- Messages
- 5,325
- Rating
"Ummm... Actuallyyyyy, the title is supposed to be, 'Tár'."
Don't care. We're moving on.
I'm not sure what to begin talking about here regarding this movie. After reading some other reviews for this online, I'm still not quite sure what to say about it. Well, let's just start with the acting because it's definitely the highlight of the movie. The entire cast absolutely knocked it out of the park, and you can tell almost immediately that Cate Blanchett put a lot of soul and hard work into this character. This along with the incredible scene set-ups and the incredible acting of everyone else as well just really gives the movie a fantastic surface from start to finish.
But, like the movie's titular (hehe) character, the more we go beyond the surface and get into the story and meaning, the real meat and potatoes of it all, we begin to see major issues. As we begin to see hints of the mistakes of Lydia, the tension is slowly and expertly ramped up. Maybe too slowly though. There's long scenes of just... Great acting, but otherwise nothing really there to advance the plot. And yeah, you could certainly argue that there are tons of little details in these scenes for the viewer to pick up on, but many movies can both advance and insert these expert details into the scenes at the same time. You don't have to choose one or the other.
The second major issue with the movie is that we never really... Get a payoff at the end in the form of any major explanation. We're left guessing what actually happened. Who said what and who did what. Instead, this is left to the viewer to figure out. And I heavily dislike when stories in general do this. Movies are not an interactive medium like games are, and while it's actually pretty great to have mystery in your movies of course, it also comes with the general expectation that you'll at least explain yourself somewhat at the end. When you don't do this, it's... Rude. It also denies the opportunity to really come to an ultimate conclusion about the entire adventure and tie things together in an epic way. Does Cate learn from her mistakes? Did she even make those mistakes in her past that it seems she committed or was it really a big misunderstanding as she keeps saying? We'll never know.
Just like how I'm never going to see this movie again...
...
Ok, that was too harsh, but my points still stand. Somewhat experimental art house movies like this are great to watch and are important for advancing genres forward. But like any experiment, it can also fail in many ways. If you defy the standards, you do so at your own peril.
Olga was hella gorgeous though.