Cate Blanchett

TAR: a haughty spirit before a fall

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Photo caption: Cate Blanchett in TAR. Courtesy of Focus Features.

Tar, Todd Field’s exploration of #MeToo and Cancel Culture, is a showcase for the considerable acting talent of Cate Blanchett. We immediately accept her as Lydia Tar, a superstar orchestra conductor. Lydia is an international thought leader in music, she speaks fluent German, and big SAT words flow off her tongue in her regular speech. She’s also imperious and abuses her privilege.

We’re used to powerful men abusing their position, but Field, by centering on a powerful woman, unpeels our kneejerk reactions. Here’s a person who has earned her status by talent and accomplishment – but she’s just too mean and selfish.

Of course, it is written that pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. These days, a viral internet can bring destruction and fall with shocking suddenness. In Tar, the telling of Lydia Tar’s final arc is compelling.

But Tar is almost two-and-a-half hours long, and the middle part is too long. Field invests about an hour and forty minutes in showing us how masterful Tar is. Having already gotten his point in the first forty-five minutes, I nodded off.

I found a very public flameout at the end to be implausible, but the Wife found it believable.

The cast is excellent, especially Nina Hoss (Barbara and Phoenix) as Lydia’s spouse and Noémie Merlant (Jumbo, Curiosa) as her seemingly fragile assistant.

Todd Field has made three feature films, the others being the superb 2001 family psychological drama In the Bedroom and my choice for the best film of 2006, Little Children.

Note: most of what usually goes in a movie’s closing credits (gaffers, best boys, caterers, drivers, accountants and the like) is in Tar’s opening credits. The closing credits only includes the cast, the music and the musicians. Odd.

Blanchett’s performance deserves an Oscar nomination, but I wouldn’t sit the the whole movie again in a theater.

DON’T LOOK UP: hilarious satire or…?

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Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in DON’T LOOK BACK. Courtesy of Netflix.

In the wickedly funny Don’t Look Up, filmmaker Adam McKay and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a souless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public.

The satire begins when an astronomy grad student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculates that it will certainly strike Earth in 6 months and 14 days. This is a very big comet, so the scientists have pegged it as an “extinction level event”. In other words, the approaching calamity is apocalyptic enough to rule out any post-apocalyptic movies.

They get an immediate audience with the President (Meryl Streep), and they expect that their news will trigger an urgent, globally-coordinated effort to deflect the comet before it can end life on Earth. That rational and responsible response is not what they get. (Then again, you wouldn’t expect that vaccinating everyone against a deadly pandemic would be controversial, either.)

Instead, they find a public consumed with celebrity fluff and eager to turn any substantive conversation into tribalism. And a very greedy capitalist, who steers the US response into the ultimate example of privitization.

The media is represented by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the hosts of a popular television infotainment show. Expert in cynically dumbing down every subject, Blanchett and Perry are hilarious every time they are on-screen. Never sexier in a movie, Blanchett also gets to play a sexually voracious social climber (“I’ve slept with two former Presidents“).

McKay’s takedown of the media includes a televised meltdown worthy of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.

Other comic highlights:

  • Mark Rylance as a tech billionaire, kind of a worst case cross between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. He bullies his way through every situation with a forced confidence (although mere mortals in his presence are advised “not to make eye contact and to avoid negative facial expressions”).
  • Noah Hill as the President’s son, Chief of Staff and Brat-in-Chief. This is what the Trump kids would be like if they were witty. ‘You’re the working class, and we’re the cool rich.’
  • Ariana Grande as a vacant pop diva who is ultra savvy about social media.
  • Lawrence’s grad student just can’t get over a general’s (Paul Guilfoyle) scam with snacks.
  • Melanie Lynsky plays the astronomy professor’s long-suffering wife, and no one throws off a muttered killer line better than Lynsky.

In The Big Short, McKay took us inside the subprime mortgage scam. His genius was in taking the story of guys in front of their computers figuring out the current and future values of other people’s home mortgages. – and turning it into an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Watching The Big Short, we laugh, and then we get mad.

Don’t Look Up is very funny but is it a somber prophecy in the clothes of a comedy? It’s very plausible that everything really would happen this way. In fact, the human response to Climate Change IS NOW happening this way (although it will take more than six months and 14 days to end life on the planet). And our rocky test drive with COVID does not inspire confidence, either.

This one of the Best Movies of 2021. I saw Don’t Look Up in a theater, but it will be streaming on Netflix beginning December 24.

Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry in DON’T LOOK BACK. Courtesy of Netflix.

CAROL: a tale of forbidden love

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Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in CAROL
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in CAROL

Carol is a beautiful and superbly acted romance of forbidden love. It is the Holiday season of 1952-53 and Therese (Rooney Mara) is a Manhattan department store clerk in her early twenties. She is smart and attractive and has come to New York to make her way in the post-war culture. She has male suitors, but it’s a middle-aged, affluent woman from suburbs that stops her in her tracks. Therese has no experience in same-sex relationships, but the older woman Carol (Cate Blanchett) has. But Carol is a wife and mother, and the risks are greater for her.

