Batman Returns

Year of release: 1992.                     Directed by Tim Burton.                Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, and Christopher Walken.

The first (brief) review I wrote of Batman Returns began as follows: “Everything about this film can be explained by simply remembering this is not Batman film, it is not a superhero film, it is a Tim Burton film. And it is a Tim Burton film about three psychopaths with parent issues who costume play while endangering the lives of every resident in Gotham City.”

If you’re wondering who the three psychopaths are, they are Danny DeVito’s Penguin, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, and Michael Keaton’s Batman. I believe Batman murders four people in this film—two of whom he kills upon his first screen entrance. DeVito’s grunting, grotesque, and strangely sex-starved Penguin with his bizarre revenge plot is the obvious villain, and while Pfeiffer’s sinister Catwoman is a far cry from the sympathetic Selina Kyle of later screen adaptations, her unresolved parent issues and ticking maternal clock make for a perfectly explosive femme fatale to foil both the Penguin and Batman.

While the Penguin is the obvious villain, Christopher Walken’s business mogul Max Shreck rivals him for control of Gotham City in a game of politics where they continually shift between allies and enemies. Have I mentioned that Keaton’s emotionally repressed Batman and Bruce Wayne is barely in this film? It’s vastly superior to Burton’s 1989 Batman for that alone, and the little we see of this stoic caped crusader only serves to reinforce that he’s as unhinged as his two nemeses.

I, and others, have included Batman Returns on the list of great Christmas movies, because it is set completely around Christmas. For a holiday about the Incarnation, reconciliation between heaven and earth, and a time of general peace and good will on earth, a movie about sexually repressed psychopaths with traumatic childhoods taking out their anger and neuroses on an entire city populace as they all navigate a late-stage capitalist hellscape controlled by one equally corrupt, but boringly idiotic, man simply because he has money, may not seem like a normal choice for festive cheer. However, if there ever were an in absentia depiction of a world that needed a savior, this is it.

A later and more beloved film about the Dark Knight calls him the hero we deserve, not the one we need. In Batman Returns, it’s a stretch even to call him a hero. There is a case to be made that Catwoman is the actual hero here given she sacrifices one of her nine literal lives to murder Shreck, and as the character who bears the brunt of capitalism’s oppression, her insanity has the most natural causes behind it. For the record, I would not make that case—this film has no heroes in my book—but while this incarnation of Catwoman is more evil than later ones, it is possible to say she’s more righteous and realistic than any other character.

Pfeiffer delivers the lines of a repressed and rebellious femme fatale with such camp and passion that the psychopathy of all the major characters comes into focus around her. The contrast of her two entrances into her pink, one bedroom apartment so perfectly captures the transformation of a bachelorette longing for partnership with a burned-out bitch determined to screw over those who have made her life hell, which is noted through the changing set design of her bedroom.

Catwoman’s shifting hatred between Shreck and Batman, may seem unreasonable, but as a psychopath, why should she be expected to think reasonably? As she says, “Life’s a bitch, and so am I,” and she sees to it to dish that bitchiness out to anyone who gets in her way. Also, as both Schreck and Batman are two filthy rich capitalists, they are more similar than not. Thankfully, Batman Returns does not have the handwringing over billionaires using their wealth to save a city as Robert Pattinson’s Batman did. Nor does it entertain any questions about Batman being a hero or a villain as Nolan’s trilogy did, despite Keaton’s Batman being one of the most unethical screen versions of the superhero. It takes the comic book conventions at face value and runs with them, along with running with its own bonkers premise—including, but not limited to, the scene where Pfeiffer self-grooms her leather catsuit and deepthroats a parakeet to intimidate the Penguin.

In the age of the MCU and a general cinematic obsession with realism, I cannot begin to describe how refreshing this straightforward, pulpy camp is to watch. From the practically un-choreographed fight sequences to villains randomly pointing guns in the air to everyone pausing to watch the acrobatics of whom they’re fighting, the lack of realism makes this fantasy world a delight. I’m still not sure I’d call this Burton’s best film, although it is unquestionably a contender, but it is without a doubt the most Tim Burton film ever.

