I took my cat to the vet yesterday and had that strange interregnum – too late to go back to work and too early to have a drink. So I flipped on the TV and lo and behold, Dog Day Afternoon was starting.
“Prescient” doesn’t even begin to capture Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece. Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) rob a bank in Brooklyn and before you know it, everything goes to shit, it’s a hostage situation, and they are surrounded by 100 cops, led by the overmatched and harried Charles Durning.
This is one of those 70s “New York City seems like hell” flicks. The robbery occurs on a sweltering summer day, and the police seem itching to gun down Pacino if only to get out of the heat. But soon, the TV cameras roll in, the crowds arrive, and before you know it, Pacino is a street-performer, not negotiating so much as whipping everyone up, screaming, “Attica! Attica!” and otherwise savoring the moment and, for lack of a better phrase, sticking it to “the Man.” His rage and theatrics are infectious. The crowd bays, bystanders want “in”, the hostages (plucky New Yorkers all) play-act and become featured cast members, and soon, the cops are the ones being led by the nose. Everybody has their 15 minutes.
But Sonny’s ride must end. Sal is a dimwit (when Pacino asks him what country they should fly to in escape, Cazale responds, “Wyoming”). The origins of the heist – to get money for Sonny’s boyfriend Chris Sarandon’s sex change – become public when Sarandon is sprung from a suicide attempt at Bellevue to come talk some sense into Pacino. The hostages start to lose the fun of it as well, and Cazale’s biggest worry becomes the fact that the networks are reporting “two homosexuals” in the bank. When Pacino is put on the line with his wife, you can see how he could be driven to such extremes and also what an awful person he has been to her. His mantra is, “I’m dying.” He is, in front of us, in slo-motion, but we sense we’ve missed a lot of the decline.
There is a great scene where the manager, having suffered a diabetic episode, is tended to by a doctor, gets his shot and chooses to stay with his employees:
As Sonny grabs him to try to help him up, Mulvaney wrenches
away. A little physical here.
SONNY
Hey! I’m tryin’ to help you.
MULVANEY
I stay here. Damn it. I just neededthe insulin. I’m used to it.
Go on. Go on.
SONNY
(to Doctor)
You tell me. Is he endangering his
health, because if you tell me he
is, I’ll get him out.
MULVANEY
I’ll be God damned if you will.
SONNY
Oh, Jesus! You want to be a martyr
or a hero or what?
MULVANEY
I don’t wanta be either, I just want
to be left alone. You understand
that? I wish the fuck you never
came in my bank, that’s all, don’t
try to act like you’re some angel of
human kindness!
You can see Pacino’s hurt. As if maybe he really thought this would work out and that he is a good man.
But soon, the FBI take over, and they are helluva lot more together than poor Durning and company.
Pacino is riveting, alternately electric and doomed, eliciting your scorn and then sympathy. He’s all furtive energy minus the excess and “hoo ah!” You know this had to go bad, and so does he, and it’s depressing to see him hope, just for a minute, and then know he’s a loser and finished. Sarandon is fantastic (he was nominated for supporting actor), ridiculous and yet, affecting in his affectations, as if he knows he’s absurd but can’t shake the affliction.
It won an Oscar for Frank Pierson’s (Presumed Innocent, Cool Hand Luke) original screenplay, which doesn’t have a false note in it.
I recently devoured Quentin Tarantino‘s Cinema Speculations, wherein he recounts his childhood and the succession of films his mother’s boyfriends would take him to see when he was a kid. Most of the films he discusses are ones you probably shouldn’t take a kid to see.
When my mother and father got divorced, I was six years old and my father was supposed to take us every other weekend for two nights. That arrangement became a little less frequent over the years, and by later grade school, he was taking me and my brother on a Saturday day and an overnight. We would spend the weekend with him at his apartment and pretty much do the same thing every time: go shopping, do his errands, look for stereo equipment, maybe spend an hour or two at his law office, go Putt Putt golfing, and then to Shakey’s Pizza in Rockville or The Charcoal Grille in Bethesda. Dinner was from Swanson’s, so you got a entree’, two sides, and a dessert.
And movies. We went out to the movies a lot. Or, we stayed in Dad’s apartment, where he had a special key that was hooked up to some kind of internal cable system, and we could watch close to first-run movies there instead of going out. Or just catch what was on TV.
