Tár, & Other Superlatives
Tár
A rare moment of inner peace for Cate Blanchett in Tár
I was a little nervous, from some podcast acclaim, that this picture was going to do the sort sort of tired nonsense I hate to see in movies: wobbly flashbacks, wobblier stream-of-consciousness stuff and, the wobbliest of all, eerie dream sequences; all usually poor attempts to paint audiences a picture of a character’s interior being. Tár, in which Cate Blanchett plays a renowned but embattled composer, very forcefully does the opposite of all of these things.
Lydia Tár’s slow descent is wrought by her forthright manner in lecture halls, her twin eye for musical talent and aesthetic beauty, and her tendency to mix up judgment calls with emotional ones. She unwittingly pushes herself into a dangerous corner, with scandal brewing around her on all sides — but the film itself is wholly disinterested in the notion of such high-cholesterol, over-worn narrative. Tár is so against the idea of using familiar cinematic tricks to get a rise from its audience, that it doesn’t even lean on classical music to build or even (ultimately) make its point. Its visual style is completely devoid of showmanship, and is focused instead on investigating granular but nevertheless intriguing problems. Why get pyrotechnical with lighting, when you can draw on the light of auditoriums to create subtle, compact war zones? Why have your cast scream their lines, shatter your set-pieces, when Cate Blanchett can practically move things with her mind?
Tár is an excellent, brutal, professionally executed film, posing a simple, bloodless transaction that never once insults your intelligence.
White Noise
White Noise is eerie, amusing, and also slightly terrifying.
When Noah Baumbach makes a movie, I drop everything — that is Newton’s fourth and tragically neglected law of motion. White Noise feels as though it was green-lit by the universe, which obviously has political views and feelings of its own; as though, in my case, it suspected I may never get round to experiencing a Don DeLillo novel otherwise.
Yes, I admit it: I’m a coward. I think plenty about death and what it means already, and I’m not sure I’m able to endure DeLillo’s unsparing, probing investigations of human mortality. (There is that book with the football elements, so perhaps I lie.) So the universe gave Baumbach the idea to lighten things up, you see, and that’s why White Noise exists: to re-interpret DeLillo’s genius, I imagine, so it can be celebrated for both its intellectual and emotional resonance.
White Noise, combining DeLillo’s straight-faced cynicism with Baumbach’s smirky variety, goes down like Jamaican food: a confounding and yet perfectly natural blend of sweet and savoury delicacies. This is a story about how most humans are more inclined to accept conspiracy than fact, sci-fi over science, when toxic waste threatens their way of life, or when the pharmaceutical industry offers a quick fix for dilemmas they ought explore in therapy, or with some honest work. Who else but Baumbach then, a director whose favoured trope is our ability to talk ourselves into inconclusive circles, to fit White Noise into two captivating hours?
He calls Adam Driver when he needs a good man to ground the absurdity; Baumbach’s muse Greta Gerwig is most probably in the room, when he conceives it. I absolutely will not be rewatching White Noise unless dinner guests insist; but I will be thinking fondly of it for a long while, every time I circle the aisles in a grocery store.
Armageddon Time
Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb star in James Gray’s Armageddon Time
Armageddon Time is another movie I would define by its rejection of style, for its tendency to mostly attempt still, obtuse portraits of its key players. In a different way than Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, it attempts to trace the roots of modern white nationalism to systematic purpose and the passivity of people who don’t recognise their own privilege. It’s understandably hard to do so, I think is the point, when discrimination is an hierarchal violence: sometimes it’s your people’s turn and when it’s not, when you’re finally allowed at the table, it’s hard to admit it’s someone else’s.
Paul Graff, in his early teens, is the youngest member of a Jewish household trying to make sense of American society’s sudden and also unexpected willingness to embrace their people. Economically, the sense is they must strike while the iron’s tolerant. I have heard African-American fathers, even in person, hit similar notes about not dithering about economic opportunity when it surfaces, dressing a certain way, adjusting one’s speech. Paul has to learn the realities of American life the hard way, when it’s made faintly and then abundantly clear that his black best friend won’t be allowed to come of age on the same terms.
I had seen a critic friend judge this movie harshly for offering a one-dimensional perspective of its black lead versus its white one. Diving in, I thought this was a problem of screen-time; but, actually, its about context, breadth, richness. We get to meet Paul’s family, are therefore offered some perspective into why he sometimes dumb things at school, but only ever see Johnny in the cut — which unknowingly perpetuates some of the exact same stereotypes the director’s trying to analyse.
Armageddon Time (pardon) is not a great time. You have to watch some abusive parenting, and you have to watch Anthony Hopkins pass once more into the great beyond, besides of course the unpleasantness of having to watch a black child enjoy zero recourse in life — which is fine, except … the societal consequence the film presents isn’t the far-reaching one its premise initially seems to be onto.
