The Beauty of Maestro's Unforgotten Wife
Image; Lea Pictures, Sikelia Productions, Amblin Entertainment, Fred Berner Films
The biopic Maestro is about famous queer composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) as he navigates his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Bernstein was a talented man who was probably most famous for his musical contributions to West Side Story, among others, but he was also a bisexual man in an age where that wasn't the most accepted of things. The biggest tension arguably revolves around the weight of that stigma on Bernstein's wife, his career, his family, and his sense of self.
Like Bernstein's music, Maestro is an acquired taste. The film matches his frantic energy. It moves from scene to scene in a way that is chaotic and, at times, unhinged. Bernstein will be talking about some sudden and vulnerable subject, and then in the next moment, he will pull back, rhetorically, commenting on his own abrasiveness. Almost every scene is filled with his high-speed, overbearing wit, which the viewer either acclimates to or doesn't.
Yet unlike in many texts where the wife of the rich gay man languishes in obscurity and neglect, Maestro gives us something that, although not new, is exceedingly rare in media — an actual partnership.
A brief summary of the wives ignored
When films recount gay men in the past, particularly white, rich gay men, the wife often suffers in the background. She is the person he, at best, lies to as he hooks up with other men on the side, clinging to his fabricated heterosexuality so that he doesn't lose his middle-to-upper-class privileges.
A good example of this is the graphic novel turned musical Fun Home, which is an autobiography of queer writer Alison Bechdel and her tumultuous (and abusive) relationship with her closeted father, Bruce. He does not have a harmonious relationship with his wife, neglecting her and giving her profound anxiety about the status of his queer entanglements. "And boys," his wife Helen sings in the song Days and Days, "My God, some of them underage." Later in the song, she laments why she resigned herself to this bad relationship, claiming that it was a gradual process of compromise over time: "That's how it happens. Days. Made of bargains, I made because I thought as a wife I was meant to. And now my life is shattered and laid bare."
We see this process of compromise also in Brokeback Mountain (2005), where the main characters, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), both enter into heterosexual relationships for most of the film's runtime, even though they both have deep affection for one another. Jack does not confide the secret of his sexuality to his wife, Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), but it hangs in the background. She knows his lover, Ennis, as "the fishing buddy." As she informs Ennis of Jack's death on the phone in a heart-wrenching monologue, sparring him of the details of his gay bashing, you can see the acknowledgment of their relationship in her eyes, unstated. Ennis' relationship is even less stable. His wife Alma (Michelle Williams) inadvertently witnesses him kissing Jack, further straining the marriage until it breaks, though the kiss itself is not mentioned well after the two's divorce.
Sometimes the wife is not just neglected but abused. In Dance of the 41, which is a film about the son-in-law, Ignacio de la Torre y Mier (Alfonso Herrera), of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz (Fernando Becerril), the main character is actively cruel to his wife Amada Díaz (Mabel Cadena). Ignacio ignores her calls for intimacy, gaslights her, and creates an entirely adversarial relationship. When the gay society and found family Ignacio is part of (i.e., The Dance of the 42) is violently shut down by the government, and its members are shamed in public and sent to prison, he is spared from this fate because of his marriage to Amada. She has no sympathy for him, telling Ignacio that his lover, Evaristo Rivas (Emiliano Zurita), is dead while indifferently sipping her coffee. She is now firmly in control of the relationship both of them are resigned to.
Dance of the 41 provides us with the most visceral reason why these men were distant and neglectful. The exposure of their secret could end them — their careers, their reputations, and in the case of this film, their freedom, and their lives. It's an understandable (if not still cruel) reason for such marital neglect, a trope repeated in film after film around the globe.
Yet in Maestro, Bernstein's wife Felicia is loved, accepted, and there —a type of representation that is rare in cinema.
The Maestro's open secret
Leonard Bernstein's bisexuality was an open secret during his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. He would flirt with men and women alike everywhere, from a large gathering at his apartment to a simple New York City street. "Can I tell you a secret? Do you know I've slept with both your parents," he says wryly to a baby being pushed along in a stroller.
His wife seems to accept his sexuality, as well as the larger-than-life spotlight he maintained. There is one scene where Felicia is talking to Leonard's sister, Shirley Bernstein (Sarah Silverman), who asserts that there is a "price" for being in her brother's orbit (i.e., that both his personality and his sexuality will never make it so he's just hers). Felicia claims to be unbothered by it, saying:
“I suppose I do understand what you mean. You know, it’s very strange, but I do believe there is that in everybody. One wishes to make adjustments to one’s self but having this imposition of a strong personality is like a way of death, really. Yet the moment I see that that is making him suffer, I realize that it’s not worth it. No, what for? It isn’t going to kill me, really, and if it’s going to give him pleasure or stop him from suffering and it’s in my power to do it, then what the hell, you know? But one has to do it completely without sacrifice. And if it is going to be a sacrifice, then I disappear.”
In other words, she wasn't going to make herself miserable for her husband's comfort and vice versa. Instead, she established boundaries and worked on her own career as well. As Carrie Mulligan says of her characterization to NPR:
“…she’s not going to do [the marriage] in a typical meek-woman-by-the-great-man manner. She’s not going to do it and begrudge him. She’s going to do it wholly because she refuses to be the kind of whingeing wife. And I think you see that in the film. And the moment that she actually can’t handle his narcissism or the focus on him or the way that he views the world, she jumps into a swimming pool.”
She doesn't sacrifice herself for her partner — at least not more than she can tolerate. They have, in other words, a partnership. There is both a frankness and a tenderness in how they talk with one another that is worlds away from Brokeback Mountain and Dance of the 41. When she doesn't like how Leonard is going about things, she tells him. "No, I just… nothing. I thought we were having a conversation," she says bluntly after Leonard tries to railroad through yet another important conversation.
This connection did not mean that their relationship was perfect — it was, of course, deeply flawed. Leonard had a habit of trying to "fix" (i.e., force) every conversation with his bombastic main character energy so that it went his way. Felicia was also mortified by Leonard's queerness getting out to the public. There is one heartbreaking scene where she insists on Leonard keeping his queerness a secret from their daughter, Jamie Bernstein (Maya Hawke), even though rumors about it abound. When he does lie to her about it, Jamie sounds relieved, the camera panning on the heartbreak on Leonard's face.
Yet the film also makes clear that, like Leonard, Felicia is navigating strict societal expectations. "And don't forget you are a man," she lectures Leonard on one of the reasons for his success, trying to bring the point home to the audience that the stakes are high for her, too. She also has a career in the entertainment world and does not want to be stigmatized by conservative America for her husband's sexuality.
However, even as this tension pushes against the foundation of their relationship, with them having long periods of separation and distancing, it does not fracture it. The two of them do reconcile eventually, and when Felicia's health starts to collapse from cancer, Leonard is there for her to the very end. There is no question whether the love is there, even if it's not always enough to keep them together for long, and that is a refreshing change from the "dead marriage" trope we see so often in queer cinema.
A ringing conclusion
With pop culture trends, it's intriguing to observe when a film comes along to highlight our collective gaps in representation. If mainstream cinema is to be believed, then the gay men of the past were confined to cold, loveless marriages that suffocated all parties involved. While these relationships did and do continue to happen (Fun Home was based on real events, after all), they have never been the only type to exist. There have always been partnerships where people manage to find happiness in less-than-ideal circumstances.
Maestro shows us an example of a queer man in a loving relationship with a heterosexual woman. It's a complicated and messy one, which makes for excellent cinema, but the tenderness is there, and that is sadly too rare in the media looking back on our queer past.