My father loved movies, he loved to talk about movies, he lived for movies. So much so that he would go through a certain kabuki with me where he would let me take a look at The Washington Post and ask what I wanted to see. I would pick a Herbie the Love Bug and he would say, “Nah. I heard about this good movie.” And then, like Quentin Tarantino with his mother’s boyfriends, you went to see a lot of dark, heavy, violent flicks, like The Laughing Policeman, The Silent Partner, Death Wish, or The Taking of of Pelham One Two Three. Or the remake of Farewell My Lovely, Night Moves, or The Eiger Sanction.
And Rolling Thunder. Which I noticed was available, and, as I couldn’t sleep anyway, I watched last night
Tarantino’s book has an entire chapter on the film, one of Paul Schrader’s first screenplays after Taxi Driver. Major Charlie Rane (William Devane) and Sergeant Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after seven years of brutal captivity in a North Vietnamese prison camp. The adjustment is fraught, and even greater tortures are brought to bear on Devane, who is being treated by an Air Force psychiatrist (the just recently deceased Dabney Coleman) in his attempt to readjust. Tragedy ensues. Devane snaps. What follows is a classic 70s revenge flick.
The film travels wonderfully. There is a crisp foreboding to Devane’s return. While San Antonio welcomes him with marching bands and celebrations, and he is reunited with his long suffering and loving wife and the son who he last saw as a baby, Devane is damaged, and beneath the cheery gleam of a welcoming Texas, there is rot and danger. His son has anxiety issues. His wife has found another man (Devane says to her evenly, “you’re not wearing a brassiere” to which she replies, “oh, no one wears them anymore”). He cannot sleep in the house, preferring a cot in the garage.
So much is done well in the lead-up to the Death Wish-ian payoff, it goes unnoticed because, after all, this is a shoot ’em up, just desserts pic. Per Tarantino: ““This opening thirty minutes is a grippingly detailed character study, and by the time it’s over the audience doesn’t just sympathize with Charlie Rane, we really do understand him. Apparently better than anybody else in the film. It’s a much deeper depiction of the casualties of war than the [other movies of that era].”
I remember watching the film with my father. It is engrossing, both subtle and visceral, like a lot of pictures we saw together. It is also wildly inappropriate, also like a lot of pictures we saw together. I had trouble wrapping my head around something horrible that happens to Devane; not a spinning, vomiting Linda Blair kind of visual, but a brutality so smartly connected to a mundane part of the household, it just traveled with me, and probably not in a good way. Even last night, I fast-forwarded.
But on Sundays, when we were dropped off, I would not tell my mother about any of these movies, because I felt me and my Dad had this thing, this bond, and it was cemented in our little secret, Jujufruits and Junior Mints in hand. And perhaps we did, although I’m probably mythologizing it. After all, my father needed to have something to talk to me about. Or at a minimum, just a two hour break from my babbling.
The picture is currently on Amazon Prime. Nostalgic for me but it really holds up.
I was not a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos. He is clearly talented, but he also revels in the ugly. The Lobster was inventive, but also, masochistic, even abusive. The Favourite was evocative but also grotesque. Lanthimos traffics in the absurd, but he luxuriates in meanness and the darkly visceral, with all its bleeding, flatulence, fluids, and muck. Yet, here, in this hilarious and charming re-telling of Frankenstein, he allows himself whimsy and some gut-busting hilarity.
The time is Victorian London. Emma Stone (Bella Baxter), a fully grown drowning victim fished from the Thames, is brought back to life by none other than a Dr. Frankenstein (actually, Dr. “God”win Baxter, Willem Dafoe) and given life via the insertion of her own unborn baby’s brain. When we meet her, she’s a mere child, eating like a infant, urinating where she stands, stubborn and defiant. But she grows, quickly, and when she happens upon sexual pleasure, she is out and free, with the assistance of a dandy (Mark Ruffalo) who haughtily acts as her tutor even as he is slowly enslaved. Soon, Bella becomes worldly, and learns a few hard lessons, but she quickly masters (speaking of absurd – this word was tagged by spell check as problematic) the ability to make her own destiny in a world that would normally relegate her to docility and subservience. To see her eat, to come, to dance, it is hard not to be as captivated by Stone’s gifted performance as Bella is by the world. And Ruffalo’s foppish moth to her carnal flame is riotous. Bella’s journey is wondrous, funny and beautifully shot, deftly lifting from the best artistic visions of both Tim Burton and Wes Anderson.