Filmmaker Todd Haynes loves Douglas Sirk’s women’s melodramas of the 1950s, and he has earned the ability to play in that sandbox with Far from Heaven, the Mildred Pierce miniseries and now Carol. Haynes evokes the period perfectly. Just like Far from Heaven, Carol is beautifully photographed by Edward Lachman. Carol uses music composed by the great Elmer Bernstein, who scored Haynes’ Far from Heaven and who died in 2004.

Both lead actresses have justifiably garnered nominations for acting awards. Rooney brilliantly embodies Therese’s confusion, yearning and excitement, her immaturity and her resolve. Blanchett, of course, nails the role of Carol, with her impulsive wilfulness, masterful charm and then panicked desperation.

Carol’s husband is played by Kyle Chandler, who after Friday Night Lights, just keeps showing up in wonderful movies: Super 8, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, The Wolf of Wall Street, and in a dazzling performance as the alcoholic dad in The Spectacular Now. Initially, I thought that the role of Carol’s husband was pretty one-dimensional. But, upon reflection, I realized that Chandler is so good that I hadn’t recognized how complex the husband’s character is – so afraid of his mother and of social convention, yet so hopelessly drawn to Carol.

Sarah Paulson, so unforgettable as Mistress Epps in 12 Years a Slave, the mom in Mud and Miss Isringhausen in Deadwood, is striking once again as Carol’s lesbian childhood friend.

Carol may be the most well-acted film of the year. It’s a satisfying romance that most audiences will enjoy.

Blue Jasmine: a portrait both profound and funny

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Peter Skarsgaard and Cate Blanchett in BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is a remarkably profound portrait of a woman seemingly ruined by circumstance and trying desperately to cling to who she thought she was.  In a stunning performance, Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine, a New York socialite whose billionaire swindler of a hubby has lost his freedom and his fortune to the FBI.  Jasmine’s identity has been based on the privilege derived from her money, her marriage and her social station – and all of that is suddenly gone.  Flat broke and reeling from the shock of it all, she seeks refuge with her working class San Francisco sister.

Despite her desperate situation, Jasmine arrives still brimming with deluded entitlement, Woody having calculated an undeniable resemblance to Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.  But Blue Jasmine is more accessible than the great play Streetcar because it’s so damn funny.  Jasmine’s pretensions are as pathetic as Blanche’s, but it’s very, very funny when her top shelf expectations collide with her current reality.

Cate Blanchett will certainly be nominated for an Oscar for this role.  Blanchett is able to play a woman who is suffering a real and fundamental breakdown through a series of comic episodes.  She flawlessly reveals Jasmine’s personality cocktail of charm, denial, shock, desperation and sense of authority.

I know that a lot of folks are put off by the creepiness of Woody’s real life marriage, but he has written a great female lead role for Blanchett, and he’s directed actresses to four Oscars in the past, as outlined in this recent New York Times article.

In my favorite scene, Jasmine faces her young nephews across a diner’s booth in a diner.  They ask her questions with childish directness and inappropriateness.  Her answers are candid from her point of view, but nonetheless astoundingly deluded – and just as inappropriate.  The scene is deeply insightful and hilarious.

Who and what has brought Jasmine to her knees?  Certainly she has been victimized by her amoral sleazeball of a husband, but she vigorously refuses to consider taking any responsibility herself.  Can she be forced to look within?  And is she strong enough to face what she would see?

Sally Hawkins is equally perfect as Jasmine’s good-hearted sister Ginger, a woman who doesn’t expect much from life and still gets disappointed.  Andrew Dice Clay, of all people, is excellent as Ginger’s ex, a lug who rises to a moment of epic truth-telling.   Louis C.K. brings just the right awkward earnestness to the apparently decent guy who takes a hankering to the long-suffering Ginger.  Alec Baldwin nails the role of Jasmine’s husband,  a man whose continual superficial charm almost masks his cold predatory eyes, and it’s a tribute to Baldwin’s skill that he makes such a natural performance seem so effortless.

Playing a primarily comic character, Bobby Cannavale delivers a lot of sweaty energy, but with too much scenery chewing. The great actors Peter Skarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg do what they can with far less textured characters.

The Wife thought Blue Jasmine dragged in places, and she was distracted by some components that didn’t ring true about the San Francisco setting – two key working class characters with Tri-State Guido accents and a Sunday afternoon cocktail party where the men wear neckties; she’s dead right on both points, but they didn’t bother me.

Blue Jasmine may not rise to the level of Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives, but it’s a pretty good film with a superlative, unforgettable performance.

Hanna: girl power to the max

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Here is a paranoid thrill ride starring Saoirse Ronan as a 16-year-old raised in the Arctic Circle to be a master assassin by her rogue secret agent father (Eric Bana), and then released upon the CIA.  She is matched up against special ops wiz Cate Blanchett.

The story relies on two novelties. First, a teenage girl is raised to speak 20 languages fluently and kill people with her hands.  Second,  the same teenage girl is raised to have no familiarity with electricity, music and other teens.  Because Ronan is perfect and the pacing flies along, sthe story works. Hanna is ably directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist).