The Conductor

 2/4

Not Rated

Conducting an orchestra seems like one of those jobs where everyone knows everything about it and at the same time they know nothing at all.  They're the people at the front waving that little stick around like a marionette in the drying machine.  As prim and proper as they look when they start, they look like Doc Brown when they take the bow.  I actually got to conduct once in the school band (the warm up scales, but never mind).  I remember feeling like the most awkward god ever.

Marie Alsop thrives on that feeling.  From the time she saw Leonard Bernstein conduct when she was nine years old, she knew that's what she wanted to do.  It wasn't easy for her and she faced a lot of resistance because, well, women just weren't conductors.  It just wasn't done.  Marie was undaunted, however, and she ended up not only being the first woman to conduct a major orchestra, but one of the most celebrated conductors in todays world.

It's occasionally said that sometimes the most important figures in history do not always turn out to be the best subjects for feature films.  I don't think that is the case with Marie Alsop.  She is an engaging personality and her story is compelling.  I just don't think that a documentary is the best way to show it.  Watching her story, I kept returning to the same thought: I kept wondering just how much better this movie might have been as a narrative film as opposed to a documentary.

There's no denying that she's worthy of a biopic.  Marie is a woman who single-mindedly pursued her dream, defying tradition and the naysayers with no reason to turn their backs on her except that she was a woman.  Her career took her all over the world and led her to be mentored by her hero himself.  It's the kind of thing that any Hollywood producer would drool over.

The problem here is that her story has already happened.  Her experiences are in the past tense, and as a result, they just aren't as interesting.  We know where she ends up, and that kills the tension.  Marie is a warm, empathetic woman who speaks candidly and with the gift of a great storyteller, but that's the problem.  The movie is telling, not showing, what happened to her.  We watch her story at a distance.

The film is also in badly need of focus.  Particularly in the second half, director Bernadette Wegenstein keeps getting distracted with tangents about her home life and what she did once she achieved her goal.  It's not that this material is uninteresting.  It is.  But it's that Wegenstein doesn't find a way to explore it in a structured way.

Marie once said that the worst thing you can tell a person is that they can't do something.  That happened to her when she said she wanted to be a conductor, and it was so crushing that she nearly gave up music entirely.  Ironically, her refusal to accept this or say this to anyone is what made her so phenomenally successful.  She was unapologetic about her goals and wouldn't let anyone stand in her way of getting there.  Moreover, she did the same for others.  If someone told her that they wanted to be a conductor, that was all she needed to hear.  She would help them achieve their dreams, and believed that anyone was worthy of doing so.

Ultimately, the movie's failure comes down to the fact that it is an extraordinary woman being shoehorned into an ordinary documentary.

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