There’s something tragically appropriate about a Christmas film calling a corrupt capitalist the Santa Claus of a city, which is how Shreck is introduced. While Santa is a myth with a tangential relationship to the true meaning of Christmas, there is a rite of passage for many children when they learn the truth about Santa and Christmas presents. In Batman Returns, the orphaned Batman, the rejected Penguin, and the estranged Catwoman were all clearly deprived of healthy, formative relationships with their parents, and letting those family tensions erupt over Christmastime at the cost of an entire society is a delightfully campy masterstroke.

Even more fittingly, in a world that needs a savior, or has lost any spirit of Christmas, mistaking capitalist greed for generosity, which the citizens of Gotham do as they lionize Shreck, makes this tragic hellscape all the more quintessentially Burtonesque. The Gotham police’s reliance on Batman is yet another wish for more money to save the day. The commitment to this campy tragedy escalates perfectly until the only way to wake up from the nightmare is to see mommy kissing Santa Claus. And at that point, as innocence is shattered, no amount of presents or money can solve childhood trauma or capitalism’s injustice. So that’s when you get a cat. Merry Christmas.

Personal recommendation: A+

Barbie

Year of release: 2023.     Directed by Greta Gerwig.             Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, and Helen Mirren.

If you saw the first teaser for Barbie, you may have thought the 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute was a one-off gag filmed just to promote the movie. You would have been wrong. Not to spoil the best surprises of the film, but the prologue telling the history of the world from the perspective of the Barbies is both hilarious and an ingenious homage to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

The homage is also thoroughly appropriate given the film’s epilogue where stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) enters a new chapter of her life not at all dissimilar from man’s rebirth as the space child at the end of 2001. To drive the new life idea home, the final line is a funny zinger about the ability to do just that.

What if I also said there’s a “beach off” among the Kens that plays extremely similarly to the pie fight that initially ended Dr. Strangelove? Or a proud proclamation of the same dolls’ identities reminiscent of the most famous line from Spartacus? And what if in fighting the villain of patriarchy, two women communicate mentally, and one of their daughters refers to it as “shining?”

I am convinced there must be more Kubrick references in Barbie, and I’d happily see it again just to catch more of them, but the film delivers on so many other levels as well.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s story does almost nothing that I expected, and while the trailers hinted at similarities with The LEGO Movie, it is very much something different. When stereotypical Barbie discovers her perfect pink world with arched feet and hot, waterless showers falling apart with thoughts of *gasp* death, weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) informs her she has to travel to the real world and find the child playing with her who has clearly become troubled by something, thus repairing the rift between their two worlds. Stereotypical Barbie just has to choose the Birkenstock over the pink heel, which to be fair, is a choice that not many Barbies would want to make.

If stereotypical Barbie is apprehensive about going to the real world, she is reassured when the other Barbies remind her that the invention of Barbie empowered young girls, letting them know they could be anything they want and not just mothers, and now as a result women hold all positions of power in the real world. And women everywhere will probably want to run up to her and hug her for initiating feminism and fixing all women’s problems.

“At least,” Helen Mirren’s narrator tells us, “That’s what the Barbies believe.” Helen Mirren also delivers my favorite joke in the film, turning an expected breakdown from Robbie’s Barbie into something hilarious, but I’m not spoiling that here.

The slap of cold water that is the real world shocks and appalls stereotypical Barbie while making Ken (Ryan Gosling) feel empowered and respected. A crash course on patriarchy thrills Ken, which he eagerly takes back to Barbieland to inform the other Kens on how they’re supposed to be subjugating the Barbies, riding horses, drinking beer, and watching The Godfather.

As an inverse of the real world’s patriarchal structure, Barbieland is a world where the Kens cannot be president, cannot have Supreme Court appointments, cannot hold high paying jobs, and exist purely for the edification of the Barbies. Since the Ken dolls were created by Mattel to be a companion for Barbie, it’s a very clever twist that demonstrates the toxicity of patriarchy that has plagued the real world for centuries. It reminds me of Aamer Rahman’s comedy bit about reverse racism only being possible with a time machine that would enable Africa to colonize Europe and inflict the abuses on white people that they inflicted on Black people for centuries.

