TAR

Next up on the AMC movie pass docket is TAR. Going into the film I had only seen the trailer once, and the production team was very careful to not give much, if anything away. My first impressions of the film was that it was going to be a pretentious, arrogant, self indulgent film that does everything it can to tout itself as high cinema without actually developing it's plot enough to be considered as such. After seeing it I can say that I was in fact correct.

I want to be very clear in the fact that Cate Blanchett was phenomenal as always, her performance was riveting, utterly convincing and completely enchanting. The cinematography was gorgeous, it truly reflected the scale of the emotions that were being conveyed and completely wrapped you up in its world. The humor was on point, it was witty, funny and well written. The dialogue was brilliant and anyone who put a pretentious amount of heart into their craft, whatever that craft is, would enjoy it.

And that's where the good observations stop…this movie clocks in at 2 hours and 38 minutes. That should be more than enough time to flesh out a character and send them through ups and downs and still wrap up your story in a way that lets the audience know how the characters actions through the story have impacted them and the people around them. It should be at least.

The pacing as you are watching the film is actually very good, you never wonder when the film is going to be over and it does naturally come to a close, however after the film does end it leaves too many questions that didn’t need to be left unanswered. With films that want to open up questions about the human condition it needs to be obviously intentional, the entire point of films like that is to get the audience to feel something, to get them to question things about their lives and their purpose. TAR feels a rough draft, like the shallow skeleton of a story that nobody took the time to actually fill in. We are given glimpses of Lydia’s character, and her past but that's all we see, glimpses. As the audience we are told that she’s a bad person but we don’t see it, we don’t see the things she did and we only really hear about their effects in passing. This leaves the emotion in the film kiddy pool levels of shallow. By the end of the movie we know Lydia is a bad person, now that’s fine but if you are going to write a film where the main protagonist sucks as a human then one of two things need to happen, 1) The ensemble cast needs to be so well written that there is something redeemable about the characters as a whole (as is the case with the Greatest Showman) or 2) The script needs to be treated as a character study and as such needs to explore the actual darkness in that person's personality. Lydia clearly had a past and there is no excuse for us not seeing that.

Had the writer and director used their time better I would have liked it a lot more, the content that exists is excellent, it simply feels incomplete. It genuinely feels like a first draft as it was severely underdeveloped. Cate truly carried the movie, but even her magnificent performance couldn’t save a shallow script. Overall the film is a 6.5/10, it got docked an extra half a point for having an incredible amount of wasted potential.