“TAR” VS ‘EVERYTHING’ IS OSCAR DEBATE

 

Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in "Tar"

By Dominique Paul Noth

The Oscars (March 12)  are actually putting up front a ferocious debate about what the public wants in a motion picture.

Part of the debate is about selectability – audiences choosing a streaming service in the comfort of their own homes rather than going out to a theater to watch movies with total strangers, bigger screens and better sound. Streaming is winning based on the box office results, providing overwhelming financial proof  despite excuses such as the hangover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the more important debate is between “Tar” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” both movies I enjoyed on both emotional and intellectual levels, yet each addressing different aspects within the larger movie envelope. They are test opposites in the schools of moviemaking.

“Everything” a few days ahead of the Oscars, was climbing in the guessing poll as the likely Oscar winner for best picture and best actress against the long assumed best actress, Cate Blanchett, for “Tar.” Her director, Todd Fields, sees hopes  diminishing for what would be my choice as  best director as well as runaway the best film of the year. But  “Tar” clearly lit all my fires while the professional technical skills that rule  Oscar have reason to applaud “Everything.”

Given the makeup of the Oscar voting industry, there are good reasons why they will vote “Everything” as best picture and openly value the technical skill sets of the industry members.  It is a delight, attuned to what has changed in movieland and requiring new definitions of what screen acting is in the current environment.

It is a science fiction tale that explodes across the multiple universes in a way the Internet can only envy, but probably the Internet has helped lead  both younger audiences and older ones to think about life in this manner. So have years of comic book fantasies, now translated into runaway box office success, given some 30 Marvel features plus resurgence of the D.C brand and such triple threats as “Hunger Games.”

What keeps “Everything”  afloat is how the Daniels (as co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are called) have inexpensively but cunningly by Hollywood terms roamed free and fast across artificial intelligence, rapid mind-bending editing, multiple universes (to which we apply the term multiverse these days), dimensions in which characters change personality and costumes whipping into different environments and ages while ultimately returning home for some basic lessons about family and domestic worth.

Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh in 
"Everything Everywhere All at Once"

While retiring from acting for  decades after being the cute kid in an Indiana Jones adventure, Ke Huy Quan is likely to win the Oscars best supporting actor honor, but even he would admit that his vocal tone is not the reason.  It is how he used movement, animalistic instincts and the Alexander Technique on posture and placement to physically change as the multiverse changes, from the wimpy husband to the martial arts expert with backpack and on and on as the needs and script require.

 The directors are expert at pulling him back and pushing him forward, as they do with much of the cast. Jamie Lee Curtis as the creepy IRS agent lurching toward the camera like the Terminator  (and I suspect that was the vision the Daniels were after with her threatening herky-jerky advances) may also win best supporting actress though there is strong competition.

There is one universe motif composed of  rocks talking to each other,  another where fingers turn into floppy hot dogs (reviewers tend to describe these sequences as  a  fight among dildos). There are dynamic kung fu passages. The movie is almost a travelog of movie memories and modern international film techniques and tech training (some viewers will need a Google search engine to keep track of what’s going on).

It  reminds us that so much movie acting these days requires body shaping, green screen and physical payoffs, far more than believing in the moment to moment acting sequence we have learned from the stage. This is not Bette Davis movie territory.

Michelle Yeoh is a wonderful center for these shenanigans (touted to win best actress Oscar since it would be a way for Hollywood to apologize for neglecting or isolating Asian characters).  Here she can use her dignity, manner and martial arts training with what seems like abandon. 

Acting  in such a free-wheeling environment, with the Daniels willing to try anything and yet have the savvy to return the story to a simple middle – well, it’s quite different than what Blanchett achieves in “Tar,” though there is a different kind of shape shifting by the actress who moves from CEO power to personable interview to loving husband to arrogant enforcer.

Some critics have wrongly criticized “Tar” as being high-brow (set in the Leonard Bernstein heights of classical music) or, worse, putting the liberal MeToo movement in its place.  Which it does, brilliantly, if you isolated from the whole film  how her Julliard masterclass elevates Tar’s putdown of a black modernist’s distaste for old white guys only to see social media excerpt her comments to make her look like an ugly arrogant racist. 

Wall Street Journal actually ran an opinion piece that accurately describes the scene but draws the wrong conclusion. It in effect damns the film with false praise, which “Tar” is suffering a lot from.

“Tar” is an example of how a fine director, Fields, can seem to be playing fair while selecting only those aspects of a character vital to his story.

For instance, Lydia Tar makes a big deal about having been mugged to explain facial bruises.  But in a fascinating sequence, the camera sees Tar invade the space of a female cellist she is sexually pursuing, get disoriented and, maybe, face-splat herself in a panic to escape.  We don’t see the face-splat but we hear her version at length – and we  have learned enough about Lydia to suspect that her power dominance and mental agitation are beginning to undo her.

I don’t want to give away too much of the movie – but let's emphasize that the invisible third person narrator we assume in "Everything" takes us where we  want to go in -- though it is really where the Daniels want us to go. Yet we accept the Daniels as truthful in a sci-fi world.

But Fields in “Tar” is actually directing our eyes to what he wants us to see about Lydia Tar and her world. “Anyone who watches this film is the final film-maker,”  Fields has said in an interview, but that is a facile comment for the press though it contains truth. It is another way of pretending he is not shaping our vision of Lydia Tar, who is a total fabrication that fits recognizably into our modern world.

He dares to trust our powers of observation in a fable about  CEO power, mob “virality,” self-deception and  a both admirable and manipulative protagonist who is undone in the end, without losing her artistic center.

Blanchett is not the only excellence in the acting realm. As one example, in a quiet observational way, Nina Hoss is fascinating as  Tar’s wife and mother of their adoptive daughter, also the Berlin Philharmonic's concertmaster – another example of how Tar is lovingly protective and an absolute tyrant in  scaring a school-chum who has been bullying her child.

Sophie Kauer, an excellent cellist plucked out of obscurity (and attractive in looks), plays the new object of Tar’s affection – but totally indifferent to the seductive suggestions of her would-be captivator.  In fact, it is Tar’s obvious plunge for the cellist’s affections that gives root to the explosion and disgrace that pursue her.  

Blanchett keep us watching from moment to moment – one reason why the film seems slower, because it is psychologically deeper and rewards careful attention. “Tar” represents the sort of excellence within one world, while suggesting many worlds to careful observers, that to my mind requires the top awards. But I don’t expect it to win.

A previous review contrasted “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Argentina, 1985.”

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic.
He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs.
From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with still active archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.