I laughed uproariously and sat in wonderment at Lanthimos’ ingenious world.
Two nits. First, I never really thought I’d say, “Hey, there’s just too much of Emma Stone naked” but the film is 20 minutes too long, and there’s just too much of Emma Stone naked. I think Lanthimos became entranced by Stone’s moxie, but soon, all of the sex seems less like a revelation, and more like an obstacle course.
Second, Jerrod Carmichael makes an appearance and there is no other way to put it – he’s terrible. Stilted, clunky, confused, and aggravatingly amateurish. You kind of feel bad for him, but you brighten when you realize he is gone.
Otherwise, great, smart fun.
Seven down, three (Past Lives, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest), to go.
Leonard Bernstein was a significant man. But you wouldn’t know it from this film. Bradley Cooper’s labor of love makes Bernstein seem rather humdrum, and as the film progresses, Cooper certifies that reality, eventually discarding Bernstein’s story for that of his wife (Carey Mulligan).
Look, it is clear Cooper reveres Bernstein, but too much is too much. Think of when someone you know introduces you to someone they love. They are already in thrall, and they have explored every nook and cranny of their idol so, in your introduction, you don’t come to your appreciation organically, the way your friend did. You start with, “He is the greatest.” And then, after that, your friend just keeps saying, “Isn’t he? Told you!”
Here, Cooper is so entranced, he glosses over what makes Bernstein Bernstein – his music. Sure, there’s tons of scenes of Cooper directing with the panache and flourish of Bernstein, but Cooper is more interested in having mannerisms down pat than exploring why we’re here. Cooper’s meticulous impersonation cannot substitute character.
Worse, since Cooper has little interest in Bernstein’s craft, we focus on his domestic struggles, which are pedestrian, even for a famous man living a barely disguised double life. He is not denied his pleasures, nor is he punished for them. Rather, they create some marital strife. And that’s what we get to see until cancer closes the story out. No war time concert in Israel in 1948. No silly cocktail party for the Black Panthers (sent up so wonderfully by Tom Wolfe). No concerts after the assassinations of JFK and RFK. No philanthropy for AIDS as it decimated his profession (and killed his longtime lover Tom Cothran, for whom he left his wife).
We learn very little about what Bernstein should be remembered for. Hell, he could have been a periodontist.
My mother tells people that The Boys in the Boat is a book “every young man must read.” In point of fact, the book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for quite a long time. But I am not a young man, so I settled for taking her to the picture.
She was rightfully disappointed. I was bored to tears or underwhelmed. For the following reasons.
1. The actual boys in the boat were supposed to be destitute, desperate, and worn down from the Depression, lean, hungry, rough boys who found rowing as a way to eat. Unfortunately, they all look like this:
2. The lead, Calum Turner, has all of the character and nuance of a Nilla Wafer.
3. Rowing does not lend itself to film. We don’t learn much about the mechanics of it, so it’s difficult to discern the issue when the boys falter (they just start to bicker at each other and their stoic, forgettable coach merely shakes his head). In races, they start out slow, and through grit, pluck and determination, the boys pick up the pace and win. That’s it.
4. Hitler shows up. But he looks like Charlie Chaplin as The Little Dictator, and I’m not sure that was the effect Director George Clooney was aiming for.
5. Jesse Owens also shows up. He says one line that is impactful and wise, with the effect being one’s own rumination: “Damn, I wish this movie were about Jesse Owens.”
The film looks classic, but presents as inauthentic. It has a hazy, postcard visage that feels both obligatory and unnatural.
Ultimately, the film is not terrible, but it is instantly forgettable, of no real moment, and about as safe a production as you’ll find.
Very similar to The Talented Mr. Ripley, but without any of the care, build, patience, intelligence, or style of that flick. In Ripley, we are wary of yet sympathetic to Tom (Matt Damon), the working class nobody who insinuates himself into the shine of the rich and beautiful. When the tanned god Dickie (Jude Law) casts him aside, we feel for Tom. We don’t endorse the sociopath’s actions, but as Tom grows closer to capture, we guiltily root for him. When Tom’s desires draw him into greater malfeasance, against our judgment, we thrill to see if he will actually get away with it.
