Tag: drama

Tár – Review

“If you’re here, then you already know who she is.” In the first scene of Tár, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself) begins an interview with Lydia Tár, listing her many, many accolades to the crowd–she’s one of the rare recipients of an EGOT, a personal favorite student of Leonard Bernstein, a internationally renowned conductor and one of the only women to ever hold prestigious residencies from Boston to her current Berlin. From the back of the house, a woman watches. We only see the back of her head. We won’t know who she is or what she’ll do until far into the movie, when it’s too late. But the interviewer is right; she does know who Lydia Tár is. It’s a queasily effective setup for an expansive, meditative, and in a word, magnificent film, that throughout its nearly three-hour runtime, puts us in the same seat as this anonymous woman: we, too, learn who Lydia Tár is. And we, too, can’t help but watch.

Tár, an astounding Cate Blanchett, clearly has more going on than her prodigious talent. She’s earned all her laurels, she’s an eloquent speaker and a polyglot, she’s established her own scholarship foundation to further the careers of other female conductors–she’s also, as we see in the very first shot, off-balance, twitchy, as if there’s a mosquito circling her neck. Her silence and care is matched by the general lack of underscoring throughout, and it makes the noise of a car, a bug, a person feel like an intrusion on her hermetically sealed life. We see her stopped dead in her tracks by the faint sound of a doorbell, hush the sputtering of a match lighting a candle, and a harrowing sequence featuring her as a guest teacher at Julliard perfectly encapsulates her as unremittingly brilliant, lightning-quick, and an inveterate asshole. It’s an arresting introduction, made better still by Blanchett, who’s doing some of the best work of her career, showcasing a woman at the height of her powers, capable of breathtaking works of art–some scenes of her conducting Mahler are shot almost like a documentary, letting the music and the actor speak for themselves–and stunning depths of cruelty. Early on, Tár takes her wife’s daughter to school, sends her off, and then approaches the daughter’s bully like a wolf walking towards a fawn. I won’t spoil what she does, but what a showcase of her dominance, in more ways than one.

Throughout the film, Tár’s drive to control is played against the very nature and composition of the movie itself. In that interview with Gopnik, she talks, with a chilling, magnetic clarity, about time. She doesn’t discover anything in performance, she says; she’s not responding to the orchestra, or trying something new, or letting the music carry her. No: “the reality is that right from the very beginning I know precisely what time it is, and the exact moment that you and I will arrive at our destination together.” But the world around her, both in a narrative sense and in the construction of the film, will not allow her this jurisdiction, plaguing her with old demons coming back to roost. Director Todd Field fills her home, the brutalist concrete of Berlin, with tiny instances, dreamlike sequences and sometimes just dream sequences, that she cannot control. They don’t always have a direct plot relevance, and I suspect they may bore some audiences expecting a tight drama (two people did walk out of my screening) but as a sort of tone poem, it’s unparalleled. The bed on fire, the lovers through water, a single black dog–it’s not all directly clear, nor should it be, nor does it need to be. Tár runs for exercise, and at one point in a public park, hears screaming. She tries to find its source, and cannot. Next scene.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this movie since I saw it, and though there’s so much more I’d like to note and praise, from the perfectly executed set work to the quietly ruinous performances to the single most devastating use of Monster Hunter cosplay ever recorded, the best thing to do might just be to cut myself off early. The movie has too much to say, and I’d be doing it a disservice to speak for it. For example, on a thematic level, Tár touches on ideas of cancel culture and sexual and gender identites, but it’s never crass enough to address these things by name; it doesn’t want to be broad cultural pedagogy, but a dissection of a self-made woman picking at her own seams. Here’s what this is, it says; draw your own conclusions. The rest of the movie follows suit. Sure, it’s about ten million things, and I can’t wait to read (and maybe write) those essays, but for a review, I think it’s good enough to say they’re there, and they’re fascinating. Tár is, like its protagonist, complex, captivating, and not easily defined. Except to say that it’s phenomenal, my favorite movie of the year so far.

