I adored Maestro for the style and reach and flourish of it, and Carey Mulligan’s last-act demise was, for me, devastating. But before I saw it and I mean throughout my whole life, Leonard Bernstein was the soul-stirring music man — composing, conducting, Lincoln Center, Tanglewood. Maestro didn’t exactly take issue with this, but it certainly sidestepped it. What it mostly seemed to do was whisper in my ear or poke me in the ribs as it said over and over, “O, I screw a lad.” (That’s an anagram for “Oscar Wilde.”) And I don’t relate to that. There is so much more to life than the raptures of the phallus. And this nagging focus upon young men interferes with the sad French horn I hear in my head every time I think of Terry and Edie and that rooftop pigeon cage. Or, you know, what “Somewhere” does to me every time.
Friendo to HE: ” I still don’t get why the public was willing to embrace Oppenheimer but not Maestro. Neither J. Robert Oppenheimer nor Leonard Bernstein were well known to young audiences when the films arrived.”
HE to friendo: “The public detected that Maestro was mostly about the gay stuff and said ‘okay, yeah…nope.’ J. Robert Oppenheimer may have been a weird genius dweeb but he didn’t fuck pretty boys. Imagine if Oppenheimer had been mostly about the boys and just a little tiny bit about building the A-bomb in Los Alamos and then being politically persecuted in the 50s. I know this is an unpleasant realization for some, but 95% to 96% of the country is straight. Sorry.”