I suppose it needs to be said given the absurd hatred Barbie is generating from right-wing incels for its wokeness, but a film that says we should build a society where women and men are treated equally with equal opportunities is hardly what I’d call woke. Although in a post-MAGA world, general human decency often is woke, so I suppose the label is not wrong, but the film’s basic feminist message is a beautiful thing that would have widely been accepted had not the alt-right gained so much traction in recent years. Nonetheless, the film’s box office success and glowing reviews are reason for hope.

Like Gerwig’s two previous films, Barbie is another example of Graham Greene’s maxim that movies should depict the world as it is and as it should be. While the subject matter here may seem far removed from Lady Bird and Little Women, there is a common thread of hope and decency that celebrates the beauty of love for what is true, noble, and good in the midst of an imperfect world.

Between Barbieland and the real world, there is so much good, and to the extent that the film has any villain at all, it is patriarchy. Patriarchy claims victims of the Kens, the Barbies, America Ferrera’s mother and secretary for Mattel, and Will Ferrell’s CEO of Mattel, who is not a villain copied from The LEGO Movie as the trailers suggested, but a well-meaning executive who wants to help girls and women while not realizing the ways he’s accepted patriarchal norms.

Ferrera’s third act speech that sets up the climax of the movie may be on-the-nose, but it exhibits the same passion a five-year-old girl has for her make-believe land with Barbies, and as a mom reconnecting with that same childhood passion, I thought the speech worked brilliantly.

Several reviews have commented on how Gosling steals the movie, but honestly, Robbie is just as good and gives him an equally clueless character to play off of. The two of them make for a great duo for a road trip movie that takes hundreds of unexpected turns.

Returning to Kubrick, Gerwig and Baumbach wrote a movie about human progress and relationships where our own inventions (patriarchy instead of HAL) plague us and hinder that progress until we can overcome them. It makes the 2001 framing story all the more fitting, and it shows how we can appreciate that journey through an obelisk and light show or a polarizing doll.

Personal recommendation: A-

Oppenheimer

Year of release: 2023. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, and Robert Downey Jr.

Bruce Wayne, as imagined by Christopher Nolan in his Dark Knight Trilogy, watches his parents be killed by a Gotham City gangster who turns out to have been hired by his later mentor Ra’s al Ghul. Bruce takes his childhood fear of bats and falling to create a superhero that visits those fears onto Gotham’s criminals. At the height of Bruce’s power, he builds a cellular spy network reminiscent of the Patriot Act to track his most dangerous nemesis, and he then takes the fall for that nemesis’ crimes to preserve peace in Gotham, laying aside his work as the caped crusader with feelings of guilt about whether he did the right thing.

Why I am talking about Nolan’s Batman? Because in the Nolan Cinematic Universe, J. Robert Oppenheimer is nearly indistinguishable from Bruce Wayne. Other than Wayne being a lapsed Episcopalian (commonly assumed knowledge among superhero fans) and Oppenheimer being Jewish. No comment on the casting of Cillian Murphy as a Jew.

I do not mean to sound glib or dismissive, but Oppenheimer, Nolan’s latest sprawling historical epic that plays with time and reckons with the potential end of the world, is essentially Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises rolled into one three-hour film. That’s a factually neutral observation, not a criticism.

J. Robert Oppenheimer is a brilliant theorist who introduces quantum physics to the United States after studying it in Europe, alongside several Nazis. He’s selected to head the Manhattan Project, builds the first atomic bomb, later develops reservations about building more weapons of mass destruction although never expresses regret for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then becomes a fall guy for the communist witch hunts under McCarthyism, all while being wracked by guilt over whether he destroyed or saved the world.

What makes Nolan’s presentation of this story engaging is the liberal cross-cutting from timeline to timeline, punctuating three phases of Oppenheimer’s career with comparisons to the other two. If the movie is too long (and it is by about 30 minutes), it’s never boring even as it becomes a relentless marathon of big ideas told with bigger gestures matched by Ludwig Göransson’s bombastic, swelling score.

