competence won’t please if we’re in the mood for flashy fraudulence (cf., America’s Presidential contest). The most hilarious slapstick may appall if we’re grieving. Babies see things for the first time; so does puppy Henry. Their delight or panic may be pure, spontaneous, natural. Human adults’ reactions tend to be verdicts – better or worse than we had in mind.

            The calculus – what we “like” – is complex. Our opinions are hemmed in by our sense of self. Some things I cannot like because of what my approval might “say about me.” I can’t abide, for example, rape jokes; racist humor leaves my funny-bone cold. In addition, we crave for our opinions the approval of our peers. Heaven help me if I offend or bore you. Unless we’re misanthropes, we adjust our likes to make us likeable.

            Maestro, the movie I saw, was not a “biopic”, a PBS series on the life and times of; it was a drama about a marriage. I shelve it beside Anna Karenina, Macbeth, and other marital plots. I recommend it as such. Its depiction of Bernstein conducting the conclusion of Mahler’s Resurrection symphony made me sob.