Maestro
Genuinely shocked that I pretty much loved this, may write more later
The More Later: my major frustration with The Holdovers (a movie I enjoyed) was that for all the internet yelling about its peerless attention to period filmmaking detail, it lacked the electric irresponsibility of the best 70s movies. What you gain in precision and pathos, you lose in "this could fall apart at any second" excitement. It's not just The Holdovers - it's a major difficulty for all kinds of period pieces set in the age of Hollywood. If I could watch actual work from the time, why would I watch a self-conscious, sanded-down imitation?
In that context, <PERSON>'s glorious untidiness and unchecked ego feel extremely refreshing. The pace is crazy, it covers 40+ years but ignores huge life events (not just artistic achievements, but like, the births of children), the balance between the two lead performances is always uneasy, it's got a genuinely uncomfortable sense of humor that's always jumping out at inopportune moments (the doctor costume... chilling), everybody's murmuring over each other all the time. Yeah, <PERSON> is jacking a lot of style from latter-day PTA (even more than from producers <PERSON> & Steve imo) but he's still got some of coke-era PTA's brashness and his very own willingness to dive headlong into dicey audiovisual metaphors (the West Side Story needle drop, etc). It's all very exciting to me, a person who loves mess. This movie has so many ideas piled on top of each other, and none of them are pre-chewed! There are definitely all kinds of legitimate criticisms you can make, but I think it earns its epigraph, a feat that I absolutely didn't think it would manage when <PERSON>'s words appeared onscreen up top. And I guess you could call it "Oscar bait" in the sense that you can tell <PERSON> really wants an Oscar, but good lord, if this looks anything like a limp and condescending Miramax biopic to you, I don't know what to say.
A statistical addendum, for my fellow dweebs:
If you count the shots with "invisible" transitions separately (like when <PERSON> & <PERSON> flee lunch to go to their dream ballet, or when the backstage background fades behind <PERSON>), there are 314 shots in Maestro (also not counting the archival over the credits). 378
I'm not attaching any value judgment to that number, but it's significant - it's somewhere around a quarter of what you'd consider "normal" for a two-hour Hollywood drama of this scale. From first shot to credits is 118 minutes (followed by very long credits), which makes the average shot length almost 23 seconds. Very long. Having the opportunity to hold things for that long is what creative control looks like. Also interestingly, the movie slows down to about half-tempo when it switches to color - there are 174 shots in the first 46:21 and 140 shots in the remaining 71:37. So averages of about 16 seconds per shot and 31 seconds per shot, respectively. Most of the shots in the black and white section occur in the early phase of Lenny & <PERSON>'s relationship - about 90 in 11 minutes, so that skews things a bit. Median would really be the more robust measurement to use here but it's a bit more work to calculate that. Might make a spreadsheet about it tomorrow. The rhythms of this thing are very musical and it feels rewarding to pull it apart. 862