As Oppenheimer, Murphy does a great job at capturing the stoic coldness typical of most Nolan protagonists. At their best (Christian Bale in The Prestige and Guy Pearce in Memento), Nolan protagonists are antiheros who meticulously construct their own hell through their obsession with their career or mission combined with their off-putting personalities. Oppenheimer is certainly no exception, burning bridges with authorities and fraternizing with communists, which includes screwing one, both of which combine to make his post-war crucifixion all the more of a foregone conclusion.

I was less interested in the kangaroo court that a political rival sets up to oust Oppenheimer as a petty act of revenge than I was in the film’s presentation of Oppenheimer’s willingness to go along with it over his guilt at starting the Cold War, or so he believes. If Bruce Wayne and Cooper (Interstellar) are Nolan’s most noble flawed protagonists, with Alfred and Leonard (The Prestige and Memento) being the most villainous ones, J. Robert Oppenheimer is somewhere in between. The common link is all these men obsess over something until they lose everything else.

Nolan is not a subtle filmmaker when it comes to political themes and philosophical ideas, as starkly contrasted by his masterful puzzle-making that provides easily missed clues, which build to a jaw dropping reveal. It’s why his best films are his ruthless revenge thrillers and his weakest are attempts at philosophizing and depicting a noble humanism. Oppenheimer has both elements, but it shifts back to the puzzle-making of his earlier films, and the philosophical ideas are less on the nose than they have been in other recent offerings of his.

The puzzle’s reveal and third act twist of Oppenheimer will be no shock to history buffs, but that doesn’t mean Nolan didn’t set them up masterfully. For those who don’t know who the villain is (I didn’t) I won’t spoil it here, but the performance by that actor is superb, and his reveal as evil and his downfall are masterfully handled. The downfall is slightly undermined by an on-the-nose moment when an intern reveals the senator who thwarted him was some kid from Massachusetts who wants to make a name for himself, “Kennedy. John F. Kennedy.”

For all of Oppenheimer’s masterful craftsmanship, it hits its viewers over the head with moments like that way too often. Some of them land the intended punch; some of them don’t. My favorite of such scenes was when Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) is being grilled by Jason Clarke’s unethical lawyer and shows herself to be intellectually his equal if not superior. The most jarring of such scenes involves an interrogation about Oppenheimer’s ongoing affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) as Kitty imagines their naked bodies thrusting in front of her and the entire tribunal for the Atomic Energy Commission. It’s so obviously Nolan’s first explicit sex scene and one of the only scenes in the film not from Oppenheimer’s perspective, that it comes across as more of a clumsy shock than anything else.

Not that the sex scenes in Oppenheimer weren’t necessary for the story. They all contribute to Oppenheimer’s assholery, which is an essential part of a Nolan protagonist, and the first sex scene provides Nolan an opportunity to introduce Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s another on the nose moment, especially given the line’s repetition when the Trinity test is successful, but for the integration of Oppenheimer’s messy personal life with his equal messy professional and political lives, I thought it worked.

As the theorist who can’t quite connect with the real world, Murphy’s Oppenheimer fits very neatly into the Nolan Cinematic Universe. As he struggles at school with how to relate to a professor, how to manage his affections for various women, how to serve his country, and whether the world should continue building atomic weapons, the gnawing loneliness of yet another genius man pervades the film. A tense, humorous exchange between Oppenheimer and General Groves (a very good Matt Damon) right before the Trinity test highlights that disconnect, as Oppenheimer assume the near zero chances of setting off a chain reaction that annihilates the entire world will appease the general. While we never see the horror of Oppenheimer’s work, Nolan does make it known through descriptions of the Japanese and Korean casualties as well as Murphy’s depiction of Oppenheimer’s breakdowns and imagining of his friends suffering the same fate.

At the center of the film is a tragedy, and rather horrific one at that, as Nolan’s lonely genius reaches out for connections in the most explosive ways possible finding the same hole that forms a link throughout so much of Nolan’s work.

