Review - Bernstein's Wall

A documentary directed by Douglas Tirola. Unrated. 105 minutes. In theaters.

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There’s a lot about Tom Wolfe’s 1970 New York Magazine cover story, “Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s” that hasn’t aged particularly well. Wolfe’s broad-stoke, editorial-cartoon depictions were always amusing when it came to the elites —few writers could map intricate social hierarchies with such devastating insight— yet often veered into troubling (cough, racist) territory when venturing outside the writer’s own rarefied milieu. Such a dichotomy was, I suppose, the whole point of the 25,000-word piece, capturing the comical absurdity of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Upper West Side soiree in support of the Black Panthers, ribbing the wealthy New York culturati for what Wolfe perceived as a trendy, “slumming” fascination with these young, afroed revolutionaries. It’s an extremely funny portrait of limousine liberalism, if not exactly a fair one.

Wolfe’s article and its fallout get about the same amount of screen time as “West Side Story” in “Bernstein’s Wall,” an engaging documentary by director Douglas Tirola that gives the music legend plenty of room to expound on his oft-mischaracterized political beliefs. Culled from countless interviews and television appearances over the composer-conductor’s five-decade career, the movie avoids the usual expert interviews and fashions all this archival footage into a crafty collage of Bernstein telling his own story in his own words. And boy, could he talk!