Exhilarating, intimate, fun (and long): Our critics weigh in on ‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’
Taylormania has come to the multiplex.
Two months after she completed the first leg of her globe-conquering Eras tour, Taylor Swift presided over the premiere of her new concert movie, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” on Wednesday night at the high-end Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles.
The film, directed by Sam Wrench and shot in August during the 33-year-old pop superstar’s sold-out six-night stand at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, arrives at a characteristically busy moment for Swift, who’s got a new album due later this month in the form of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” and who’s been traveling the country to watch her NFL player of a rumored boyfriend, Travis Kelce, do his thing on the field.
And yet to hear Swift tell it, she’s practically counting down the days till she gets back on the road for another round of shows.
“I’ve never had a fraction of the amount of fun I had on the Eras tour,” she told an audience at the Grove peppered with friends and fellow celebs. Times pop music critic Mikael Wood and Times film critic Justin Chang were in the house as well and compared notes afterward.
MIKAEL WOOD: Well, Justin, allow me to start by quoting Taylor Swift: “Welcome to the Eras tour!” Having seen Swift’s show three times — on opening night in Arizona and then twice at SoFi Stadium — I’m eager to hear how this pop extravaganza played onscreen for someone who hasn’t seen it in the flesh. Was its length exhausting to you? Did its nonchronological run through Swift’s catalog tell a discernible story? Could you grasp why she placed a fedora on a cute kid’s head at one point?
For our readers, I’ll say that “The Eras Tour” movie is a pretty straightforward depiction of the production Swift took to stadiums across the country this year; there’s no backstage footage, no documentary dressing, no talking-head voice-overs to explain what we’re witnessing. (There is a cute blooper reel at the end.) A few songs have been cut from the set list — among them, tragically, “The Archer” — to get the film’s run time under three hours, slightly. But if you’ve seen the Eras tour, you’ll recognize “The Eras Tour.”
Now, a big part of the show in real life is the sceney-ness of it all: the fans in wild and creative outfits, the swapping of friendship bracelets, the many famous people who’ve turned up in various cities to watch Swift perform. And that was the case too at the Grove, where decked-out Swifties milled around excitedly in the lobby before showtime, trading stories about how many tour dates they’d attended. For last night’s world premiere, something like 2,000 guests filled more than a dozen of the AMC building’s theaters; I was in the one where Swift herself took in the movie, surrounded by the backing vocalists from her road band and an assortment of celebrities including Adam Sandler, Maren Morris, Julia Garner, Simu Liu and former rich-guy L.A. mayoral candidate (and Grove mega-developer) Rick Caruso.
I have to admit I spent a fair amount of time watching the singer watch herself, and I can definitively say that Taylor Swift is all in on Taylor Swift. (Also: Sandler? Big “Reputation” guy.) But enough about the vibe. What did you make of “The Eras Tour” as, y’know, a movie?
JUSTIN CHANG: I’ll answer that in a second, Mikael, right after I’ve cleared my head and shaken off the last vestiges of “Shake It Off” (a favorite of my 7-year-old daughter’s and thus a perennial household earworm). In all seriousness, Wednesday night’s premiere was a wonderfully deranged experience. It was exhaustingly long, at 168 minutes, yes, though given the show’s three-hour-plus run time, you have to admire the movie’s economy. Still, it didn’t help that our AMC theater had to stop and restart the movie 15 minutes in due to a distracting sound-sync issue. I’m glad they fixed it; for a while I feared that audio and video were never, ever, ever / getting back together.
Anyway, how’s the movie? This Taylor Swift nonexpert could hardly be less qualified to answer. At the same time, I have to imagine my reaction was not entirely dissimilar to that of anyone — even a die-hard Swiftie — encountering the show for the first time. Again and again, in between private stretches of partial tune recognition, my jaw dropped at the sheer visual grandeur of the thing: the dramatic shifts in setting and scale that can find Swift crooning gentle songs from “Evermore” at a fantastical moss-covered piano one minute and then diving into some kind of digitally confected pond the next.
Most of all, I gaped at Swift’s sheer physical and musical stamina, by which I mean not just the unflagging energy and sustained quality of her vocals, but also the staggering post-2018 artistic output that “The Eras Tour” encompasses. The COVID years were extraordinarily productive, transformative years for Swift, and both the show and now the movie tell the story of that transformation. And just as the tour, with its Ticketmaster-smashing success, has rejuvenated the music industry like nothing since before the pandemic, so the film looks poised to set the box office ablaze; it’s the “Barbenheimer” of pop-music juggernauts.
I’m curious, Mikael, having seen the Eras tour three times already, how was your fourth go-round? Did you, like me, enjoy the way the movie collapsed live and theatrical viewing experiences, the way all the dancing, light-waving people in our theater seemed to merge with all the dancing, light-waving people at SoFi Stadium? Those crucial missing songs aside, were there aspects of the movie that you feel diminished, or perhaps improved upon, the original?