Personal Recommendation: B

The Little Mermaid

Year of release: 2023 Directed by Rob Marshall.             Starring Halle Bailey, Jacob Tremblay, Daveed Diggs, Awkwafina, Jonah Hauer-King, Javier Bardem, and Melissa McCarthy.

When the first teaser for Disney’s live action remake of The Little Mermaid dropped, the soundwaves surrounding it quickly became dominated by racist morons complaining that Ariel was no longer white with red hair. A part of me can’t believes I had to type that sentence in 2023, but here we are. What that toxic discourse covered up was how bad the teaser looked. I’m cynical enough to think Disney would not be above starting such racist bullshit as a marketing ploy, but regardless, the first focus on the film was the casting of Halle Bailey.

For the record, she is phenomenal and probably the best live action Disney princess to date. She’s substantially better than Emma Watson as Belle in the Beauty and the Beast remake, partially because her singing isn’t autotuned into oblivion, and partially because she captures the longing of a teenage mermaid for the unknown human world quite well. I look forward to seeing her in the adaptation of The Color Purple musical in December. It is also very nice to see a Disney princess and mythological creature portrayed as a person of color, and Disney and Rob Marshall deserve credit for her casting.

What Disney does not deserve credit for is the ableist rewriting of Howard Ashman’s lyrics. (Also the straightening of them, but more on that later.) In “Kiss the Girl” Lin-Manuel Miranda provides some “sanitized” words that stand out like a sore thumb, because apparently Disney executives correctly realized it was predatory to kiss a girl who can’t consent, but erroneously decided Ariel couldn’t consent because she can’t speak at that moment.

I’m very sorry to hear that executive at Disney are so out of touch with reality that they are unaware that sign language, gesturing, writing, and other forms of non-verbal communication exist. And that they seem to think that people who cannot speak are broken, inferior beings who can’t fall in love or express that. To make matters worse, Ursula erases Ariel’s memory so she doesn’t realize she needs to share true love’s kiss with Eric before three days or she reverts to a mermaid. For the supposed awareness around consent, that deviation from the original makes Sebastian, Flounder, and Scuttle’s forcing of the romance far more cringeworthy than anything in Ashman’s original lyrics.

As to why that deviation from the original film was added to a movie that mostly adheres to the original slavishly, I don’t know. It might be explained by the bloat that permeates the entire movie. Rob Marshall’s overriding attitude seemed to be “Why do something in two minutes, if you can do it in eight?” The only thing Ursula’s memory erasure does is add extra dialogue making the on-land romance between Ariel and Eric take longer.

At just over two hours, the movie is unquestionably too long. The first hour of it moves along passably, with “Under the Sea” being the one scene that doesn’t look like it was shot by a camera with a black nylon stocking over it. It is the best song in the score, and it deservedly won Menken and Ashman their first Oscar in 1990. Daveed Diggs was a fantastic choice to play Sebastian, and he delivers it beautifully. Marshall’s cutting to a school of dolphins for “down here all the fish is happy” was a bizarre choice, as the emphasis on the word “fish” with the imagery of dolphins took me right out of the song, but Diggs pulled me back in quickly, in spite of some other visual choices on Marshall’s part that make no sense.

Excuse me, but I need to get this out of the way.

THEY CUT THE BEST VERSE OF “POOR UNFORTUNATE SOULS!!!!!!!!” LIKE, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WERE THEY THINKING WITH THAT??????

Okay, now on to the moment where the movie really began to derail. Melissa McCarthy is fine as Ursula. She’s no where near as menacing or flamboyantly queer as Pat Carroll’s Sea Witch was, but I really don’t think that’s her fault. Her first two scenes before her big number are almost verbatim quotes of Carroll’s lines, which pales for anyone who enjoyed Carroll’s delivery.

More problematically, Marshall’s odd visual choices really came to a head in “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” When Ursula sings “Now it’s happened once or twice, someone couldn’t pay the price” she shows two merfolk being punished in the animated film. Here she holds up eight skulls of merfolk, which is substantially more than once or twice. The relentlessly dark palette of the film is probably most offensive in this song, with the dark blue being punctuated by bursts of orange, which is so uninspired color-wise that it’s depressing.

