Street fight breaks out concerning Tár!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2023

The Benjamins say we're right: In the last few days, a street fight has broken out concerning the Oscar-nominated film, Tár.

Critics praised the film to the skies, but it died a cruel death at the turnstiles. A reader has politely chided us for our claim that the film was on the extremely high end of obscure. 

That's the provisional explanation we offered for its low box office receipts.

This reader also seemed to think that we spent too much time on the topic. By way of explanation, do you know how depressing it can be to write about our own tribe's journalism day after day after day?

Responding to the reader's jibes, we included one final complaint about Tár, a complaint we hadn't included in our original award-winning reports:

For what it's worth, I never mentioned the part of the film that annoyed me right away—the possibly parodic, grotesquely fawning introduction of the character Tár right at the start of the film. 

I can't hear an intro like that without thinking of the various ways such highly praised elites have failed us down through the years. Then it was on to that initial interview segment, which struck me as highly obscure, but also as full of points which seemed to be disconnected and of no apparent high interest.

The reader seemed annoyed by the way we focused on all the references which we ourselves didn't understand. All along, our guess has been that very few others understood those references either. 

Skillfully, we sent the analysts from the room, then offered this ultimate zinger:

"It's hard for us to lose this debate. The box office says we're right!"

Final notes concerning Aftersun: Telephonically, we offered a synopsis of Aftersun to a friend this past week.

We found it hard to do that without emotion. In our view, director Charlotte Wells does an extremely skillful job of story-telling in this, her first feature film, slowly letting a tragic situation come into view. 

Very slowly, the viewer is allowed to see that something is badly wrong inside the life of a very good person. We had a hard time telling the story to a friend this week. We recalled the loss of NAME WITHHELD, and of the late Richard Jeni.

That said, the basic setup of the film—an 11-year-old girl with a camcorder interacts with her loving but troubled father—strongly echoes Jim Sheridan's 2002 film, In America. 

The 11-year-old in Sheridan's film is able to see that her father is struggling in a way her counterpart in Aftersun isn't. Also, the outcome is reversed. 

For our money, Aftersun lets a tragic story unfold with a high degree of skill. We found it hard to tell that story this past week—but as a very minor complaint, we'll admit that we thought the echo was a tiny bit strong.

In America received two Oscar nominations for acting, and a Best Screenplay nod. As for Aftersun, Paul Mescal received a Best Actor nomination—and Sight & Sound's 93 savants selected it as the best film made anywhere in the world in the course of the year now gone.