Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras ​​Tour’ review: Look what we made her do

We can talk, I guess, about everything Taylor Swift has done for the economy, friendship bracelets, seismology, and Travis Kelce. But her greatest non-musical achievement is the innocuous Art it’s made of yawn. On a 50-foot-tall screen, its various mouth openings make for an impressive sight. There is a “who?” “Me?”, “Yes I said so”, “Ouch”, “Awww”, “Oh golly”, and “Sally Field wins another Oscar”. Her story is an “oh” story.

That joy is reason to be excited about the film compiled from her live show — “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which was filmed at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, the final stop on the first leg of the tour. “Glad” because what Swift’s happiness agent could be was recorded on stage and the stamina was called upon to run that agency for a good part of three hours. The film is about 165 minutes long, and she is as excited as she descends on the stage to bid farewell, as in the first minutes she magically materializes on it. The first words she says to 70,000 people cheering her on are: “Oh, hi!”, as if SoFi were a shower we caught her singing in.

In June, when Swift landed at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the pushing and yelling — by five high school students — at my butt stopped right after about two hours. I turned to check their trance and found a pile of exhaustion—the human version of that scrunched-up emoji. Her joy exceeded theirs, and her zing was astounding them. If nothing else, this film is a monument to that: Swift’s illusion of ease. She doesn’t work as physically hard, loosely or hydraulically as her dancers. It’s not Jackson. And she doesn’t sing as tremendously or as wonderfully as Streisand or Carey or Dionne or Knowles-Carter. Nor is her show — produced as separate segments devoted to nine of Swift’s 10 albums — the cultural gym Madonna requires. Swift plays to her enhancing strengths: great pitch, striking stature, lively songwriting, winking, and the very idea of ​​play. Not far from things, around the time of “Cruel Summer,” she announced that we encountered “the first bridge of the evening.” There’s more to come, because ever since Lionel Richie has had a major pop star enjoy this pleasure with the power of her bridge.

It wasn’t until this film that Swift’s 10-minute breakout song “All Too Well,” which she performs alone downstage in a sparkling gown and an acoustic guitar, struck me as a feat of true theater. While in the movie theater, I felt the song’s haunting excitement in a new way. Some of that comes from watching Swift’s face as she registers pain and makes recriminations. The rest comes from assembling the song out into the anthem area. It’s like watching someone work on wood in “American Pie” until it resembles “Purple Rain.”