Here, our new Tom Ripley is Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a modern day loser at Oxford who gloms on to his own Dickie, Felix (Jacob Elordi), a rich kid whose monied and titled family lives in a castle on Saltburn estate. After ingratiating himself with Felix, Oliver is invited to Saltburn where he negotiates Felix’s ridiculous caricature of an upper-class family, his own increasing desire for Felix, and the fact that he is disposable to these people when, like Ripley, he is trying to make himself indispensable.
Unlike Tom, however, we don’t root or care for Oliver. He’s a furtive creep. Even when he overhears the rich kids at school or Felix’s family malign him, our natural pang of sympathy immediately gives way to caution. The guy smells of wrong from the get-go and because of it, we have no skin in the game, either about Oliver’s fate or the cartoon characters around him.
What follows is a wretched flick infatuated with its own provocativeness. It’s not very funny, though it is labeled a black comedy. It’s not very edgy, though it is sexually perverse. It’s not very smart, unless rich people one level removed from The Howells on Gilligan’s Island saying grotesque things is your idea of smart. In Ripley, the rich were dazzling. Any condescension was barely perceptible, and accordingly, all the more cutting to Tom. You can see why Tom wants in and how much it stings. Here, Oliver yearns for a world populated by dolts and cretins, so, who cares?
The picture is also repetitive in the extreme. Basically, every scene is Oliver made uncomfortable until he becomes morose. When Oliver gets a win, another cliché rattling his/her jewelry reminds him for the umpteenth time that HE DOES NOT BELONG.
After running the tired plot into a very tight and boring corner, the end lapses into inanity (SPOILER: Oliver kills them all in a manner a mall cop would suss out as foul play inside of a minute; apparently, the British police force is trained by Magilla Gorilla).
But no one is on to Oliver because it’s a shit screenplay so far up its own ass that it need not deign to generate interest, draw characters, or construct a sensible narrative.
The near-end, where we flashback to Oliver’s machinations previously hidden to us, ala’ M. Night Shymalan, is such a clumsy and pathetic attempt at bringing order to this mess I almost felt for the creator.
But then, I realized Saltburn is from the writer director of Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell), another infantile, impossible crapfest which got the critics to swooning.
When I saw the preview for Alexander Payne’s latest picture, I thought, “Okay. Older father figure. Private New England boys school. Some Christmas break bonding. Not the Baird school, but Barton. It’s Scent of a Woman, with a couple of tweaks.” I was right and also very wrong.
Now, I like Scent of a Woman. It’s occasionally moving, impressively manipulative, and entertaining as hell. Chris O’Donnell is vulnerable and empathetic. And even in a small part, a young Phillip Seymour Hoffman (poor George, “sitting in Big Daddy’s pocket”) resonates.
But the picture is near-obliterated by Al Pacino’s roar and Martin Brest’s complete lack of restraint. Hey, folks, not only are we going on a last hurrah with a blind depressive and his young charge, but let’s make the blind depressive a) do a flawless tango with a complete stranger; 2) have such a “fix-is-in” fight with his family that you feel for the bad guy, Bradley Whitford, the sneeriest of nephews; and 3) drive a race car in the Big Apple!
Hoo-ah!!!!!!
Still, like a Whopper Jr., the flick delights until the inevitable dyspepsia.
Now, the differences. First, without Pacino sucking up all the oxygen, The Holdovers has room not only for a Paul Giamatti as a strict, sneakily populist professor, and newcomer Dominic Sessa, the poor rich boy abandoned to staying over at school for the holidays under Giamatti’s thumb, but Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the school’s cook, who must endure the Christmas break and her own recent tragedy. I can’t commend her performance enough – restrained, clever, surprising, and then heartrending without a hint of stereotypical sass and easy schmaltz. Her sharing of the ins-and-outs of The Newlywed Game with Giamatti is primo.
But Pacino could not have allowed it. There was simply no space.
Second, Giamatti and Sessa actually grow, and bond, primarily through conversation, revealing a beautifully rendered mutually protective nature. Whereas, Pacino and poor O’Donnell simply pinged from situation to situation, each increasingly absurd, because they were confronted with two legitimate threats.
Third, again, whereas the scorching flames from Pacino’s engine disallowed any real growth, space or time for others, Payne depicts important interplay between or including secondary characters. The heartbreak and frustration of a bullied kid and his mitten choked me up, and after another poor holdover from Korea breaks from homesickness in the middle of the night and is comforted by Sessa, the job was nearly finished. Indeed, the kids in The Holdovers run the gamut – the dumb bully is there, but so too the clueless but tender-hearted jock and the poor youngsters. In Scent, with the exception of O’Donnell, every kid at Baird seemed to be some form of generic, shit heel carnivore or mere prey. Here, Payne delves a little deeper and produces some truly poignant moments.
