Film review

  • Tár

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Field (2022)

    Weighing in at 158 minutes, Tár is insanely overlong.  Duration as heft really is the issue here:  the surplus running time renders the film a kind of physical assault.  You begin to sympathise with the gym punchbag that Lydia Tár occasionally lays into – when she isn’t jogging, conducting an orchestra or treating people appallingly (in ascending order of frequency).  Whatever Todd Field’s multi-tasking title character does, she does with a vengeance – ditto Cate Blanchett, in how she plays (and occasionally overplays) Lydia.  Cut an hour from Tár and it might be an entertaining #MeToo melodrama – distinctive because the creative powerhouse that falls from grace, when allegations of sexually predatory behaviour surface, is a woman and self-described ‘U-haul lesbian’.  This leaner Tár would still be shallow, though:  even as it is, writer-director Field doesn’t find the time to clarify the truth or otherwise of the accusations levelled at his anti-heroine.

    In just three letters and an acute accent, her surname screams European kultur but Lydia Tár was born and raised in America.  Her childhood hero and inspiration was Leonard Bernstein; she is now a composer, a pianist, an ethnomusicologist and the first woman to be principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (in other words, not a real person: all twelve holders of that post have been men).  She’s married to Sharon (Nina Hoss), first violinist in the orchestra, and they have an adopted daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic).  Most of the film’s early scenes see Lydia, accompanied by her personal assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), in New York.  In an interview at The New Yorker Festival with Adam Gopnik (as himself), Lydia philosophises and plugs her latest projects – her soon-to-be-published autobiography, an upcoming live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.  She meets with Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), an investment banker and amateur conductor, with whom she set up the Accordion Foundation to support aspiring female conductors.  Teaching a masterclass at Juilliard, Lydia is infuriated by Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), a conducting student who says that, as a ‘BIPOC pangender’ (BIPOC stands for ‘Black, Indigenous and people of colour’), they’re not into the music of a white, cis-male misogynist like J S Bach, who fathered twenty children.  Insisting that the work, not the biology or biography, is what matters, Lydia lays into Max, branding them ‘an ultrasonic epistemic dissident’ and worse.  Her cruelly sharp tongue is also in evidence back in Berlin.  When she learns that Petra is being bullied at school, Lydia calmly and frighteningly threatens the little girl responsible.  She advises this child that ‘If you tell another grown-up about this conversation, they will not believe you – because I am a grown-up’.

    There’s no doubt, at least for a viewer less than knowledgeable on the subject, that Todd Field (In the Bedroom (2001), Little Children (2006), nothing since until now) has researched the classical music business thoroughly.  He spends so long demonstrating this, along with his flair for epigram (‘The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity’), that the dramatic charge of scenes is diluted in the showoff verbiage.  Lydia’s revenge on the child giving Petra a hard time registers more strongly:  what’s said here isn’t only especially unkind but also unusually succinct.  Besides, Lydia’s words to the infant bully suggest the terms in which a powerful perpetrator of sexual abuse might discourage their minor victim from reporting it.  Skeletons in Lydia’s cupboard start rattling when she receives in the post a first edition of Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge (a novel based on the author’s romantic relationship with a woman who subsequently attempted suicide).  Lydia opens the book, reads an inscription and is immediately panicked:  in uncharacteristically cack-handed fashion, she tries physically to destroy the book.  It soon becomes clear the gift is from Krista Taylor, a former Accordion scholar, who also sends Lydia accusing emails.  In one or the other of her Berlin homes (as well as the place shared with Sharon and Petra, there’s a smaller apartment where she spends time working alone), Lydia is unsettled by odd, magnified sounds – an ominous ticking turns out to be a metronome in action, it seems of its own accord – bad dreams and the distant screams of women.

    These spooky comeuppance alerts and harbingers of psychological breakdown come through clearly enough but identifying key dialogue in the film continues to be a needle-in-a-haystack job.  Lydia has lunch with Andris Davis (Julian Glover), an elderly conducting mentor, her predecessor in the top job in Berlin and life partner of her ‘assistant conductor’, Sebastian Brix (Allan Corduner), whom Lydia’s plotting to sack.  At one point, Andris mentions a real former principal conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and how he was treated in early post-war Germany.  In retrospect, you assume that Field is signalling a connection between the supposed victimisation of Furtwängler in the de-Nazification period and what happens to Lydia in the #MeToo era.  As the scene happens, though, the mention of Furtwängler has no impact at all:  we’re just eavesdropping on chat between big-time music pros.  Their exchange is dramatised only by Cate Blanchett’s playing the whole of it with a glint in her eye and an edge to her voice – which give everything that Lydia listens to and says the same (vague) weight.

