Religion’s In Your Lips

By: Chris Willman for Variety Date: January 21st 2020

“Not a shot. Not a single chance. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

Taylor Swift - who, at 30, has reached a Zen state of cheerful realism - laughs as she leans into a pillow she’s placed over her crossed legs inside her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, leaning further still into her infinitesimal odds of winning a Golden Globe, which will zero out when she heads down to the televised ball in a few hours.

Never mind whether or not the tune she co-wrote, “Beautiful Ghosts,” might actually have been worthy of a trophy for best original song (or shortlisted for an Oscar, which it was not). Since the Globe nominations were revealed, voters could hardly have been immune to how quickly the film it’s a part of, “Cats,” in which she also co-stars, became a whipping boy for jokes about costly Hollywood miscalculations and creative disasters. Not that you’ll hear Swift utter a discouraging word about it all. “I’m happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie,” she declares. “I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he’s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.”

If this leads you to believe that the pop superstar is in the business of sugarcoating things, consider her other new movie - a vastly more significant documentary that presents Swift not just sans digital fur but without a whole lot of the varnish of the celebrity-industrial complex. The Netflix-produced “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” has a prestige slot as the Jan. 23 opening night gala premiere of the Sundance Film Festival before it reaches the world as a day-and-date theatrical release and potential streaming monster on Jan. 31.

The doc spends much of its opening act juxtaposing the joys of creation with the aggravations of global stardom - the grist of many a pop doc, if rendered in especially intimate detail - before taking a more provocative turn in its last reel to focus more tightly on how and why Swift became a political animal. It’s the story of an earnest young woman with a self-described “good girl” fixation working through her last remaining fears of being shamed as she comes to embrace her claws, and her causes.