Even more problematically, the missing verse is the one about communicating without words and saying women are better silent anyway. Apparently the filmmakers decided a villain giving villainous advice was a problem, so they stripped the villain of some of her most iconic lines, which contribute to “Poor Unfortunate Souls” being the best Disney villain song. (Yes, I will die on that hill. Don’t argue that with me.) The other problem with omitting that verse is that the lyric and dramatic foil that Ashman set up between “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and Ariel’s wish in “Part of Your World” is gone too.

Ariel sings, “Bet you on land they understand, bet they don’t reprimand their daughters.” When Ursula sings, “Yes, on land it’s much preferred for ladies not to say a word, after all, dear, what is idle prattle for?” it not only shows the Sea Witch is subverting Ariel’s dreams while pretending to answer them, but it also forms a dramatic development through the song lyrics. Cutting that was honestly unforgivable.

One of the best aspects of the Disney renaissance was the way almost all the villains resurrected the queer coding of the 1940s and ‘50s. Pat Carroll’s butch, drag queen-inspired Sea Witch, has obvious lesbian undertones, of which McCarthy’s Ursula only has a faint reminiscence. The new revelation that Ursula is King Triton’s sister contributes to the straightening of the character by making her an evil aunt of the protagonist and not the flamboyant outsider she was in the 1989 film. The makeup copies the animated character, so the queerness is still there minimally, but the desire to control and manipulate a young woman is gone along with the missing verse of the villain song. This Ursula is only a power-hungry witch willing to use her niece as a pawn; the predatory and sexual undertones are eradicated.

Releasing The Little Mermaid on the last weekend before Pride Month, with its cuts and alterations to the lyrics of an iconic gay song-writer who died from AIDS was certainly a choice. That his song-writing partner had to write new songs that drastically pale in comparison to the work that largely started the Disney renaissance adds insult to injury.

For the record, I will also die on the hill that Alan Menken has never partnered with a lyricist as great as Howard Ashman. Steven Schwartz came close, but everyone else Menken has worked with is a notable step down. Menken and Miranda have written three new songs for this version of The Little Mermaid. Eric’s solo, “Wild Uncharted Waters,” is fine, even if it garners a deserved eyeroll for its introduction of on-the-nose similarities between Eric and Ariel by making them both rebellious teenagers from their opposite sex parents.

“The Scuttlebutt” is a fifth-rate Hamilton remix and an affront to humanity that is so jarringly different from the rest of the score that it feels like a painful slap in the face reminding us that Ashman died and Miranda does not even have half of his talent.

Ariel has one new solo, “For the First Time,” which makes no freaking sense at all. I am willing to overlook giving Ariel a song after she loses her voice and is supposed to be mute until she breaks Ursula’s necklace, since she can obviously still think. However, the lyrics are all about adapting to life on land, how difficult it is to walk because of gravity, how hard it is to wear a corset, and how uncomfortable shoes are. I’m sorry, but if Ariel still thinks a fork is a dinglehopper and you use it to style your hair, how the hell does she know what gravity, corsets, and shoes are, and how could she be singing about them? It would be as if Eliza Doolittle, after mastering the speech inflections of a British lady, sang a song about attending a ball and how wonderful it was without ever having been to a ball.

“Part of Your World” was an I want song that was largely responsible for launching the Disney renaissance. “Under the Sea” cemented it as a fabulous show-stopper, and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” made a clichéd villain a menacing, three-dimensional character while giving representation to the LGBTQ+ community at the height of AIDS. Nowadays Disney is largely devoid of original ideas, and while their desperate cash grabs usually have enough great material from their source to be watchable, they’re a far cry from the original that many people loved.

For the record, I never loved The Little Mermaid. I adore the score and might argue it’s the best work Menken and Ashman did for Disney—it’s really close between that and Beauty and the Beast—but the absurd happy ending that contradicts Hans Christen Andersen’s tragic fairy tale of longing for unattainable love was a weak point for me as soon as I was aware of it. There was a brief moment in the 2023 Little Mermaid when I thought a quasi-tragic ending might actually occur. (If it had occurred, I’d have written a very different review.) Unfortunately, Disney is afraid to take any risks and do anything that would alter the products they built their name on.

