Tár and Marcel the Shell With Shoes On are basically the same movie

Although 2022 has ended, best-of-2018 lists will continue rolling out. Cinephiles are still catching up on everything that happened in an year with great films across all platforms. Two films that ranked high on a lot of those year-end lists: Todd Field’s 158-minute epic, Tár, about the rise and fall of a fictional conductor (played by Cate Blanchett, who’s all but guaranteed a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the role), and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s whimsical little ditty Marcel the Shell ShoesThis is a feature-length extension of YouTube weirdities that became viral twelve years ago.

The first movie is about a sexy, manipulative and morally questionable female in a profession that seldom recognizes them. Another is about a lonely, cute seashell with big eyes. But weirdly enough, it turns out that they’re pretty much the same movie, apart from a few minor details like “tone” and “intention” and “scope” and “execution” and all that stuff. You can see the parallels.

• These films feature touchy, finicky, eccentric filmmakers. They express their personality through music and have precise methods.
• The protagonists have separated from their families. They are trying to make a new start with non-family friends.
• Both Marcel and Lydia Tár turn to assistants for that support, then make the mistake of believing those assistants are more personally invested in them than they actually are. Both assistants wind up rebelling against the protagonists’ emotional needs.
• Both protagonists spend a lot of on-screen time being interviewed by real-life journalists — The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik in Lydia’s case, 60 minutes’ Lesley Stahl in Marcel’s case.
• Both protagonists need the media’s cooperation and collaboration to achieve their goals, but both find the side effects are overwhelming, problematic, and not easy to control. They both find that their celebrity attracts opportunistic individuals.
• Their assistants secretly filmed them in both instances and distributed the video online. The viral footage caused a massive blowup.
• Both of them experience devastating loss, and both respond by falling into paralytic depression, withdrawing from everyone they’d previously been connecting with. Both seek simplicity and retreat into their past lives to find it.
• Both families eventually come back together.
• Both express their feelings of loss and joy by making music together at the end. The performances of the two protagonists end in a bizarre performance, where they take up again music front of an audience.

So there you have it — absolutely no meaningful difference whatsoever between Tár Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Let’s sum up: Both movies have the same basic message. Artists and media are difficult to work together, while the public is worst. Strange that there were two films about the exact same topic in one calendar year.

However, we should not forget the times that we were able to get. Armageddon And Deep Impact Two blockbuster action films about asteroids that threaten Earth in one year. It’s exactly the same. Perhaps we could rewatch these movies again to find similarities. Marcel And Tár, too.