Filed under: art, movies, music | Tags: Amy Taubin, Cate Blanchett, conductor, film, film criticism, music, stupidity, Tár
Can anyone introduce me to film critic, Amy Taubin? I discovered her awesomeness when I went searching for some sensible criticism about the much lauded film, Tár, and found her on a podcast talking a great deal of sense. She said, “It has to be one of the stupidest movies I’ve seen in many a long year” and I could not have agreed more. I said something similar, out loud, multiple times, as we watched it (at home, don’t worry. I wasn’t exclaiming in public!). It was a very stupid movie, which was all the more irritating given how smart it thinks it was.
I have a long list of things I found exceptionally stupid – but I feel like I should mostly focus on one because I’m worried that it’s a bit of stupidity that might become extremely popular, given the accolades this stupid film is receiving.
The trick at the heart of this movie is that the writer wrote a pretty bog standard story about a man abusing his power and then just cast a woman in the part instead, suddenly making his dumb story about a man getting his #MeToo comeuppance seem like it might be interesting. It isn’t. But because it’s a woman doing stuff we usually see men doing, it seems like it might be edgy or compelling. There’s been virtually no attempt to make this a believable story about a woman. It would be a somewhat believable story about a man, but as it is, it feels like they just kept the story as it was, changed some pronouns and added a line or two about gender and called it a day.
Writers. My friends, my fellow creative folks, please don’t do this. I fully support all the changing of Baggage Handler # 1 from Glen to Glenda. This gives a lot of women jobs that weren’t available before! I’m all for it! But to attempt to tell a man’s story with a woman in the role, just to make it interesting, is egregiously transparent. This guy wrote a story about a man falling apart due to his abuses of power and then realized it would never get made so he gave it to Cate Blanchett to play – and now they’re all waiting for the awards to roll in.
And you know, I get it. I’ve done it. In high school, my friend and I put on a fairly banal play called Businessman’s Lunch – but we gender reversed it so we cast girls to play the sexist businessmen and a boy to play the waitress that the men harass. It DID turn a sexist story into an interesting look at gender. I’m pretty proud of that piece we made. But it was pretty sophomoric. I think we were literal high school sophomores. I guess I hoped for more from Oscar Nominated people than something like what I came up with at age fifteen. You know?
But this is all bonkers. The credits that begin the film (not the end credits that roll relentlessly at the beginning for some pretentious reason. I’m talking about the accomplishments that New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik reads that supposedly belong to Cate Blanchett’s character) that are supposed to help us believe that this character is immensely successful – are all impossibly enormous. (As my friend said, “They might as well have said she was an astronaut, given the realm of reality those credits were living in.”) Like, those are credits no one could have. No one. Not a man and definitely not a woman. As I learned from my friend, there is currently literally only one woman who has a reasonably successful conducting career and she had never led even one of the four major orchestras this character is supposed to have led all of. It is a fantasy within a fantasy. No one’s career involves leading four major orchestras – but in a field where there is literally only one woman, a woman could CERTAINLY not be in that position. And the character is blasé about it. She says she believes she has had no special challenges as a woman in the field.
This would be impossible. In a field that requires getting large groups of people to work together, there is no way, in this current world we live in, a woman conducting could believe she’s had no challenges. Now – maybe she just SAYS these things – there are women who say such things as a strategy to avoid having to discuss gender 24/7 but none of the obstacles that this character runs into are anything like what women actually come up against. This character is only accidentally a woman.
It all just feels like an excuse to rail against “all this woke business” in a slightly more palatable form. Like, if it’s beautiful Cate Blanchett abusing power, we don’t mind so much. We sympathize with her bad deeds! She’s a lady genius so we don’t mind her shaky ethics!
Am I saying women wouldn’t abuse their power should they, by some chance, get some? Not at all. Surely some would and it would be interesting to watch a film about how women actually abuse power when they get it. It just wouldn’t be like this. It isn’t even a little bit believable.
My favorite absolutely absurd moment was when a horde of protestors gathered to harangue the conductor at her book signing. I’m sorry. No one – not even the biggest classical music nerds – would get a bunch of hand painted signs and a shouting squad together to yell at a conductor. First, few people care that much, about sexual harassment or music, and second, those that did care about music would be worried about messing up an opportunity that the disgraced conductor might be able to get them in the future. And it for sure wouldn’t be covered in the news.
I feel like this writer has no idea how classical musicians behave nor how women behave and it’s all so off the norm that people found it edgy or something?
I don’t know why people like this movie. It’s just so silly. And it takes itself so SERIOUSLY. The only thing to do is to just throw up our hands and hope that this trick of putting a woman in a part written for men does not become a trend. And to quote Amy Taubin, who I really hope to take out for drinks one day, “It’s a ridiculous movie. And why don’t people see that? People don’t understand anything at all about the art world and these people are in the art world. They make movies so…. Fuck it. I don’t care. I just don’t care.”
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2 Comments so far
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 
I heard from other people it is terrible!
Comment by Mame Cotter February 19, 2023 @ 2:57 pmOh phew. Glad to not be so alone on this one!
Comment by erainbowd February 19, 2023 @ 9:52 pm