Last, Pacino had one change to make, from bigger-than-life suicidal howler to a man who wants to live for himself and others. Conversely, Giamatti is seemingly a martinet, but in fact, turns out to be multi-layered. Rather than merely having Giamatti overcome his condescending and authoritarian nature, writer David Hemingson explores several aspects of his personality and past, all of which fill in the puzzle. And Sessa isn’t the only contributor to his growth, which fleshes him out even more fully,
The end of the film is a bit of a surrender to Scent’s need for big dramatic closure, and in particular, one Giamatti zinger is off-kilter and completely out of character. But the sin is venial.
If they are still holding the Academy Awards, I see a slew of nominations, and if you can get some juicy early odds on Da’Vine Joy Randolph for supporting actress, go heavy.
The previews suggest an unrelenting, biting send-up of the idiocy of the so-called black experience as represented in the arts. On that front, the film delivers, though with a stiletto rather than a cleaver. But while the social satire of the film is paramount in its marketing, in presentation, the picture is a sweet and moving story about a family whipsawed by tragedy. It is not lost on the viewer that the dramedy is refreshingly devoid of the stereotypes punctured by the picture. Writer-director Cord Jefferson practices what he preaches, delivering on the traditional at the expense of a caricature he effectively obliterates.
We meet Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a college professor and author in California, as he is confronted by an entitled white undergrad who objects to his having written the title of a Flannery O’Connell short story on the blackboard. Monk explains that as a black man, if he can get over the word that shall not be said, surely, so can she. Our Precious, however, stands in for every vapid girlchild who haunts the modern university, likely cheering for Hamas though they would throw her and her heightened sensibilities off the nearest roof. So she complains. Monk is summarily placed on sabbatical and forced to reunite with his upper middle class family back in Massachusetts and, as with all “going home” movies, things get messy.
Monk is also going through a professional slump, his books fewer and farther between, and not very popular. While attending a book fair, he notices the crowds at another black writer’s (Issa Rae) event, and when she reads a passage from her novel, a tale of domestic hardship told in the patois of the street (“Yo, Sharonda! Girl, you be pregnant again?”), Monk winces. The crowd, however, swoons and applauds the bravery, grit and authenticity.
Furious, Monk writes his own ghetto tale, My Pafology, as a joke and a rebuke. He also creates a pseudonym, and soon, the big publishing houses and Hollywood come calling. He is stunned yet seduced, and in aid of his scam, must adopt the mien of the inner city thug, a character so “real” that he cannot make public appearances because, of course, he is wanted by the law. He negotiates his double life in the midst of rapprochement with his family, with varying levels of success.
I laughed out loud in the theater at least a dozen times, and was thoroughly amused throughout. No one is unscathed, and nothing feels cheap or gratuitous. Most jibes are nuanced, and when Rae and Monk finally go at it, there is no dawning, no lesson. Just an insoluble conundrum that thankfully is not laid at the feet of whitey or oppression or the usual suspects that are part of the grievance mill Jefferson has in his crosshairs.
The script crackles. Not only in Monk’s hilarious attempts at playing street, but in the familial slings and arrows between Monk and his siblings and the interplay between Monk and his colleagues. When Monk is solicited by a tony literature award contest to be one of the judges, the courter explains that they needed to add some diversity to the panel. Monk responds, “I’m honored you’d choose me out of all the black writers you could go to for fear of being called racist” to which he receives the oblivious reply, “Yeah. You’re very welcome.”
If it has any flaws, it may be a bit top-heavy on family melodrama over the social satire. But it’s one of best movies of the year.
Obviously, I am overwhelmingly pleased to see a three hour film about a historical figure (and to think, Ridley Scott’s next picture is … Napoleon!) Just the other night, I was having drinks with younger colleagues (I am the last year of the baby boom, I estimate that these folks are late 20s), who were excited to see the movie. I took a pull from my pipe and asked them, “what do you know about Oppenheimer?“ One answered, “the atomic bomb.“ Then I thumbed my tweed jacket and said, “what else do you know about Oppenheimer?“ Neither knew anything further, which makes sense. Yet due to the cachet of Christopher Nolan and the buzz about the film, they couldn’t wait to go see it. One was teaming it up with Barbie for a Barbenheimer, which sounds both intriguing and daunting. But to each their own.
