It understands the classical-music world and has fun fiddling around with film form. I was a classical musician growing up, so I’m probably more disposed than most to like a movie set in the classical-music world. Then again, that could mean that I set a higher bar for authenticity when it comes to depicting it.
There’s no doubt that the cinema’s reigning masterpiece of classical-music drama is “Tár” — a great movie in so many other ways that that remains only one dimension of it. But Todd Field inhabited that world, and allowed the audience to do so, in a way that no previous director had. Two other films leap to mind that have the ring of deep-dish classical-music reality: “Mr.
Holland’s Opus,” which beautifully caught the experience of studying music in high school, and “Maestro,” a movie I may have enjoyed more than others, even though it left out a ton of stuff about Leonard Bernstein (like, for instance, the heart of his conducting career in the ’50s and ’60s!), because I instinctively filled all of that in. Viewed on that scale, “Behemoth!,” Tony Gilroy’s drama about a professional cellist, played with perky mystery by Pedro Pascal, scores on the level of authenticity. Pascal’s character, a renowned musician named Alex Serian, has been a member of various world-class symphony orchestras, notably in Chicago, but the film presents us with a more plugged-in contempo angle on this kind of career.
In the new era, orchestras are foundering, the pay isn’t what it used to be, and even a virtuoso string musician might need a side gig or two. For Alex, that has meant playing in orchestras that are assembled to record movie scores — a major industry, and one that “Behemoth!” depicts as being nearly as high maintenance as the prestige symphony circuit. The conductors who oversee the recording of the movie scores are portrayed as hyper-demanding corporate perfectionists. (One of them, a prima donna played by Thomas Kretschmann, makes it feel like you’re seeing Klaus Kinski going to work for Skydance.) And from the film’s opening scene, which immerses us in the lingo of rehearsal, which is a mixture of old-school classical Euro directives (“pianissimo”) and Hollywood jargon (“new ink”), we’re right there in the cavernous recording studio, feeling the heat and the nuance.
My all-time pet peeve in classical-music films is that characters who are supposed to be playing the violin or cello almost never look real — you can see from a mile away that they’re faking it, imitating the finger and bow movements like crude mimes. Tony Gilroy has solved this problem in the most committed way possible: He had Pedro Pascal learn to play the cello. That’s really Pascal doing it, which is why everything about his motions looks real, from the vibrato to the bowing to the way he moves his head.
That devotion works for the film. It allows us to feel that Alex is as genuine in his talent as a professional athlete or a star chef. Virtuosity is the air he breathes.
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