Much to do about Bradley Cooper’s nose

Bradley Cooper has recently perhaps had good reason to feel like the character in Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s short story, The Nose, in which a 19th century St Petersburg official’s nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own.

In Cooper’s case, it’s not his actual nose that’s been the subject of furious debate but rather the prosthetic one that the actor chose to use for his portrayal of legendary American conductor, composer and Jew, Leonard Bernstein in the upcoming biopic Maestro, which is also directed by Cooper.

The nose features in the teaser trailer for the film released ahead of its premier at the Venice Film Festival next month and its eventual arrival on Netflix in December. The fact that Cooper, a non-Jewish actor, chose to use a prosthetic nose to make his natural one more alike in appearance to that of the Jewish character he’s portraying, has sparked online outrage and cries of anti-Semitism, even though Bernstein’s own family have no problems with the nose and the US Anti-Defamation League has given it a clean bill of health on the anti-Semitism front.

The broader issue, rather insensitively summed up by the easy coinage, “Jewface,” is about non-Jews playing Jews on screen. It’s one that Guardian columnist and Jew David Baddiel has been vocal about in recent years and he’s been supported by American Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman who has raised the issue on her podcast.

Accusations of “Jewface” have been levelled at Helen Mirren for portraying Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in Golda (opening on circuit in SA today) and at actress Kathryn Hahn whose announcement that she would play Jewish comedian Joan Rivers in an upcoming series was met with such outrage that she was forced to pull out of the role.

There’s a long history of dangerous stereotyping of Jews that centres on our noses, and makes the schnozz a particularly sensitive area for us. However, the argument could be made that if the actor playing Bernstein were Jewish, felt his nose wasn’t up to the task of matching that of the West Side Story composer and decided to enlist a little help from the makeup department, then we wouldn’t be writing thousands of lines about it.

The problem seems to be that Cooper isn’t Jewish, even if the bigger question of who is and what exactly Jewish means is one that complicates the whole Jewface debate and is best saved for another day. And anyway, isn’t acting supposed to be about inhabiting the skin of characters who may be completely unlike you? It used to be but in this age of high alert about identity and representation there’s been a not always helpful shift towards the idea that an actor’s personal identity should mirror something of the character they’re playing, particularly when it comes to representing minority groups.

Tom Hanks recently admitted that he would not be able to comfortably portray the gay man afflicted with Aids in his 1992 Oscar-winning performance in Philadelphia now; and Eddie Redmayne has said that he regrets his decision to play a trans character in The Danish Girl in 2015, even though he was nominated for an Oscar for doing so.

There is a marked difference between the derogatory and bigoted use of blackface, brownface and yellowface and that of white actors portraying white characters who are different to them in ways other than skin colour. As Mark Harris, writing in Slate pointed out: “Those benighted practices ... are intimately connected both to the ongoing reality of ethnic and racial caricatures and to the long history of nonwhite actors being locked out of playing their own race in favour of cartoon versions offered up by white directors and producers and embodied by white actors.”

That is not the same as the casting of Irish actor Cillian Murphy as Jewish physicist Robert Oppenheimer or Cooper waving his baton in imitation of Bernstein even though there are plenty of angry Jews out there who want you to believe that is.

As a Jew, I’m not particularly offended by Cooper’s nose and from what I’ve seen it only serves the purpose of making him look more like the character he’s playing. As a critic, I’m more offended by the idea that the intriguing and complicated character of Bernstein is to be played by Cooper, an actor for whom I bear an intense dislike.

Whether his prosthetic nose will help him to better act the role and demonstrate the suddenly unfashionable idea that acting is, as Harris observes, supposed to be a craft defined by, “expressive empathy, of leaping into the life of another, of inhabiting someone you are clearly not”, rather than the fashionable idea that, “any character you play is an extension of yourself and of the suitability that you got the gig”, remains to be seen.

For now because of Screen Actors Guild strike regulations, Cooper thankfully isn’t allowed to say anything about his performance, but I’m not holding my breath that his Bernstein will be much more than a pale imitation of the man, even with the help of his fake nose, and that has nothing to do with whether Cooper is Jewish.