They should not be disappointed. Nolan’s first two acts are so fully realized and lovingly shot, they are nothing less than stunning. And his narrative-hopping from time period to time period is not just for show. Nolan captures the important vignettes that underscore what you will see later. His rendition of the first atomic test is gripping and fraught. I was on the edge of my seat knowing full well that for the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was not a good day.
Alas, the third act is a bit clunky. In the end, a bureaucratic and personal feud between Oppenheimer and Robert Downey, Jr. eclipses some of the larger themes of the picture. It just struck me as a little bit beneath what preceded it, as if Oppenheimer’s undoing stemmed from a mere misunderstanding or snit.
I read the book upon which the film was premised, American Prometheus, years ago (and had the honor of being taught a course entitled “Nuclear War Crises” by the book’s co-author, Martin Sherwin). The real Oppenheimer was a bit of a mess. His views on the efficacy, wisdom and impact of the bomb matured, but also wavered, and he could speak with confident enthusiasm and also wary trepidation. He could be thoughtful and also, cooly lethal (he once rejected a poisoning scheme with, “I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this”).
Cillian Murphy does a beautiful job of working it out in front of us with an internal, searching performance. We see him struggle, not by soliloquy, but by discussion and quiet deduction. Murphy is, rightfully, a lock for best actor (if the Oscars are still a thing next year).
Murphy is ably complemented by Emily Blunt (wife), Florence Pugh (lover), Matt Damon (the glue guy, still Hollywood’s best and least heralded actor, as General Groves), and a slew of others, all solid (Josh Hartnett? Yes, Josh Hartnett has grown up) and of whom you invariably remark, “Damn. Where have I seen him?”
As Oppenheimer’s bureaucratic nemesis, Downey Jr. crackles, though, as mentioned, he is seminal to the weakest aspect of the movie.
Talky, meticulous, massive, yet chock full of the little things, Nolan has made a grand, intelligent epic. I hope it spawns more to come.
When Todd Field’s picture was lauded and criticized by conservatives and liberals alike, I knew it had to be different in a fruitful way. For some, the film is a clear and direct rebuke of privilege and abuse of power (“The film does tell its story in an elliptical, at times confounding way, but that stylistic choice shouldn’t be mistaken for moral indecision”). For others, the director is an apologist (“Field views identity politics as a zero-sum game that seeks to destroy true art”). It’s a shame it took me so long to see it, because no matter where you land, the film is a masterpiece, the best picture of last year.
Strangely, I was reminded of Apple TV’s foray into prestige television, The Morning Show, the first season of which delved deeply into the #MeToo movement and tackled it with nuance and intelligence – until the end, when the show naturally had to bow to more conventional norms, transforming a multi-layered, canny drama into a chest thumping lecture that naturally relegated women to perpetual victims in order to “celebrate“ them. But 90% of that show is grand entertainment that eschews the easy answers and bumper sticker mentality so explicit in drama “ripped from the headlines.”
Field is under no such pressure or expectation here, and the world he portrays could not be further from the vacuous wasteland of network television. His protagonist, Lydia Tár, is a celebrated orchestra conductor and scholar in the mold of Leonard Bernstein. She is kinetic, committed, urbane and refreshingly unburdened by the fetishization of status and injury so prevalent in modern times. When Tár guest lectures at Juilliard and a student explains to her that he is uncomfortable with the music of Bach given the composer’s status (“Nowadays, white, male, cis composers—just not my thing”), she responds, “Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.” The exchange is tense, edifying and epitomizes the generational clash of substance versus fad.
Soon enough, the incident is released to social media, edited to make Tár look as bad as possible, and she must confront the fallout.
Comparatively, it is the least of her concerns. Because in the midst of what should be a minor kerfuffle, a former student kills herself, one with whom Tár had a romantic relationship and then subsequently blackballed. Then, Tár withholds a coveted elevation from her primary assistant, another woman with whom it appears Tar (and maybe the deceased) had been intimate. Soon, all sorts of compromising texts and emails are released. Litigation naturally follows. Dangerously, Tár becomes infatuated with a third young woman, a brilliant young Russian cellist, who she favors with opportunity, losing her the support of her musicians and her wife, Sharon, who is also her concertmaster. Anybody mildly acquainted with the times can see what’s going to happen, except for Tár, who while intensely controlling, is also unsurprisingly unsophisticated (she asks the assistant to delete all of the emails to and from the deceased student, thinking, “well, that’s that!”) What follows is near horror film, as Tár is tormented by omens and assaults both real and possibly imagined.
