It understands the classical-music world and has fun fiddling around with film form. But is that enough?
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
@OwenGleiberman See All
Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures I was a classical musician growing up, so I’m probably more disposed than most to like a movie set in the classical-music world. Then again, that could mean that I set a higher bar for authenticity when it comes to depicting it. There’s no doubt that the cinema’s reigning masterpiece of classical-music drama is “Tár” — a great movie in so many other ways that that remains only one dimension of it. But Todd Field inhabited that world, and allowed the audience to do so, in a way that no previous director had. Two other films leap to mind that have the ring of deep-dish classical-music reality: “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” which beautifully caught the experience of studying music in high school, and “Maestro,” a movie I may have enjoyed more than others, even though it left out a ton of stuff about Leonard Bernstein (like, for instance, the heart of his conducting career in the ’50s and ’60s!), because I instinctively filled all of that in.
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