I was mesmerized by the movie, especially the production. You are right about the shift from BW to color; for me, the vividness of the color section seemed a near satire of stereotyped nostalgia for the '70s. Since I considered the movie more or less a musical based on a selection of vignettes from Bernstein's life (and I typically avoid musicals), loving his compositions, it worked. Within minutes I forgot that Cooper was playing Bernstein, following it as a typical (or cliched as you suggest) love story + schizo artist/human tale. Thinking of the movie as a musical set to Bernstein's music made the "magical realism" techniques appear more accurately as scene transitions in a stage play. Some of what you found unbelievable, such as depictions of Bernstein's coy public petting of other men, I registered as performed exaggerations to show us Felicia's jealousy and anger. As a historian I have pretty low expectations for film portraits of the past; the medium does not lend itself to convictions of argument and evidence to which we typically appeal. You may be right that Tár is much more successful as a movie, perhaps Amadeus too, depicting the sublimely talented artist regularly making a mess of his life. But I was moved by Maestro, if only for the parallel of his Ely Cathedral conducting Mahler to his dancing in the club to Shout. Felicia wins his approval in the first, is dead and absent in the latter, and this suggested to me what Cooper hoped we'd learned about Bernstein. Accurate, or not.
I was mesmerized by the movie, especially the production. You are right about the shift from BW to color; for me, the vividness of the color section seemed a near satire of stereotyped nostalgia for the '70s. Since I considered the movie more or less a musical based on a selection of vignettes from Bernstein's life (and I typically avoid musicals), loving his compositions, it worked. Within minutes I forgot that Cooper was playing Bernstein, following it as a typical (or cliched as you suggest) love story + schizo artist/human tale. Thinking of the movie as a musical set to Bernstein's music made the "magical realism" techniques appear more accurately as scene transitions in a stage play. Some of what you found unbelievable, such as depictions of Bernstein's coy public petting of other men, I registered as performed exaggerations to show us Felicia's jealousy and anger. As a historian I have pretty low expectations for film portraits of the past; the medium does not lend itself to convictions of argument and evidence to which we typically appeal. You may be right that Tár is much more successful as a movie, perhaps Amadeus too, depicting the sublimely talented artist regularly making a mess of his life. But I was moved by Maestro, if only for the parallel of his Ely Cathedral conducting Mahler to his dancing in the club to Shout. Felicia wins his approval in the first, is dead and absent in the latter, and this suggested to me what Cooper hoped we'd learned about Bernstein. Accurate, or not.