By a Nose
We were not undone by Bradley Cooper wearing a fake schnoz to portray Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. To borrow from another famous Israelite, sometimes a nose is just a nose. We can also cope with Helen Mirren and several tons of prosthesis playing Golda Meir, Luke Combs covering Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, and Whitney Houston suping up Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. We need not exhume the story of how Elvis made off with Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog. Nor shall we launch another demographic investigation into the cast of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Representation frequently matters, but culture itself is appropriation. Plus, there are only so many Sarah Lawrence professors for a reporter to call.
We wrote a long, sober piece about culture, identity and Hollywood. But a hummingbird news cycle blew past us! So we’ll save it for when Meryl Streep stars in The Irma Manischewitz Story. Oh, we kid (insert Yiddishism here). According to Rashi, the right answer to thorny questions about depictions of Jewishness—or any other sort of -ness—is: It depends.
Grownup people understand that Hollywood has a sordid history of exclusion. They also get that acting is about about playing a diversity of characters, not minding census categories. Ultimately, show business is a pretend game, not a 23andMe test.
Like Bernstein, Cooper is famous, handsome, and talented. And he’s not Jewish. On your own time, you may engage in a Talmudic tussle over just who gets to define Jewishness—among other areas of glorious differentiation—for the rest of us. Despite a perennial compulsion to jam ourselves (and others) into boxes, human beings contain multitudes. Cooper clearly has more in common with a world famous conductor than yours truly. Lennie’s kids are over the moon about it, as you would be if a movie star were playing your pops.
Cooper’s given equipment isn’t small, but he went in for a little dramatic augmentation. Maybe a fake beak will work the same magic as Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic honker in The Hours. Back in 2003, somebody said she won her 2003 Oscar by a nose, a joke that would not land in the Catskills. An Academy Award is motivation enough for an actor of any background to spend hours in a makeup chair. But enough of this (insert Yiddishism here). Let us feast on delightful distractions.
