As anticipation builds for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming West Side Story remake, attention is bound to turn once again to Leonard Bernstein’s ageless score, still one of the most thrilling orchestral works ever heard on Broadway, mixing jagged shards of testosterone-fueled jazz with exquisite expressions of love. But the composer takes a back seat in Bernstein’s Wall to the educator, activist, arts ambassador and extravagantly gifted conductor, whose work illuminating classical music for wider audiences made him a groundbreaking cultural figure in American television in the 1950s. Douglas Tirola’s fascinating docu-portrait takes advantage of vast archival resources to reveal the passions that drove the man, mostly in his own words.
While Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon wove together present-day interviews with choice material from the satirical magazine’s heyday, the director’s new film is constructed entirely from existing TV interviews, news footage, home movies and audio clips. Aside from personal letters rendered in elegant graphics, the film presents what amounts largely to a first-person character study; the briefest interview snippets with Bernstein’s wife and his sister are the only significant departures.
Bernstein's Wall
The Bottom Line Fortissimo.
This is a thoughtfully constructed tribute that lacks neither cultural and political context nor intimate personal perspective. Perhaps most striking is the reminder of what a household name Bernstein became, something almost inconceivable for a classical music figure today. That’s perhaps due to the singular nature of a man who appears as dynamic in his everyday life as he was at the concert hall podium. Celebrity with substance. Countless clips show him to be a great talker — a teacher and a preacher, an advocate for social change, using the arts as a delivery system for freedom and equality, peace and unity. That he did this without ever dumbing down his message makes it all the more remarkable.
Tirola’s approach is signaled by opening with one of Bernstein’s direct-to-camera television lectures, which he began with the CBS arts series Omnibus in 1954, covering a wide spectrum of music including classical, jazz, musical theater and opera. He reflects on whether an artist has the power to change the world, to help erase the dividing lines and walls that challenge humanity.
The film covers Bernstein’s upbringing, his difficult relationship with his Ukrainian Jewish immigrant father, his post-Harvard studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Tanglewood Music Center in the Berkshires. While he credits the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director Serge Koussevitsky with teaching him the fundamentals of conducting, Aaron Copland was his key mentor in terms of composition. Excerpts of their correspondence suggest a sexual relationship between the two men, or at least the desire for one. The doc acknowledges that Bernstein was gay and that his wife of 27 years, Felicia Montealegre, was aware of his “confusion” from the start.
There’s every indication that Bernstein’s experience of marriage and fatherhood was nonetheless fulfilling. But in one poignant exchange of letters well into their marriage, Felicia speaks candidly about his sexuality and the obstacles created by his double life, graciously conceding him his freedom, “with no guilt and no consequences.”
Bernstein’s leftist political leanings are detailed throughout, from his relatively unscathed brush with the House Un-American Activities Committee (he was denied a passport at one point) to his participation in civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam protests. A Manhattan party he threw in 1970 to raise defense funds for several unjustly imprisoned Black Panther Party members made him a target of harsh media criticism, with Tom Wolfe coining the derisive term “radical chic” to describe Bernstein’s embrace of the cause. Media outlets dismissed the event as “elegant slumming,” but Bernstein refused to back down in his defense of civil liberties.
Both in his years as music director of the New York Philharmonic and after, Bernstein was cozy with celebrities and politicians, notably the Kennedys. At Jacqueline Kennedy’s request, he composed the theater piece Mass for the inauguration of the Kennedy Center in 1971. This drew mixed reviews and bristling suspicion from Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, heard in a recorded phone conversation warning the president that the work’s political overtones would make it unwise for him to attend. Bernstein calls Mass “a statement about the temporariness of power.”
Alongside his idealism, the doc focuses on Bernstein’s belief in the democratization of the arts, something he championed in his habit of addressing the audience informally before New York Philharmonic recitals, and in his televised series of Young People’s Concerts for CBS. It seems significant that his rise as a figure of both national and international renown coincided with the post-war boom years in which America was establishing itself as a global cultural force.
Admirers of Bernstein’s contribution to musical theater will be disappointed by the brief time allotted to West Side Story and On the Town, while beloved works like Candide and Wonderful Town are skipped altogether. His last original score for Broadway, the 1976 fast flop 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, gets almost as much attention as his successes in that sphere. But Bernstein’s Wall is a densely packed look at specific aspects of Bernstein’s genius, and anyone interested in the role of the arts in mid-century American life will find much to savor in this stimulating overview, briskly edited by Zachary Obid.
Given Bernstein’s great love for Beethoven, established from the opening, it’s fitting that the film ends with footage of him conducting the Ninth Symphony in East Berlin in 1989 as part of the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. To mark that reunification, he rewrote part of Friedrich Schiller’s text for the “Ode to Joy” movement, and had the choir substitute the German word for “freedom” in place of “joy.”
He describes himself as “possessed” by the ideas and shapes of music, keeping him engaged in life even at his most depressed. Watching his wild exertions at the podium, that seems quite literal. “I love last lines and last bars,” he says. “Last statements.” The doc’s moving final shot provides exactly that, showing Bernstein overcome at the end of that historic Berlin performance, his head bowed, his demeanor humbled.
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‘Bernstein’s Wall’: Film Review | Tribeca 2021 - Hollywood Reporter
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