Contemporary criticism in blockbuster guise: Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” and Todd Field’s “Tár” with Cate Blanchett.
By the time Don DeLillo published his novel White Noise in 1985, it was rarely snowing on television sets. In Germany, too, the end of broadcasting had largely been abolished, and the analog age was preparing for its end. Nevertheless, the US author is today regarded as a prophet of the media society, whose flood of information he foresaw in all its contradictions.
Filming this novel today, with all its visionary irony, while still leaving it in its historical season: It’s a bit like filming Orwell’s science fiction novel in 1984 in the style of the 1940s when it was made. Director and screenwriter Noah Baumbach goes one step further. He uses his multi-year contract, which the streaming service Netflix – today one of the most powerful film studios in the world – gave him for a truly monumental film. One rarely sees social satires in blockbuster format. For the Venice Film Festival, which likes to open with Hollywood, it’s a found feast. But is it really a candidate for the Golden Lion?
Adam Driver plays the central character of college professor and Hitler expert Jack Gladney, who shares a manic fear of death with his wife Babette, played by Greta Gerwig. That doesn’t make both characters any less lovable family people. But while Jack distracts himself with nerdy knowledge accumulation on research topics like “Hitler’s Dog,” Babette falls under the influence of an experimental, albeit completely ineffective, drug. Worse, she embarks on an affair with the dubious source of the substance. Before Jack, who is raging with jealousy, faces Lars Eidinger of all people in this role, other catastrophes happen. The most spectacular is that of a chemical accident with mass evacuations, which Baumbach brings to the big screen with a reasonable amount of extras.
As in the book, this is the central turning point, the psychological dimension of which is not forgotten behind the spectacle. What happens to paranoiacs when fate suddenly proves them right? At the same time, the hour of the self-appointed interpreters has come. Here Baumbach actually uses the Netflix medium for very contemporary media criticism. While news television becomes superfluous with pathetic soothing formulas, something like an influencer awakens in the family’s teenage son: he charismatically gives the evacuees lectures made up of pieces of information that have been pieced together.
It’s definitely a great film, but it’s rarely a great film. Baumbach, this master of smug dialogue, rarely relies on the image. Still, you want to see him: for an enchanting lecture duel in which Driver and Don Cheadle, who plays the Elvis expert at the college, outdo each other with nerd knowledge; for a senseless, voluptuous ballet in the supermarket; and especially for Barbara Sukowa as an atheist nun in a German-speaking convent.
Who said anyway that the German-speaking cinema shines at the Lido with absence? Cate Blanchett also plays entire scenes in German in “Tár”, the second social satire in the competition. Filmmaker Todd Field, who has received Oscar nominations for each of his two films to date, “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children”, wrote the role of a conductor hired in Berlin especially for her. Without her approval, he says, his first film in six years would never have been made; Nina Hoss plays her life partner as the orchestra’s first violinist.
The drama electrified the audience for two and a half hours – and left them divided. Apparently inspired by the James Levine abuse scandal and other MeToo cases, her patterns are applied to a female career. In doing so, Field itself seeks controversy – even the depiction of a lesbian couple relationship by two heterosexual actresses conflicts with diversity requirements – which are themselves highly controversial. Equally to be expected are objections to such a plot construction from the pen of a male filmmaker. But even in the first scene, Field leaves no doubt that we are dealing with nothing more than a construction. Similar to Ruben Östlund’s satire “The Square”, this film aims at an elitist, hypocritical cultural establishment determined by commercial interests, which encourages misconduct.
It opens with an academic eulogy to Blanchett’s character, the celebrated conductor Lydia Tár, and an epic interview that draws her close to the great Leonard Bernstein, as if he had been her mentor. Could it be? Bernstein died in 1990. The film abounds with such carefully placed irritations. This chief conductor of an orchestra that is named after the Berlin Philharmonic is showered with honors, and she is also a professor at the Juilliard Conservatory in New York. During a lesson, she snubs a student who rejects Bach’s works for questionable ethical reasons.
Something is brewing here, but we’re still on their side. In the back rooms of the Berlin Philharmonie, of course, she plays a different game. She fires a long-time employee and gives a part-time lover hope for the job. At the same time, apparently generously, she helps a young cellist to make a grand solo appearance with her showpiece, Elgar’s cello concerto. But similar cases of favoritism are already haunting the New York press.
You can recognize a lot of it, but Field always pulls out alienating stops that make the familiar sound different. Or an atmosphere of Dario Argento-esque horror. His own virtuosity reflects his work on the conductor’s podium. The fact that Blanchett’s film character inexorably transforms into an unreal Disney villain is just another alienating effect. No, this disturbingly fascinating film is never suspected of being real. And that should protect him from schematic rejection.