    Tár gets a much-needed injection of energy and sharper focus once Todd Field eventually moves into rehearsals for the Mahler Fifth:  the orchestra sequences test Blanchett more and she rises to the challenge brilliantly.  (It’s true that when she’s conducting at maximum intensity the spectacle verges on comical but so it often does with the real thing.)  It’s striking, however, that Lydia, talking to her players, alternates between German and English, and the German bits aren’t subtitled:  having supplied far more classical music talk than the film needs, Field is oddly uninterested in communicating Lydia’s instructions on how to interpret it.  He also seems worried the audience will be bored having to listen to more than a bit of Mahler – it’s at this point that the film belatedly starts to major in the sexual predator storyline.  Field makes much more use of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s original score for Tár.  Lydia is famous for commissioning the work of female composers:  there’s a meta moment (which, in the circumstances of the story, is rather disconcerting) when Guðnadóttir is named as one of these composers.

    Learning that Krista Taylor has taken her own life, Lydia instructs Francesca to delete all emails to and from Krista.  It’s implied that Lydia has had more than a professional relationship with Francesca, who therefore likes her chances of replacing superannuated Sebastian.  When Lydia gives him his marching orders, however, he’s moved to remind her what people are saying about her:  unnerved, she doesn’t give Francesca his job after all.  In any case, there’s a new apple of Lydia’s eye – young Russian cellist Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), who, in rehearsals, fires flirty smiles in the maestro’s direction.  Once she finds out that Olga embarked on a music career after watching (on YouTube) Jacqueline du Pré play the Elgar Cello Concerto, Lydia selects this as the orchestra’s companion piece to the Mahler and makes sure Olga is chosen as the soloist – even altering her scorecard at a supposedly blind audition to do so.  Whereas Sharon, though concerned by Lydia’s behaviour, suffers largely in silence, Francesca, denied Sebastian’s job, flounces out never to return.  Meanwhile, the rumours that Lydia and Krista were in a relationship which, once it soured, caused Lydia deliberately to block her ex-favourite’s career progress and send Krista over the edge, are getting louder.

    For the second year running, a high-profile American movie references The New Yorker in a big way.  This time, the latter’s two cinema critics take very different views of the film’s merits.  The New Yorker isn’t central to Tár as it was to Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (2021) but where the magazine features, and doesn’t feature, in Field’s drama, is significant.  As well as Adam Gopnik’s lengthy interview with Lydia, there’s a shot of the first page of an extended New Yorker profile of her.  But it seems this has nothing negative to say about Lydia.  In 2018 writers from The New Yorker and the New York Times shared a Pulitzer Prize for ‘explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women’.  In Field’s film press allegations against Lydia are confined to the tabloid New York Post.  This red-top devaluation of the allegations is part of why Richard Brody (who venerated The French Dispatch) is so hostile to Tár.

    Brody objects to (what he sees as) Field’s targeting of ‘so-called cancel culture and [lampoon of] so-called identity politics’, to his presentation of Lydia as a victim and her accusers ‘as unhinged and hysterical’.  Field, according to Brody, portrays ‘derisively’ the conducting student Max and how he identifies.  I’m not sure this is fair on Field.  There’s an inherent problem with a lot of identitarian language or, at any rate, speech:  ‘As a BIPOC pangender, I have difficulty connecting with Bach’ may not look too silly on the page but can hardly fail to sound silly coming out of someone’s mouth.  Still, Brody’s right that Field excludes details of Lydia’s alleged sexual abuse of young women.  The lack of flashbacks to what-really-happened with Krista Taylor may be no great loss; the almost complete absence of evidence considered by the Berlin Philharmonic board’s disciplinary hearing, is a more vexing omission.

    As the scandal about her conduct gathers momentum, Lydia angrily complains that, ‘these days, to be accused is the same as being guilty’.  Later, when her reputation has been irretrievably damaged, another character remarks, matter-of-factly, that we’re living in a new (#MeToo) world – says, in effect, this is how things are now:  get over it.  There’s clearly truth in both observations and perhaps Todd Field would justify skimping on the case against Lydia on those grounds:  since it’s been decided by the court of public opinion and social media that she’s in the wrong, it hardly matters how culpable she is.  Field might also claim he leaves no doubt that Lydia practises outrageous favouritism, apparently based on sexual attraction, and clearly does abuse her position of authority.  Even so, by obfuscating what exactly has gone on, he dodges the question of what kind of retribution (if any) he thinks Lydia deserves.  A video of her showdown with Max, taken by another student, goes viral:  because it’s been edited to present Lydia in the worst possible light, the effect is to suggest this travesty is typical of the campaign being waged against her.  When Lydia returns to New York, now with Olga in tow, for a deposition in a lawsuit filed by Krista Taylor’s family (and to continue promoting her book), there are placard-bearing protesters in the street, demanding justice for Krista.  Lydia dismisses them as ‘millennial robots’.  The protesters are given no right of reply.