Around half-way through this movie, I felt bad for Halle Bailey. She was cast as a Disney princess, gave it her very, very good all, only to be stuck in a lifeless cash grab that bastardized the best aspects of the original film. I even felt a little bad for Rob Marshall, because most of the lousy creative decisions obviously came from higher up executives.

Ultimately, I was angry and sad to watch an iconic queer-coded character neutered, to watch a famous gay lyricist have his lyrics likewise neutered, and to watch yet another bloated, soulless remake from Disney that neuters the story of a gay author writing about his forbidden love who married a woman leaving him alone. If Disney wants to neuter anything as a force for good, perhaps they could neuter the careers of racist and homophobic fascists like Ron DeSantis and Trump instead of churning out remakes like this.

Personal Recommendation: D

TÁR

Year of release: 2022. Directed by Todd Field. Starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong, and Sophie Kauer.

Earlier this year I went to hear the National Youth Orchestra perform their summer program at Carnegie Hall. The program was the Elgar Cello Concerto and Mahler 5. My personal feelings about Elgar aside, the summer academy for those high schoolers yielded amazing results in a concert that culminated in one of the most daunting symphonies ever composed. (Actually, it culminated with an encore medley of E.T. themes, which was a perfect digestif to the concert.)

My personal feelings about Elgar not aside, the only reason to program a work as horrendously boring as his Cello Concerto is to have the audience take a nap so they’re refreshed for the Mahler. (For the record, I do like some Elgar, but he’s a very hit or miss composer for me, and the Cello Concerto is a big miss.)

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett in a ferocious performance that’s probably her greatest work yet) presumably does not share my antipathy toward the Elgar Cello Concerto, and thus she chooses to pair it with the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Mahler 5 under her baton. However, by the time she selects it, it is clear Lydia has ulterior motives and is trying to groom a young, new cellist who has just joined her orchestra.

Lydia is not a monster from the first scene; indeed, the backstage shots of her taking pills to calm her nerves and being reassured by her assistant before an interview with Adam Gopnik (himself) garners her some sympathy, even if her responses to the interview are a little off-putting and clearly somewhat phony. However, as the film progresses, she becomes more and more unlikeable and the depths of her inhumanity and arrogance become increasingly apparent. That Blanchett maintains our interest in Lydia and what happens to her while also making her so repulsive is a testament to the power of her performance.

Shortly after that interview, Lydia has lunch with a colleague who clearly worships her and then teaches a conducting masterclass at Juilliard. The masterclass takes an interesting turn, when a BIPOC, pangender student insists that they can’t really be into Bach because he was a straight, cis, white man who fathered too many kids.

I’ll be honest, as a professional musician who has reckoned with truly problematic composers and performers, dismissing Bach for those reasons reeks of glib, lazy involvement with one’s art while doing nothing to actually address past and present injustices, and it gives wokism a bad name. (If you want to talk about the anti-Semitism in the St. Matthew Passion and how we reconcile that, or don’t, with current performances, that’s an entirely different question.)

Lydia’s response, however, is even worse. Her tirade humiliates the student and builds on her belief that there is no gender discrimination in classical music, and we should examine all music in a vacuum as if it exists independently of its creator, and the works have no bearing on the lives of their composers.

This is a striking contrast to the opening New Yorker interview where she reverently describes her mentor Leonard Bernstein grappling with the greater context of Mahler 5 and changing his interpretation of it depending on where he was conducting it. In that interview, she insists it’s impossible to conduct Mahler 5 unless you know the details of what was going on in Mahler’s personal life, because that influenced how he composed the symphony.

If this juxtaposition of scenes and attitudes doesn’t reveal Lydia’s hypocrisy and shallowness at first, her later interactions with everyone in her life do. A notable scene for a “blind” cello audition shows Lydia noticing that one auditionee is the attractive young female she saw earlier, because she sees the same shoes beneath the stage curtain. Lydia promptly erases whatever criticism she had written on her form.

