Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
Directed by Sam Wrench
Running time: 2hr49 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Taylor Swift in Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
There’s a line that critics often fall back on, when reviewing documentaries or films on a highly specific subject, that attempts to counteract said specificity with more general admiration. “You don’t have be a fan of [X] to enjoy this film,” they write — and, well, it rarely rings true to me. You kind of do have to care about, say, John le Carré to get much out of The Pigeon Tunnel, Errol Morris’ upcoming doc about him, and that’s no mark against the film. Why should anyone unfamiliar with the music of Linda Ronstadt go see the 2019 tribute Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice? No reason at all, and that’s fine. Not everything has to be for everyone.
All of which is a long way of saying that you absolutely do have to be a fan of Taylor Swift, or at the very least a regular and appreciative listener, to consider watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a nearly three-hour cinematic souvenir from the pop supernova’s current, record-breaking concert run. And that’s to the film’s credit: “fan service” is often a term we wield with a sneer, but this is the accessible experience that legions of Swifties without hundreds of pounds spare to spend on elusive tickets to the show deserve, and Swift and director Sam Wrench have tailored it to them with a generous lack of compromise. It’s made with care and style and not a little kineticism, from its slick, flexible shooting to its nimble editing to its crisp sound design, every number popping with earphone-friendly immediacy.
It also does a service to Swift herself, preserving the quintessential popular musician of her generation (love her or hate her, this hardly feels debatable) at what could potentially be the strutting peak of her powers, bridging the gap between her ingenuous country-teen past and her recent, more ambitious excursions into pointedly adult folk and electronica in one canny package. As a portrait of an icon in her prime, it’s as neatly timed and defining as Madonna’s Truth or Dare was in 1991, which isn’t to say they’re anything alike. Where Madonna’s jokey, freewheeling blend of concert footage and backstage japery distilled her persona as a beyond-the-music provocateur, The Eras Tour — featuring concert footage, concert footage, more concert footage and nothing but concert footage — is a massive, somewhat overwhelming testament to Swift’s glistening, unrelenting professionalism as a performer.
You’d call her a pop machine, if not for the expressive, heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of her melodically immaculate songwriting — the gift that has kept Swift, a proficient if never especially powerful singer, a tier above most of her peers for the better part of 20 years. Watching her in close-up on a cinema screen, whirling dauntlessly through sundry sparkly costume changes and brisk choreography routines, you wonder how deeply she still feels a song as lyrically tremulous and shattered as the ten-minute breakup anthem “All Too Well”, now that it’s simply another mandatory component of this sheeny extravaganza. Perhaps she still does, perhaps not. Either way, the crowd, palpably throbbing even through the camera, feels it for her, and that’s now the point.
That transference makes The Eras Tour unexpectedly moving to me both as a film critic and as (yes) a Taylor Swift fan — even if, with the latter hat on, I could grouse that such personal favourites as the lovely, swoony, synthy romantic pledge “The Archer” and the grimly funny, Haim-featuring murder ballad “No Body, No Crime” have been edited out of the film’s setlist of over 40 songs. (Consider that figure your final warning that this is not a film for agnostics.) Even Taylor Swift can’t give us everything. But she damn well tries.
TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR (2023) Shot by Brett Turnbull | Edited by Dom Whitworth
In cinemas now.