    Field creates the semblance of balance only by showing that Lydia is an egomaniac and a nasty piece of work in ways that don’t amount to sexual predation.  Richard Brody’s New Yorker colleague, Anthony Lane, praises Tár highly.  Like Brody, he draws attention to the Lydia-Max exchange:  ‘According to taste,’ writes Lane, ‘you will either cheer her majestic gutting of twenty-first-century self-regard, and her stout defense of high aesthetic principles, or agree with the student that she’s “a fucking bitch”’.  Those are indeed the two options – the substance of Max’s argument about Bach is ignored.  But it’s not a simple either/or.  Although this viewer happens largely to share Lydia’s views on cancel culture and identity politics rather than Max’s, I didn’t ‘cheer her majestic gutting’ of what they (Max) had to say.  I agreed with Max’s description of Lydia as a ‘fucking bitch’ – not because her views were wrong but because she insulted Max callously, in front of other students.

    Adam Gopnik introduces Lydia as one of the elite company of EGOT laureates.  Cate Blanchett hasn’t yet won a Grammy but she has the other three prizes and looks set to win her third Academy Award for Tár.   I’ve mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, it requires exceptional talent to do much of what Blanchett does here.  On the other, the film’s set-up and the star’s approach to her role are annoying.  Lydia Tár tends to wipe the floor with people:  the magisterial Blanchett has a similar tendency with whichever cast member(s) she’s sharing a scene with.  You can’t even describe her performance as competitive:  it doesn’t need to be because the other actors are given so little to work with.  Nina Hoss is good as Sharon but the part is underwritten.  At the start, Sharon appears to be dependent on prescription drugs that Lydia is withholding from her.  This seems to promise real histrionic opportunities for Hoss but nothing further happens to suggest that Sharon’s a vulnerable personality.  It says a lot about the casting and direction that Mark Strong, one of the best people in the supporting cast, not only plays a wimp but does so in a hairpiece (perhaps the worst worn by this actor since Our Friends in the North back in the 1990s) that proclaims his wimpiness.

    I confess that I didn’t understand what was going on in Tár’s last half-hour, a succession of episodes so improbable that I decided – wrongly, according to Wikipedia’s plot synopsis and a few  reviews of the film that I’ve since read – these must be happening only within Lydia’s distressed, deranged mind.  (1) Dismissed by the Berlin Philharmonic, she gatecrashes their live recording, in front of a packed concert hall audience, of Mahler’s Fifth.  Careering towards the conductor’s podium, she overbalances and crashes to the ground.  When Eliot Kaplan, conducting in Lydia’s place (as if), helps her up and tries to reason with her, she floors him with a haymaker and, once he’s down, carries on pummelling (so at least those sessions with the punchbag paid off).  (2) She returns to New York and her childhood home on Staten Island.  She selects one of the ancient VHS tapes on the shelves and emotionally watches a recording of one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.  Her brother, Tony Tarr (Lee Sellars), arrives, says, ‘Hello, Linda’ accusingly, and tells her off for forgetting her roots.  (If the Bernstein tapes that inspired Linda to escape from Staten Island are so dear to her, why haven’t they been at her side in Berlin rather than entrusted to the care of the philistine, blue-collar family she has abandoned?)  (3) She travels to South East Asia for a conducting assignment and goes for a massage at a plush brothel, where she’s invited to select a masseuse from among the occupants of what resembles a huge fishbowl, in which attractive young women sit like … yes, like the players in an orchestra.  Lydia’s eyes meet those of the girl who sits in the fishbowl in the same position that Olga occupied in the Berlin Philharmonic.  Lydia is next seen back out on the street, where she throws up.  In the final scene, she’s back on the podium, conducting the score for a video game series, to an Asian audience of cosplayers.

