Is This Where We Are?

This piece caught my eye this morning, mostly because I couldn’t have had a more exactly opposite response to the film. But this take is still interesting to me because so many gay men seem to have felt the same way.

The setup—two beautiful, damaged urban gay men struggling to connect—and the tender, moving performances of Andrew Scott (who is always great) and Paul Mescal—made me inclined to forgive an often obvious, and sometimes outright maudlin story. But gradually my mind drifted far away from the characters to mostly trying to solve the puzzle of the plot. By about halfway through, I was just frustrated and irritable. Instead of contemplating the real problems I thought the story was about—how gay people are always on the outside of their families, the essential loneliness of being gay—I left the theater trying to figure out whether it was a dream, or the guy was schizophrenic, or was it a fable or a horror story, and what the hell was that blurry mass of flesh on the bed at the end? I enjoy the former; the latter makes me angry. It’s not that being tricked by a movie is necessarily a bad thing (“I see dead people” was fun), but not this time. If you stripped away all the gimmickry, there is a beautifully written and acted and powerfully moving story of two men yearning to be together despite everything in modern life that wants to prevent that from happening. It posited interesting questions about gay life, implicitly, and directly in the conversations between the two main characters. (I learned later that the film was made by guy who also did the HBO series Looking, which I loved partly because it dealt with similar questions.)

And then there’s Maestro—in the end I just really loved it, it was so beautiful so watch. Big and gorgeous, unabashedly stylized, cinematic. The way it was edited gave me exactly what I miss in so many contemporary films that look like they were edited by 3-year-olds with ADHD. I’m a sucker for a lingering camera, a whole scene in one long uncut static shot you can relax and let your eyes and mind really take in, slowly, every inch of it. And the tracking shots, especially the one near the end, of Bernstein conducting and the camera moves around him. The virtuosity of his performance and of really everything—just rapturous. It seemed to me that everyone involved in this film was working at the highest level of excellence, and that in and of itself is moving.

But there’s something strange at the heart of it. It’s billed as a biopic, but it’s not. It’s a story of a very unconventional marriage, Bernstein’s wife Felicia is the protagonist, and Bernstein’s inner life is kept hidden, except in some scenes where Felicia shares her take on it. I don’t think this is necessarily unintentional. “Leonard Bernstein” is a performance, his life had the quality of myth, unsurprisingly, because it was constructed, by him, by the media, by his admirers and fans. 

Which gets me to what’s on my mind. That idea of such a constructed performance is often a story about celebrity, but it’s also, and more salient here, a story about queer people, a story about the closet. Every “self” is an act of performing and concealing, but the stakes are usually higher and more explicit for queer people. Bernstein was famously “out,” in that he didn’t hide his attraction to men and his affairs. But the public at that time, and in many ways still, didn’t know what to do with a gay man so unless you were in that circle you wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t like “out gay conductor, Leonard Bernstein” in the New York Times.

Bradley Cooper’s performance, intentionally or not, had the feel of something meta, a performance of a performance—interestingly, not unlike Cate Blanchett’s in Tár—which was exactly right for Bernstein, but without seeing its cracks, and we never do, the film fell short of revealing anything very deep or complex about the man. (Felicia was the only truly complex character.) That in itself is moving, the portrayal of a personality so diminished by the closet; but just sad, not tragedy. Tragedy would be seeing what was lost.

So … there’s another film to be made there, and I look forward to it, when (if?) straight people ever come to terms with how they treat queer people, the lives they force us to live so that we don’t make them uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing I don’t have time to really puzzle out this morning: I feel like both these movies are movies about gay men but made for straight people. (All Of Us Strangers was made, I think, by a gay man. The actors, as far as I know, are straight and it’s loosely based on a story about a straight couple. I could be wrong about any of that, if those things even matter.) I think maybe that’s just where we are, in terms of how popular culture deals with queerness now, and that’s not at all a bad thing. Maybe?