Her fall is inevitable and painful. In the telling, we are confronted with a person of brilliance who is now being held to account for the excessive exercise of her own power. And while the viewer recognizes the inappropriate nature of what Tár has done, this is not a comeuppance or morality play. Nor is it an expose’ on the indiscriminate butchery of cancel culture.
Rather, the film is a case study of a destroyed career from forces within and without in the context of our modern, rather fevered times, and nobody gets off easy. The student at Juilliard is, of course, silly to be under the compulsion of such a limited worldview, but that is what young people do. Field smartly makes him attractive, a sort of wounded fawn (he clearly has some kind of physical tic as he repeatedly taps his leg in nervousness). Is Tár abusing a weakling? Or is she exactly the kind of person you want your child to learn from? Yes, she pushed back, but in the doing so, there is more caring – for the art and for the student – than derision or triumph. She is trying to get through to him, lest he imperil his own education and love of music in service of a dunce’s worldview. It is not mere coincidence that when he is rebutted by Tár, he casts a misogynistic slur. Old school in the young belly.
Similarly, the student who commits suicide was mentally shaky, as reflected in her increasingly hysterical email and text missives, while the current assistant is also star-struck and needy, always spookily, jealously hovering. Certainly, with intent or not, Tár takes advantage. Not that it would be hard. Dazzled, would-be acolytes would naturally be drawn to greatness. Hell, old Baby Boomers like Filmvetter are equally susceptible.
But in current discourse, the power imbalance is such that Tár has impermissibly utilized her privilege in a manner that is blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah. We’ve all undergone the training and endured the mantras. Like Miranda warnings, they need not be recited here.
Field is clearly interested in more. For example, are individuals who are soft naturally drawn to Tar for less emotional reasons? In the film, these individuals have absolutely no problem in the exchange as long as they are receiving favor. When it is withdrawn, they crumple. And strike. And let there be no doubt, Field certifies the fact of the bargains. In a break-up scene with Sharon (who is also portrayed as more fragile than Tár: when we meet her, she thinks she’s having a heart attack), the latter states that she always explicitly understood the quid pro quo, and only takes offense when Tár violates the negotiated terms of their relationship regarding other women.
Or, does brilliance excuse excess? I mean, fame often does, and Tár is famous, if only in the rarified circles of the classical music community. But she is also demonstrably and uniquely talented, what one might call an international treasure. The powerful and gifted don’t get a pass, for sure, but the loss of her gift is nothing to be sneezed at. And will Tár’s contributions be tarnished in history, like those of Bach, because of her personal failings? Whither the output of so many artists who turned out to lechers, perverts and worse? Must one separate the work from the creator? Isn’t the alternative an obliterative Manichean mindset that fuels the dip-shittery of fundamentalists, right and left? Or must we do everything in our power to exorcise Chinatown from our artistic memory because of the criminality of its creator so as to warn other miscreants of the consequences? And oh, how times have changed!
It’s not just the driven control of her career and others that damns Tár. Field also shows her desire for intimacy, her insistence that the beauty of wanting and being wanted can be replicated and perpetual, and the fear that soon it may not be so, as seminal to her fall. When Tár, who clearly lusts after the new ingenue both physically and artistically, is left in the hotel hallway to dine alone as the cellist goes to meet a young man, your heart almost breaks.
Blanchett is a wonder, confidently grounded yet hunted and haunted, not only by encroaching mores, but her desire for unfettered autonomy. Field portrays her as beset at all sides, and Blanchett gives the performance of a generation (in three different languages, I might add).
A meticulous, thought-provoking modern tragedy, which Paul Thomas Anderson summed up beautifully: “Every detail matters in this film. Nothing is not deliberate or full of intention. It’s directed with such perfectly controlled mayhem and glee by Todd, it’s really hard not to drool as another director. He made a film which for some years was considered a very dirty word, he made an art film. But it’s art that’s not fussy or pretentious. Just razor-sharp, pitch black, and hilarious. A very focused mirror held up to some of the worst of our human behaviors. It’s also a blast.”
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