    Todd Field identifies with his protagonist to the extent that it’s sometimes hard to tell where her snobbishness ends and his begins.  Not always hard, though:  if the finale isn’t happening just in Lydia’s imagination, it’s offensive on the part of Field that the Asian location is characterised as the cultural depths to which Lydia has fallen from Berlin and New York.  When Lydia tells the orchestra in their rehearsal of Mahler’s Fifth to ‘forget Visconti’, this sounds a bit like Field jeering at viewers who (like me) are saying to themselves, ‘Oh yes, it’s the Death in Venice music’.  The décor in Lydia’s Berlin home(s) is stylishly bleak.  (Florian Hoffmeister’s lighting gives her domestic world a bone-white grimness from the start that limits the film’s visual options when things fall apart for her.)  The look of Lydia’s nightmares suggests someone committed to aesthetic one-upmanship even in sleep.  Her brother’s revelation that Lydia is really Linda isn’t very crushing:  Tony would have done better to complain about what she did with their surname, and especially that accent.  Field’s title certainly gives a warning whiff of what you’re in for with Tár.  The trailer similarly announces the serious business it’s going to be.  When I got home after seeing it and The Spirit of the Beehive back-to-back, Sally asked what the film was like.  Which one?  The name had slipped her mind – ‘You know … “The Conductress”’.  This alternative title tickled us both (Sally had seen the trailer).  Cate Blanchett’s leading lady uses a private jet for transatlantic travel.  The thought of her working on the buses slightly mitigates the punishment of Todd Field’s tumid marathon.

    19 January 2023

  • My Cousin Vinny

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Lynn (1992)

    Two student friends from New York, driving through Alabama, stop to buy provisions at a convenience store.  Bill Gambini (Ralph Macchio) accidentally shoplifts a tin of tuna.  Back on the road, he and Stan Rothenstein (Mitchell Whitfield) are pursued and pulled over by a police car, and arrested.  They’re surprised the tuna theft is such a big deal even though, as worried Stan had already warned Bill, ‘the laws are medieval down here’.  In custody, Bill admits to the local sheriff, Dean Farley (Bruce McGill), ‘it was a stupid thing to do’.  Bill doesn’t know that, moments after he and Stan left the store, the clerk (Kenny Jones) who served them was shot dead:  Sheriff Farley has got himself a confession to the killing without even trying.   Bill is charged with first-degree murder, his friend as an accessory, in a state where capital punishment is alive and very well.  The boys can’t afford the lawyer they badly need but when Bill, allowed a phone call, speaks to his mother, she reminds him there’s an attorney in the family.  Vincent La Guardia Gambini (Joe Pesci) – Bill’s cousin Vinny – makes the journey from Brooklyn to Alabama, accompanied by his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei), to take on Bill and Stan’s defence.

    My Cousin Vinny is a true black comedy (something liable to be overlooked because it’s also usually a broad comedy).  A man has been violently killed.  A miscarriage of justice, leading to the death penalty, is on the cards.  But Jonathan Lynn and the scriptwriter, Dale Launer, give the situation consistently light-hearted treatment, and the cast delivers performances to match – though that doesn’t stop them finding truth in their characters, too.  The film was a box-office hit and plenty of critics liked it – ditto a good few lawyers, who praised the accuracy of Lynn and Launer’s description of courtroom procedure.  It’s hardly unusual for the makers of film dramas to brag about their background research and insist what they’ve put on screen is consequently, unarguably credible (a whopping non sequitur).  It’s refreshing to see such research undertaken for the purposes of comedy and without boasting:  no one’s going to claim that the conscientious prep makes things funny.

    This was one of four films to be released in 1992 in which Joe Pesci appeared.  This matched his 1990 total but Pesci was never again so productive.  Since announcing his retirement from acting in 1999 (to concentrate on a musical career), he’s been nearly as good as his word – just three screen appearances since the turn of the millennium.  Two were probably favours for friends:  a cameo in Robert de Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006); a much more extensive supporting role in The Irishman (2019), which Martin Scorsese had to work hard to persuade Pesci into doing.  (His involvement in the intervening Love Ranch (2010), a flop directed by Taylor Hackford, in which Pesci starred opposite Helen Mirren (Hackford’s wife) is harder to explain.)  My Cousin Vinny also stands out for giving Pesci a rare lead role.  Pushing fifty at the time, he was probably too old for the part as written, even allowing that the title character has recently passed his law exams at the sixth attempt (he’s never appeared at a trial, let alone won one).  Yet Pesci’s age helps to make Vinny’s appearance and dress sense all the funnier, and the odd couple pairing at the heart of the story all the more enjoyably odd.

