Melody Maker

Finding hidden music in a role has long been a theme of Carey Mulligan's astonishing career but never more so than in the symphonic new film Maestro.

- Maya Singer.

There’s an indelible scene in the film Shame, in which Carey Mulligan, in one of her ear ly breakout roles, performs a torchy rendition of “New York, New York.” Director Steve McQueen f rames Mulligan in a tight close-up, so we can see the exhaustion in her troubled character’s eyes as she sings those famous, triumphal lines: “Start spreading the news….” Nothing happens in this scene. And everything happens as Mulligan sings, because what we’re witnessing is a person fighting to keep the spark of herself alive. This, kids, is acting.

Mulligan performs the same magic trick in the new movie Maestro. Only this time, she does it just by listening. Playing Felicia Montealegre, wife of legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, Mulligan’s character is not, cannot ever be, the star of the show. She’s married to a once-in-a-generation genius, and her life is defined by her husband’s ambitions—and his appetites. Late in the film, she’s had enough. She leaves Bernstein—depicted by the film’s co-writer-director, Bradley Cooper—only to return to him, after an unhappy hiatus, as he’s conducting Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection symphony. From the periphery of the rapt crowd, she watches him build his cathedral of sound, and here, what you see in Mulligan’s eyes is a lifetime of love and compromise and the crescendoing acceptance that this man, holding the baton, is her world.