Tags 2022, drama, review, thriller

Reviews

The Banshees of Inisherin – Review

Post author By Simon
Post date October 20, 2022
No Comments on The Banshees of Inisherin – Review

About a quarter of the way into The Banshees of Inisherin, Colin Farrell’s Pádraic bemoans his sudden loneliness. He’s sweet but simple, with a kind of hangdog sincerity Farrell plays to the hilt, and his best (and really singular) friend, an older fiddler Colm (Brendan Gleeson), has just told Pádraic he doesn’t like him anymore. Pádraic is explaining this to the only other person that’ll really tolerate his company, a manic, horny child, who takes this information in and mulls on it, head in hands. “I think he’s depressed,” Pádraic whispers. The kid responds “why doesn’t he just push it down like the rest of us?” This is a perfectly emblematic cross-section of the larger film, a story about loneliness, darkly and hilariously told, with an unusual (for writer/director Martin McDonagh, that is) amount of restraint. Long-time fans of his work may find themselves wishing for a little more action, but as one of those aforementioned fans, I found myself quite enchanted by Banshees.

The title comes from a song Colm’s writing, a four-piece composition inspired by the imagined banshees of the tiny coastal island that the movie never leaves. Banshees are portents of death, and if you’re at all familiar with McDonagh’s earlier work–movies like In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, and a decorated playwriting career including The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore–you’re going into this movie expecting a fair amount of death anyways. But while Banshees is pocked with violence, swift, painful spurts that dot daily life on the titular island, it’s hardly the bloodbath you’d reasonably expect; rather, violence constantly haunts the peripheries. Banshees is set in 1923, next door to the Irish Civil War, and we regularly see plumes of smoke in the distance, hear the crack of gunfire echo across the channel from the mainland. Inisherin is a fictional island, and the war might never reach its shores, but it never, never leaves the world, a choice that–along with McDonagh’s own reputation–fills the movie with a grimly comedic dread. It’s tightly wound, and when things happen (and don’t get it twisted, this is the man that made Three Billboards, things happen), there’s a notable remove, almost like we’re being hurried along past the point of impact. There’s some excellent staging and visual work in this pursuit, too, as cinematographer Ben Davis keeps the camera just on the other side of the window, wide on the countryside, or sometimes literally in the clouds, not letting us get too cozy with the humans below. Around here, Banshees seems to argue, a place where men will mutilate themselves before speaking an honest thought clearly, violence is inescapable. Don’t look too hard, it says, just keep your eyes forward, there’s more behind and there’s more ahead too.

The only character that seems to have a means and will to escape Inisherin’s vicious cycle is Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan, played by the superb Kerry Condon. Even among the uniformly excellent lead cast–Farrell, Gleeson, and a delightfully unhinged Barry Keoghan as the aforementioned horny child–Condon deserves special praise for her magnetic prism of anger, sorrow, repression, and determination that never once feels broad or easy. She’s an intelligent but ill-liked woman on the outside of these outsiders, the beating heart of the movie, and when she leaves its world much of its brightness does too. The things the men left behind do get harder to watch, less funny and more nerve-wracking, until at some point Banshees just kind of stops. There’s not a single dramatic event, reunion or otherwise, that the story hinges on; rather, it reaches the end of its thought, and then roll credits. I thought it compelling and effective, but would understand a certain frustration with this, especially in a movie this neatly made.

All in all, I quite liked Banshees. There’s a deliberate understatement about it, atypical for McDonagh films, atypical for stories about masculinity, atypical for comedies, atypical for movies starring Colin Farrell, poor man, and all of that works in its favor. You watch it, and you know, you just know what it could burst out into at any second–but it doesn’t. And if that doesn’t frustrate you, and I hope it doesn’t, then it’ll captivate you.

Tags 2022, comedy, drama, review

Reviews

Little Women – Review

How lucky we are to be alive at the same time as Greta Gerwig, who, only two feature films in, has established herself one of our best directors! I wondered how she’d possibly follow Lady Bird, her directorial debut, a knockout combination of sorrow, humor, and pathos. I shouldn’t have worried. Little Women is a stunning achievement, one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen in theaters, narratively expansive and yet sacrificing none of its intimacy or precision.

For those of you that didn’t do the assigned reading in middle school, Little Women is a novel written by Louisa May Alcott, centered on the March family, four sisters and their mother living in Massachusetts during the Civil War. It’s endured the century and a half since its publication, because it’s a great read that you should have done in the first place instead of watching TV, you dang kids, and also because it’s one of the first major English-language novels to seriously posit options for women’s careers besides marriage or madness. Every one of its major players is given a great deal of agency in the world around them, and the romance that is present is never one-sided; proposals of love, and any other event, are all treated as serious decisions made between complex human beings. I know even less about historical literature criticism than I do about movies, though, so suffice it to say if you haven’t read it, you should, and either way, you’ll love the 2019 film adaptation.

