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In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.
Dear Dana, Bilge, and Beatrice:
Not to turn Movie Club into a film critic gripe-fest, but I have been wrestling with the dilemmas you’re all fleshing out—how to cover a medium where more and more, giant blockbusters asking the same bunch of thematic questions devour so many cinema seats and box office dollars. I even struggle with how to cover the slow rollout of a big streaming release. Do I tackle it when it’s playing in a handful of theaters in the big cities, or does the Atlantic’s general audience benefit if I wait a few weeks for it to be widely available online—even if the discourse has died down by then? I often find myself dissatisfied with either answer, longing for the days of the more traditional, word-of-mouth-focused expansion around the country that was de rigueur for awards contenders in the pre-pandemic era.
Instead, it so often feels like these wonderful movies are failing to leave a footprint, to borrow your term, Bilge. Maybe what helped Everything Everywhere All at Once break through—in addition to its long spell in theaters—was how it borrowed and remixed story formulas from the comic-book movies that have become so prevalent, spinning yarns about multiverses and superpowers but grounding them in relatable family mundanity. But fundamentally, what bothers me most about so many other movies failing to break through in theaters is the systemic ramifications: The more something like Armageddon Time or Tár gets rushed to streaming quickly, rather than being given a chance to thrive in theaters, the more normalized this misbegotten strategy becomes.
But enough hand-wringing about the state of things. Beatrice, you noted your intrigue with this year’s slate of films trying to wrangle with quote-unquote woke culture. I liked Pleasure, but I found myself frustrated by how it kept tacking back to a traditional rise-and-fall Hollywood arc; it was such a daring work in terms of explicit on-screen content, but a surprisingly straightforward one narratively. And while I appreciated how current Tár felt— it is certainly my favorite movie of the year—I did find myself flabbergasted by how it was interpreted by writers I respect as a regressive screed against “cancel culture,” when to me it seemed anything but.
Yes, what’s happening to the mercurial mega-conductor Lydia Tár is certainly “cancellation.” That seems entirely justified, given the ways she’s abused her professional power—and how that abuse has reached the level of self-parody. Todd Field finds so much dark humor in the sheer clumsiness of Tár’s behavior as the film goes on. Little things, like her buying the very bag carried by the woman flirting with her after her Adam Gopnik interview, or trying and failing to influence the lunch order of the cellist she’s pursuing. And then there’s her utter failure to see the forest for the trees: She thinks deleting a few incriminating emails will protect her, but fails to understand that passing over her loyal and all-knowing assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) for a promotion will incur catastrophic wrath.
Field’s previous film Little Children, all those years ago, was a dark drama with a heart of ice, but it also had an archly funny air, its unseen narrator dissecting every suburban trauma and flirtation like David Attenborough discussing the mating habits of praying mantises. To Field, Lydia Tár is clearly suffering from a deep moral rot, but she’s also just lost her game, whatever combination of charm, intelligence, and magic that vaulted her so high into the stratosphere to begin with. So much of the movie is about her trying to finish the grandest homework assignment imaginable—her version of Mahler’s fifth symphony—and procrastinating in the worst ways imaginable, from preying on orchestra members to terrorizing the young children of Berlin.
That’s why I find the final act of the film, which sees her humiliated and embarking on an odyssey into Southeast Asia to conduct a video-game score, extraordinarily moving (though not without its own wry humor). For the first time in the movie, she actually seems vaguely centered and ready to do the work, diligently plowing through her notes and—most importantly—approaching the project without the imperial air with which she so impressed Adam Gopnik. It should be impossible to extract any sincerity from her at this point, and yet that’s what Field and Blanchett do—and no, Dan Kois, the whole thing isn’t a dang dream!
Consciously,
David
Read the previous Movie Club entry | Read the next Movie Club entry
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