The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Revisited in its theatrical cut, director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is still an impressive achievement in compressed storytelling, an approach that makes the film's three hour runtime feel positively breakneck. In adapting JRR Tolkien's first volume of The Lord of the Rings Jackson, along with co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have jettisoned characters and situations, as well as borrowed events from later books, to arrive at a piece that is largely built around two characters - Elijah Wood's Frodo and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn - both of whom are slowly being crushed by expectation. For Frodo it's a pressure that he has, to some degree, chosen to take on himself. Although, as Ian McKellen's Gandalf pontificates, Frodo is uniquely suited to meet this call to adventure, it is this young hobbit who stands amongst squabbling giants at Rivendell and volunteers himself to transport a ring of incredible, corrupting power across the world to be dropped into a volcano. 

Frodo, and the rest of the halfling members of this expedition for that matter, are positioned as cheery innocents who, in attempting to repeat the storied quests of their forebears, find themselves journeying deeper and deeper into an all-encompassing horror. It isn't difficult then to draw parallels between the residents of the green and pleasant Hobbiton and the British Tommies who left their homes to be gobbled up by a new kind of warfare on French fields during the Great War. Both are, popularly, framed as guileless and therefore massively unprepared for what awaits them abroad. Tolkien, presumably, twisting his own flea-bitten experience of pulverising modernity at the Somme to ask what conflict could possibly be worth all this bloodshed and destruction? Threat in this first installment then is organised in terms of the technological, specifically generated by a vassal state transforming itself into an industrial hub. Christopher Lee's fallen wizard Saruman, who believes it politically expedient to align himself with a returning spectre, orders his underlings to overturn ancient trees and churn up the earth beneath them until this sorcerer's  domain is cast in mud and smoke; an enormous warren of intersecting tunnels where roughly hewn armour and mutant hordes each tumble off a production line. 

In a wider realm spotted with the crumbled remains of advanced civilisations, Saruman's excavation registers as obscene - the willful destruction of a formerly picturesque, fantasy landscape for selfish or even cowardly ends. This is war as a seismic disturbance. A blot that threatens to, should the ghostly Sauron regain his full strength, engulf everything. Whereas Frodo's suitability to smuggle this crucial ring is largely illustrated through comparison - several much more obviously powerful men shudder to even touch the thing - rather than stated exposition, Aragorn's royal lineage, and the weight that carries, is directly spoken to us on several occasions. Perhaps, given his cool nickname and proficiency in a fight, the screenwriters worried that an audience unfamiliar with the original text (or overfamiliar with the Neanderthal seen in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings) might assume that the character is a heavy and nothing more? Certainly Mortensen's performance consistently works against any such dismissal, tempering whirlwind sword skills with a tender, fatherly nature that suggests a greatness on the cusp of being assumed. This insistence that we know Aragorn is descended from fickle human kings introduces a note of doubt about his motives as well. Will he be able to overcome the innate, reflexive treachery of man and be a true ally to Frodo? 

More than anything though, what remains specifically appealing about Jackson's approach to Fellowship is that this piece arrived before green screen and computer generated effects became a ubiquitous answer to filmmaking problems. Jackson, who made his bones on low budget horror (if not splatter) films threads this first instalment with similarly inventive compositional solutions. Since this is a world that demands people and objects of varying sizes are interacting with each other, there is a constant need to find fresh viewpoints as a way of concealing the scaffolding beneath them. So although CG is frequently deployed it sits alongside detailed and expansive sets, life-sized puppetry, forced perspectives, and (reportedly maximal) miniature environments. Regardless of whether or not it should be the case, these physical - touchable - effects are better suited to stressing an idea of human craftsmanship and ingenuity than purely digital compositions. If big budget blockbuster entertainment is a series of magic tricks deployed in service to a hair-raising story, then a variety and depth in the execution of these deceptions is best suited to the task of consistently delighting an audience. None of this is to say that Fellowship is perfect - at least in this edit the truncated shape of the central journey, one told primarily in gigantic establishing shots, begins to feel less like a grueling odyssey and more like a succession of bullet points, as if favoured locales are being ticked off - but Jackson's opening salvo cannot help but register as a laudable example of large-scale filmmaking that foregrounds the kaleidoscopic disciplines that underpin such massive endeavours. 

Tár

A couple of observations about Lydia Tár, the flawed composer facing irreparable damage to her reputation in Todd Field's latest film. Firstly, she makes it her to business to update her own Wikipedia entry, logging in as a (clearly experienced, based on later conversations with her public relations team) wiki editor to punch up the shorter sections of her own page. Lydia lists recent accolades and positive press attention in short and unobjectionable sentences before methodically filing the source clippings in her office, straight into spurious folders, away from prying eyes. Although this article fine-tuning is portrayed to us as fingers tapping away in brief inserts with no definitive author, Cate Blanchett's Lydia is the only character in Tár seen to actively action anything when using a computer. Her beleaguered assistant-cum-mistress, Noémie Merlant's Francesca, pointedly does not use a computer, even after having been directly instructed to do so. 

Instead, Francesca's domain is her smart phone, a text accented lens through which we are shown Tár in adoring, mocking and, later, accusatory contexts. Tár even creates pretext under which she can seize Francesca's laptop away from her; snooping through inboxes and junk folders in an attempt to conceal a campaign of cruelty constructed around an uncooperative conquest. Lydia's desire to directly curate and manage her presence on the internet's leading encyclopaedia is revealing, especially when judged alongside the film's instantly infamous Juilliard scene. Tár's rebuttal of a performing arts student who dismisses the composer Bach on the grounds of his infidelities is not, necessarily, just that she is experiencing a kind of canonical revulsion that a great composer can be so easily dismissed for, in her mind, such trivial reasons. It's a secret, personal, injury for a woman who is well aware of her moral and ethical shortcomings. 

