The Eras Tour Is Intimate, Colossal, and Disappointing

Like most people, I know some of Taylor Swift’s songs by the mere fact of being alive, but it’s one thing to hear music and another to listen to it. The prime virtue of her concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”—shot last August, during three performances at SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, California—is to concentrate one’s attention on her music, for two and three-quarter hours, as if in a listening booth. What it reveals about her artistry only heightens my appreciation for the substance and the imagination that goes into the making—indeed, the being—of this pop superstar. The concerts are megaspectacles, simultaneously intimate and colossal; Swift commands the stadium throughout, amid large-scale stage business. She’s often alone, sometimes joined by a handful of dancers, occasionally backed by a brigade of them, as huge video screens and stage sets serve as elaborate backdrops adorned by light shows and smoke effects. (As for the band, it’s kept far away, in a paddock of its own.) The film of this show puts her songwriting in the foreground, as if her music were a movie script, brought to dramatic life by her performance.