WOOD: I love your point about the merging of Swift’s two audiences because it’s true: Again and again on Wednesday night, I couldn’t tell where the crowd noise in the film ended and where the crowd noise around me began.
As in the live show, Swift’s song “Cruel Summer” — a No. 3 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 this week, more than four years after it came out — appears at the very beginning of “The Eras Tour,” and in my theater, at least, it had people singing along at full volume from the jump. Very “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” especially in the little moments when fans got to demonstrate their deep knowledge of Swift’s work — the bit in “All Too Well (10-Minute Version),” for instance, when they screamed “F— the patriarchy” along with her.
Is this rowdy interactive approach one way that Hollywood might hope to save the theatrical business? If nothing else, it’s sure to be a part of the Beyoncé concert film that will follow Taylor’s into theaters in December. I wonder how that prospect strikes a committed moviegoer like you, Justin. (Stray thought: The Grove was serving booze at the premiere, which no doubt helped loosen up some number of Swifties. How might “The Eras Tour” shape theater owners’ feelings on liquor at the multiplex?)
You asked whether the cinematic experience improved upon the real-life experience in any way. The answer is yes, and it came in the close-ups: You get to see the intricacies of the choreography in a song like “The Man,” where Swift and one of her dancers lay out a scene of casual boardroom sexism; you get to see the instrumental interplay between the singer and her band, as in a hoedown-ish take on “Fearless.”
And you get to behold Swift’s acting: the way she flares her eyes at a certain point in “Champagne Problems” or her portrayal of a neglected partner in “Tolerate It,” which depicts an unraveling marriage with a level of detail I didn’t catch in any of the concerts I saw in person. Speaking purely in terms of her dramatic abilities, I don’t think Swift’s on a level with former Disney kid Olivia Rodrigo, to name one of her many musical inheritors. But there’s no doubting that those skills are what help hold together the vast tonal and stylistic range of her music. What did you make, Justin, of Taylor Swift, screen thespian?
CHANG: “Champagne Problems” and “Tolerate It” are indeed melancholy highlights, and the raw anguish of the latter’s elaborate “Citizen Kane” homage surely registers more powerfully up close, I imagine, than it does from a distance. Here and elsewhere, Swift’s ability to project intimacy becomes the movie’s reason for being: You get the delirious sensation of being swallowed up by a massive crowd, up to a point, but then, in the space of a single cut, it’s suddenly just her alone onstage, all but bringing the performance directly to you. I felt that way watching her perform “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” a song that compacts so much painful history, but which Swift suffuses with a lightness and energy that feels bracingly optimistic.
Those moments aside, Mikael, what struck me most about Swift’s performance was her apparently unfeigned delight, her seemingly genuine pleasure at being there onstage in front of a gargantuan crowd, doing the most draining, all-consuming work of her career night after epic night. Early in the show she points her finger into the crowd and moves it around the entire stadium, conjuring an aural wave that you can practically feel traveling around the movie theater, before it finally surges in a seat-rattling surround-sound crescendo. The pleasure of the moment lies in how utterly tickled Swift seems by her own power, which can hardly be a surprise to her at this point. Somehow, she convinces you that it is.
As the opposite of a committed concertgoer, I don’t mean to sound naive or to assume that this sort of effervescence is unique to Swift. Over the years, of course, her many critics have dismissed her as calculated and inauthentic — accusations that are par for the course, I think, for a female artist who gets anywhere near her stratospheric level of success. But authenticity has always been a tricky, even dubious concept in art, and one of the pleasures of “The Eras Tour” is the way it destroys the facile notion of a pure individual self. With its labyrinthine arc, jumbled chronology and dazzling changes of tone, milieu and costume, it’s Swift’s ode to invention and self-reinvention, the many different lives she’s lived and faces she’s presented over the course of her career.
Our audience certainly seemed to lap it up unreservedly, full of liquor and high on their own Taylormania. I can only imagine how that must have been with Swift herself sitting there in your theater, Mikael; I imagine watching Taylor Swift watch Taylor Swift must have been its own uniquely mesmerizing experience, to the point where sometimes even the big screen itself became an afterthought. Then again, as you noted, “The Eras Tour” is doing its damnedest to give movie theaters a badly needed shot of adrenaline. With a $100 million-plus opening weekend in the offing, it’s going to be a huge boon for multiplexes nationwide.
There may be something a little depressing about that from a lowly film critic’s standpoint, insofar as it suggests that theaters can thrive only when a movie becomes a gargantuan cinematic event — an occasion to dress up, plan a friends’ night out and bask in an experience you can’t get in your living room. It entrenches the idea of moviegoing as an exception, a rarity. But with any luck, the same folks flooding theaters for “The Eras Tour” will remember how much fun it can be; hell, maybe they’ll feel like sticking around and checking out “Killers of the Flower Moon” while they’re at it. That’s not a movie you can dance to, but by that point, what’s another 3 1/2 hours in the dark?
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