Mill Valley Film Festival 44

“A note only has meaning in relation to the notes around it,” Leonard Bernstein liked to say, and clearly, to this great composer, conductor, music educator, and overall American cultural eminence, context mattered a lot. Bernstein’s Wall examines his personal and professional relationships and their effect on his art; using archival footage, Bernstein’s own autobiographical recordings, and, most revealingly, his letters, Douglas Tirola’s documentary gets to know the man by way of his most meaningful context. In his work and in his life, Bernstein fought for civil rights and the antiwar movement, for international cooperation, and for peace. Through the arc of it all, as this complex portrait reveals, two resounding notes would become motifs: his repressed homosexuality and his hard feelings for his father. At once epic and intimate, Bernstein’s Wall also becomes a poignant survey of how art can give form to the emotions we struggle to realize.