What Bradley Cooper’s Makeup Can’t Conceal
Hollywood can manufacture a Jewish nose, but can it tell a Jewish story?
If you haven’t heard about the controversy surrounding Bradley Cooper’s nose, you’ve made better choices than I have. (Well, until now.) Here’s the short version: Maestro is a forthcoming biopic about the renowned Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein. The film stars Cooper, who also co-wrote and directed it. Last week, the trailer for the film was released, revealing that the actor’s nose had been … enhanced for the screen. Outraged social-media users and the websites that write about outraged social-media users quickly turned on the movie, creating such consternation that Bernstein’s own family felt compelled to publicly defend Cooper and his creative choices.
As a Jew with a big nose and even bigger mouth, I have some thoughts.
First off, this debate isn’t really about the nose. It’s about a non-Jewish actor playing a famous Jewish figure. Few people would have complained if a Jewish performer—whether with a noticeable natural nose or a fake one—had been cast in this role. Rather, the problem was casting a non-Jew and then accentuating his features in a stereotypically Jewish fashion. At a time when Hollywood is obsessed with representation, such a casting decision compounded by the attempt to disguise it felt like a cartoonish affront to the entire enterprise. Cooper’s artificial nose is not anti-Semitic, but it is understandable why many found it off-putting. Something need not be bigoted to be a bad idea, especially in an industry that today claims to take care to avoid evoking stereotypes of minority groups. That the studio did not anticipate the fuss over Cooper’s prosthetic suggests an institutional blind spot.
But although Cooper’s critics have a point, their proposed solutions would actually make the situation worse. Our cultural conversation is enhanced, not diminished, when diverse performers inhabit other communities and humanize them for audiences. And Jews should know this better than most. After all, though they comprise just 2 percent of the American population, Jewish actors have been able to portray a wide variety of non-Jews on-screen, to the great benefit of both American Jews and American culture (just ask fans of Harrison Ford, Daveed Diggs, or Natalie Portman). Insisting that Jewish roles go exclusively to Jews could constrict rather than broaden the space for Jewish performers, and relegate aspiring Jewish actors to a narrow niche.
The truth is, just as it’s possible for Jews to sensitively portray non-Jewish characters, it is possible for non-Jews to empathetically embody Jewish ones. The merit of Cooper’s portrayal will be determined not by the nature of his nose but by the quality of his performance. The real question is not whether non-Jews can play Jews, but whether they can do the Jewishness justice. To take one example, the problem with the 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex, is not that the trailblazing Jewish judge is portrayed by the non-Jewish Felicity Jones. It’s that the feminist jurist’s deep and abiding Jewish identity was almost entirely effaced from the story.
Leonard Bernstein’s musical career similarly cannot be disentangled from his Jewish commitments. In a 1989 interview, the conductor spoke of how his calling was first kindled in synagogue, recalling how “I felt something stir within me, as though I were becoming subconsciously aware of music as my raison d’etre.” Bernstein’s first complete surviving composition was a setting of Psalm 148. Over the course of his life, he wrote more than 20 Jewish works. His first symphony, Jeremiah, was named and modeled after the biblical prophet of lamentation. His third symphony is called Kaddish, after the Jewish mourning prayer, and alternates between the Hebrew and Aramaic of the original text and Bernstein’s haunting English words, which are rife with biblical references to sources as diverse as the Song of Songs and the Book of Job.
Bernstein saw the piece, in which the speaker argues openly with God, as fundamentally Jewish. “Our great Judaistic personalities of the past, including Abraham, who founded Judaism, and Moses and the prophets, all argued with God,” he said in a 1985 interview. “They argued with God the way you argue with somebody who’s so close to you that you love so much, that you can really fight.”
As the conductor’s longtime assistant Jack Gottlieb put it, “Bernstein may not have been traditionally observant, but he was deeply Jewish in every other way. In fact, he once described himself as a ‘chip,’ not off the old block, but ‘off the old Tanach,’ the Hebrew acronym for the complete Bible. As a teenager he even briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a rabbi.” Judaism was not incidental to Bernstein’s life; it was essential.
Hollywood has shown that it can manufacture a Jewish nose. But can it tell a Jewish story? A mass-market feature film is unlikely to dive deeply into its subject’s Jewish background, which might be confusing to general audiences. But that doesn’t mean the movie can’t make artful allusion to the material. If Maestro manages to encompass Bernstein’s Jewish commitments, then it will have truly captured a reflection of the artist. If not, no amount of makeup will obscure the absence.