Lydia Tár knows she is a philanderer; worse she is haunted, in an unconscious and unacknowledged way, by the awareness that she has sabotaged and undermined at least one former quarry to such an extent that the young woman in question has seen no option but to take her own life. While spending minutes tearing down Zethphan Smith-Gneist's student for failing to see the art rather than the artist, Tár is aware that she is guilty of her own scurrilous trespasses. Misdeeds that, in the fullness of time, might one day make their way into the permanent cultural record, tarnishing her own legacy. She's scared, therefore she attacks this young person with every weapon at her disposal. Blanchett's performance here combines the sweeping charm of an arrogant expert, a pretentious insistence on using words and phrases derived from non-English languages (which are then immediately clarified to rub salt into the wound), and a physical intimidation so abrupt and unexpected that her jabbing actions generate their own strange kind of plausible deniability. Surely no-one would be so brazen? 

Secondly, Lydia ruthlessly maintains her own private space within her homes. The office in the apartment she shares with her wife, Nina Hoss' Sharon Goodnow, is off-limits to the rest of the household. It seems to sit in some far-flung corner of this concrete-coloured co-habit, as if physically as far away from the well-trodden rooms as possible. It cannot be stumbled upon, it must be deliberately approached. Lydia's bubble must be penetrated. A heightened moment when Tár discovers that her young daughter is sat in the netting between the sliding door of this office and, presumably, a balcony beyond seems at least about someone having dared to inhabit this space, when Lydia isn't there to supervise, as it is a legitimate safety concern for a child playing somewhere dangerous. Tár's office presents as neat and ordered, a catalogued tribute to music as a record of genius. Naturally though, there are scurry holes and secret, more personal, functions threaded throughout. As well as her secret clippings file, there is a locked cabinet concealing a collection of dead stock pencils -  an affectation centred around uninterrupted routine that we see Lydia mocking another composer for earlier. 

A brief visit to her childhood home reveals an inverted space. In that, far humbler, setting it's spelling bee certificates and academic medals that are on prominent display. They line the walls like sporting achievements in a sitcom bedroom while Lydia (previously, we learn, named Linda)'s obsessively indexed VHS cassettes are hidden in a cupboard; perhaps denoting the strange shame felt by a working class child who feels compelled to catalogue broadcasts featuring her musical hero, conductor and educator Leonard Bernstein. Although appointed to achieve completely different ends, the commonality between these two rooms denotes a person adept at presenting a successful exterior while obscuring their own private face or desires. These secrets are the scaffolding that support the unflappable projection shone out into the world. Lydia also owns a second apartment in Berlin, clearly off-limits to her wife and child, that - outwardly - is maintained to offer the composer a place of retreat or respite when work responsibilities overwhelm her schedule. In practice, it's clearly where Lydia brings her prospective extramarital conquests; the young women Tár is hoping to enchant, then ensnare. 

Less a bolthole than an entire wing of unmolested and uncompromised space for Lydia to inhabit, this second apartment isn't the first place we encounter the red-haired spectre that is haunting this woman - during a stage interview with The New Yorker, someone with redheaded curls sits watching an out-of-focus Lydia - but it is the first instance that goes beyond the circling presence of a human stalker, tipping into the explicitly paranormal. While Tár fusses with rolls of musical parchment paper, we can see a partially obscured red-headed woman standing in the next room, next to a piano, staring at us. As the shot continues the person slips out of focus, becoming an ill-defined blur as Lydia selects her sheet music. The effect is not unlike that of watching an analog video recording of Three Men and a Baby and mistaking a Ted Danson standee for an actual ghost; it's an offhand startle generated by a fabricated figure that has limited presence in the surrounding feature. This choice is deliberate though, rather than strange happenstance. Viewed in the fullness of the completed film, it's tempting to presume that these are the moments when Krista Taylor, the former lover that Lydia ruthlessly blackballed, chose to end her own life. 

The shot that follows has Tár walking directly into the room and space just inhabited by the shape. She doesn't notice or react to anybody, and the rest of the scene plays out without gesturing towards the idea of home invasion so, presumably, the presence has dissipated. Perhaps this ghost represents the human trauma that Tár has pumped out into the world? She has an idea it's there, lingering, at the back of her mind - Lydia even ritualistically lights candles after entering this apartment prior to her brief visitation - but this force cannot exert itself on her in any way that counts. As the film continues and Lydia's life systematically falls apart though, this presence creeps closer and closer to her real home. Her nights are troubled and sleepless, the conductor plagued by intrusive melodies and metronomic clutter that keep her from slipping off into slumber. Possessions start moving and disappearing - although this meddling could simply be Lydia's scorned assistant Francesca exerting her own quiet revenge - culminating in the loss of an entire unperformed draft of her Mahler symphony. The last sighting of the Krista wraith comes immediately prior to the sequence of events that detonate Tár's personal and professional life. In the middle of the night, having finally succumbed to sleep, Lydia is awakened by her daughter screaming her name. As she rushes from her marital bed the ghost sits perched and observing. As Lydia tries to comfort her child, the young girl stares beyond her tightly held parent, her eyes locked onto an apparently empty doorway. Tár's bubble is beginning to burst.