According to Lydia’s wife (Nina Hoss), the concertmistress for the Berlin Philharmonic, the only non-transactional relationship Lydia has ever held is with their daughter. And yet, even that relationship is tainted, as Lydia has strict rules the girl must follow. Lydia’s handling of a school bully is nothing short of emotional child abuse, because in her world power and favoritism are how you achieve anything.

TÁR isn’t really a cautionary tale about power corrupting or a feminist who broke glass ceilings and then sealed them over behind herself. It’s a character study of an absolute monster from that monster’s perspective.

If that sounds tiring, or if this review’s focus on Lydia’s unethical behavior makes it seems like she’s an overbearing presence on the film, that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a riveting descent into madness by a character who has replaced human interactions with artistic ones, and director Todd Field knows how to punctuate the film with reminders of the humanity Lydia is so lacking.

The film is shot entirely from Lydia’s perspective, and the unreliable narrator trope is brilliantly reflected in the editing. The opening scenes use long takes as Lydia’s confidence in asserting her worldview and her power comes across. As challenges and reckonings to that enter, the film becomes increasingly choppy and disjointed.

The one possible flaw (a second viewing my change my mind) is the final sequence which seemingly comes out of left field, because Lydia has completely lost her mind and her career. I briefly wondered if the last thirty minutes or so all took place in her mind, but I don’t think that interpretation is right.

The final breakdown of Lydia is perfectly filmed and choreographed, drawing from nearly every prominent scene that led to that climax. The hazy tracking shots perfectly reflect Lydia’s nightmares, and earlier exchanges all come to a head there.

In our culture of #metoo and canceling problematic artists, Lydia’s cancellation is a shattering of her world. That shattering is likewise reflected in the quicker editing as a world of abuse falls apart and Lydia loses her accomplishments. To claim that the film shares Lydia’s disdain of cancel culture is not accurate. For one thing, she is an unreliable narrator. More importantly, depiction of an obviously toxic world does not equal an endorsement of that world, and cancel culture is a threat to Lydia’s toxic world.

If Lydia has any real life counterpart, it’s probably James Levine, whom the film name drops by a character who sympathizes with him. While her crimes don’t equal his, and while her cancellation ends up being more severe than his ever was during his life, the question of how does one reckon with art created by monsters permeates the film.

I remember someone once saying “for every ‘separate the art from the artist’ person, there’s a better artist who isn’t a swamp monster.” I sadly disagree. Sometimes, there is a monster who is unparalleled in their artistic ability. (Confession: every time I make a list of who I think the ten greatest directors are, there’s one person I leave off, because I don’t want to entertain the conversation about the quality of his films given the crimes he committed.)

What we do with those monsters and their work is a crucial conversation. The romanticization of the asshole artist has created centuries of abuse and turning a blind eye to countless victims. TÁR is an unflinching depiction of that world, which challenges it through the toll it takes on everyone and everything: the asshole artist, the victims, their colleagues, and the art itself.

It is entirely appropriate that TÁR issues this challenge through the story of a conductor, a profession that has housed countless asshole artists. Even more appropriately, that conductor is on the brink of her career’s pinnacle achievement, and she is a woman who has fully imbibed the toxicity imbued in her profession’s past, a toxicity that at one point would have shut her out.

It’s no secret that conductors have a reputation for being arrogant, and TÁR is an example of that arrogance taken to an 11. If there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy, it’s the tragic side of one of the most famous musician jokes:

Four conductors were sitting in a bar. Bernstein and Boulez were arguing over who was the greatest conductor. Bernstein insisted it must be him, because he had made more recordings than any other conductor. Boulez countered that he had conducted more of the world’s top orchestras, so he must be the greatest conductor. This went back and forth for some time. Looking to resolve this argument, Kleiber leaned over and said, “Fellows, you’re both wrong. God himself told me I’m the greatest conductor ever.” At which point, von Karajan slammed down his drink and said, “That’s not true, I never said that!”

Personal recommendation: A