The whole package is lovely, but its boldest aspect is the script, an innovative, Jo-rooted, non-chronological rearrangement of major scenes from the novel. In any lesser circles this might have felt desperate or empty, but Gerwig’s guidance, in concert with Nick Houy’s assured editing, helps every scene lend new meaning to every other. The young girls squabbling on Christmas give us insight into the women they eventually become; the women reconvening on their old house let us long for what we’ve seen them leave behind. In one masterful sequence, Gerwig conjures an agonizing gap of time from two companion shots of Jo descending the stairs. It’s clever, but it never becomes preoccupied with its own cleverness, instead showing us the family in its totality. The script also features what potentially my favorite dialogue of any period piece; it employs archaic words and phrasing–many lines are direct quotes from Alcott’s original novel–but allows them deeply modern cadences, and the result is electrifying. Watch the Marches struggle to talk over each other about a neighbor’s party or discuss what to do with an old house, and they’re instantly recognizable as both characters from a past time and as a family you might overhear on the street. This alone would make Little Women a joy to watch; it is far from the only exemplary thing about it.

Florence Pugh as Amy, Saoirse Ronan as Jo, and Emma Watson as Meg.

Adaptations of Little Women have long served as lightning rods for talented actors, as far back as Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, and the 2019 version is no different. Saoirse Ronan, as per usual, towers over the proceedings, her Jo March slipping from mood to mood but never losing her heart or her unstoppable drive–even when Jo is at her most abject and directionless, you can hear the gears spinning behind her eyes. When she tells a bedridden Beth that God’s will hasn’t met hers, you believe it. Florence Pugh deserves particular praise, too, for lending fan unfavorite Amy a tremendous amount of sympathy, painting her as a young woman less spiteful than she is acutely aware of herself and what it will take for her to advance herself. Even Timothée Chalamet, an actor I’m rarely completely sold on, is well-positioned as Laurie, a young man who has never wanted for anything and is completely unprepared when he does. Every actor, featured or not, lends a striking humanity–Laura Dern’s Marmee laughs through sentences to her daughters, Tracy Letts’ Dashwood has a habit of slamming down pages he’s done reading. Nobody falls into any easy period drama traps; nobody feels like an icon of a bygone era. They may be wearing frocks and waistcoats, but throughout the near-decade sprawl of the story these characters remain immediate and achingly human.

It’s impossible to catalog the full range of excellence on display here, but I’m going to list a few standouts. Yorick Le Saux’s elegant cinematography knows exactly where to place the camera, letting us trace every ill-concealed thought that flickers across Jo’s face, zooming out to let her face down the Massachusetts countryside alone. Alexandre Desplat’s score is pitch-perfect, planting us squarely in the post-war North without feeling antiquated. And most notably, Little Women‘s feminist sensibilities are simultaneously barely spoken and ever-present. The movie is not, textually speaking, about women’s rights, any more than it is about the Civil War, Massachusetts, or painting. There are few lines that read explicitly as rallying cries, and even then, their purpose is generally narrative. Yet we are never let off the hook, never allowed to forget the full scope of the March family’s situation. You can practically feel everything Marmee chokes down as she says “I am angry nearly every day of my life.” Little Women doesn’t want us to forget she’s got every reason to be. (The movie arguably does Alcott’s original ending justice as well, with a brilliant ending device that I won’t spoil here, but allows both Jo and Gerwig to have their cake and eat it too.)

As good as it is, Little Women barely misses perfection. Emma Watson’s valiant efforts do little to lift Meg from her fate as the least interesting March sister, and a handful of moments from the flashback scenes, despite the makeup department’s stellar use of bangs, can still feel like older actors stooping to play younger. These spots are few and far in between, though, and not dealbreakers even when they present themselves; they do little to diminish the breathtaking quality of the film. Much like Lady Bird, every inch of this piece is suffused with emotion in a way that’s easy to miss until it knocks you flat. Little Women is sweeping and accessible, grounded and skybound, and above all an absolute delight to watch. Movies don’t often come this exquisite.

Tags 2019, drama, period, review