    Vinny drives into the town of Wahzoo (an invented name) and emerges from his car wearing Ray-Bans, a well-worn black leather jacket and cowboy boots.  Out from the passenger side comes his girlfriend, in a short, tight black skirt, black tights and high heels:  Lisa’s already taking photos, on a little instant camera, of the foreign country in which she and Vinny have just arrived, and predicting the local Chinese food will be terrible.  ‘Boy, do you stick out,’ he tells her, in a thick Brooklyn accent.  When she tells Vinny he does too, he points out the cowboy boots.  ‘Oh yeah,’ Lisa, in her even thicker Brooklyn accent, says drily, ‘you blend ’.  Marisa Tomei’s perfect reading of that line is the first of many.  For those of us familiar with him only from his Scorsese roles, Joe Pesci manages admirably the shift from jabbering cross-talk to a style of performance more dependent on acutely timed delivery.  He plays well with a range of other actors, notably Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster), as the trial judge (the splendidly named Chamberlain Haller) and Lane Smith, as the district attorney.  But Tomei is star of the show.  However obvious a punchline (and it’s sometimes very obvious), her timing and tone are triumphantly inventive.  Lisa’s frequent exasperation and occasional fury with Vinny feel real.  Tomei is a witty physical comedienne:  sashaying Lisa is both a cartoon and beautifully individual.  She works as a hairdresser but her dad runs a garage and all her other male relatives are car mechanics.  Vinny eventually drags Lisa to the witness box, where her dazzling display of automotive expertise confounds the prosecution – she proves the getaway car driven by the store clerk’s killer couldn’t have been Bill and Stan’s.  (James Rebhorn, also excellent, is the professional expert witness who eventually bows to Lisa’s superior knowledge.)

    My Cousin Vinny was distributed by 20th Century Fox.  It’s doubtful that a mainstream comedy in which a British director, a California-raised scenarist and a collection of New Yorker characters deplore and thwart Deep South culture and judicial convention, could get made in Hollywood today.  Not so much because the death penalty, needless to say, remains in force in Alabama (which, according to Wikipedia, ‘has the highest per capita capital sentencing rate in the United States’) – more because political correctness now extends to not treating as a laughing matter the political incorrectness of illiberal America.  Jonathan Lynn and Dale Launer don’t, it should be said, make fun of African-American Alabamans – except for, and very gently, Mrs Riley (Pauline Meyers), an elderly and, as Vinny demonstrates in court, seriously myopic eyewitness to the aftermath of the store shooting. Vinny’s earlier, horrified reaction to hominy grits for breakfast is directed not at the Black cook (Lou Walker) preparing them but at the colossal dollops of lard in the frying pan.  That lard and the fleshy white faces (on red necks) of the more aggressive locals are virtually of one substance.  As for Black faces, there are a few on the jury.  Lynn cuts emphatically to one of them listening to the DA’s opening statement, as he explains that ‘verdict’ is a ‘word that came down from England and all our l’il ole ancestors’.

    Even if the film were made by a major studio now, at least two sequences wouldn’t make the final cut.  Hot on the heels of the first crossed-wires conversation between Bill and Sheriff Farley comes another misunderstanding.  Stan is terrified by the prospect of jail:  ‘You know what happens in these places …,’ he tells Bill, ‘sometimes there’s a big guy no one wants to tangle with who’ll protect you but you have to become his sex slave and do anything he wants’.  Vinny – not a big guy but imposingly leathered – arrives in their cell while Bill’s asleep and is soon telling an increasingly suspicious Stan, ‘I mean, it’s your ass, not mine.  I think you should be grateful – I think you should be on your fuckin’ knees’.   The pace and energy of this exchange, typical of the film, are terrific but it would surely be construed as unacceptably homophobic now, though its loss would be a loss.  The same can’t be said for a later courtroom address by the public defender that Stan (briefly) hires to represent him instead of Vinny.  The man has a terrible stammer.  Not even Austin Pendleton’s comic resource and sensitivity can redeem this bit.

    Jonathan Lynn had directed for cinema before and would do so again but My Cousin Vinny was the only one of his ten features (the most recent made in 2010) to succeed with both audiences and critics.  Lynn is probably still best known, in Britain anyway, as a writer – co-author, with Antony Jay, of the BBC’s highly-rated (but tedious) 1980s sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.   Dale Launer had already written two hit comedies – Ruthless People (1986) and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) – but has only one post-1992 writing credit on IMDb.   I don’t know how much Lynn, who also has a Cambridge law degree, may have contributed to Launer’s screenplay but their collaboration here is so successful that it’s a pity they’ve not worked together since.  Because it always seems inevitable that things must finally work out happily for Vinny, Lisa, Bill and Seth, the trial scenes run the risk of going through the motions:  in the event, the dialogue and staging turn them into effective courtroom drama (which is amusing in itself).  Perhaps the film could be trimmed by a few minutes – Lynn sometimes dwells on comical reactions for too long – but it never flags.  I hadn’t seen My Cousin Vinny for over twenty years but it’s as much a treat as ever.  I’m not sure that I ever enjoy new films nowadays – especially new comedies – as much as I still enjoy this one.

    12 January 2023

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