NYFF 2022 Film Review: Tár
CATE BLANCHETT STUNS IN THE BRILLIANT, THORNY TÁR
Director Todd Field’s first film in over 16 years, Tár follows a polymath maestro as her career implodes by her own hand. A stark, thorny confrontation of the ego and arrogance that come hand-in-hand with genius, the stunning devolution of Lydia Tár is abetted by one of the great director-actor pairings. Minor spoilers ahead…
Tár - filmmaker Todd Field’s first feature in over 16 years - begins at its non-diagetic end with walls of credits moving in reverse. From assistant editors to caterers to grips, its opening crawl is deliberately crafted and placed to acknowledge below-the-line talent integral to the movie you’re about to see. It’s a peculiar move, but one that crystallizes the longer Tár marches through its near three-hour runtime. Like the saga of Lydia Tár (an inimitable Cate Blanchett) itself, the film’s oddly positioned credits are an interrogation of hierarchy: a disintegration of a cult of personality and a dismantling of the power of lone genius.
Tár follows a legendary conductor and composer, Lydia Tár, in the weeks leading up to her watershed completion of conducting the five Gustav Mahler symphonies. A revered polymath at the zenith of her field, she is the first woman to lead the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, she is a Juilliard professor, a wife, and a mother. But Lydia’s days as queen of her castle are numbered; she has a glum, obedient assistant named Francesca (a chilly Noémie Merlant) whose own ambitions are spring-loaded as keeper of her boss’s closet skeletons, her own wife (stealth MVP Nina Hoss) is beginning to respond to her devouring psyche with less and less graciousness, and ghosts from Tár’s past - figurative and perhaps even literal - are beginning to rear their ugly heads.
“Fueled by a singular, searing performance from Cate Blanchett, Tár marks the beginning of an all-timer director-actor pairing.”
A fall from grace is only as precipitous as our conviction in its height, and Tár undoubtedly sinks or swims along with its lead; Field has written a prickly character who just so happens to be a genius, and it’s up to the precision of a singular Cate Blanchett to portray - convincingly - a protegé of Leonard Bernstein, an EGOT winner, and a mythologized musician. From the very first frame of the film, Lydia Tár is full-blooded in her complexity, a character embodying a thorniness that would absolutely be less affecting were she a man. A successful woman in a vocation dominated by old, white men, Tár spends her time goading ineffectual - and male - contemporaries into retirement and running an internationally lauded program mentoring young female conductors, but her ego is also insurmountable. An intellectual bulldozer, she is quick to talk over her students, her colleagues, her wife. “Time is the thing. Time is the essential piece of interpretation,” she waxes on with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “You cannot start without me. I start the clock.” Blanchett exudes an irresistible, barbed charisma that acts as a Rorschach test: those caught in her gravity will immediately label her as a new “problematic fave,” those who scoff at her pretentiousness will likely lap up her downfall.
To call Tár the great “cancel culture” movie of 2022 would be more than misleading, it would be a misnomer. Sidestepping polemics, buzzwords, and dog whistles altogether, Field instead paints an austere portrait of a woman unwittingly orchestrating her own destruction: the mask of prestige, acclaim, and genius blinding its wearer to the consequences of her own actions. Early in the movie during a Juilliard master class, Tár is playfully pitted against a leg-shaking, “BIPOC, pan-gender” student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist). Bristling against a Bach composition for the composer’s personal, ethical shortcomings, Max enters a lopsided tête-à-tête with his professor and is promptly eviscerated. “If you want to dance the mask, you must service the composer. You've got to sublimate yourself, your ego, and yes, your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself,” she exclaims. Max is no match for the argumentative colossus that is Lydia Tár, but Field also takes the opportunity to convey the maestro’s shocking inability to read the room. Tár is a relic: an abrasive, old-world savant uniquely ill-equipped to navigate modern sensibilities.
“Field…paints an austere portrait of a woman unwittingly orchestrating her own destruction…”
Field may not have directed a feature-length film since 2006’s Little Children, but his formal dexterity hasn’t missed a step. A controlled, deliberate detonation that veers from satisfying competence porn into a runaway train, Tár revels in the grey and in the enigmatic. Much of its dreamlike parlance — seemingly just steps away from a full-fledged horror movie with ghostly sightings and an actual aural sampling from 2000’s The Blair Witch Project — is almost Kubrickian, which would be more of a coincidence if Field hadn’t worked with the late auteur on Eyes Wide Shut. Tár’s supporting cast only enriches its narrative’s magnificently thorny text: Noémie Merlant’s patient turn has a cauldron of feelings bubbling just beneath the surface, real-life cellist and first-time actor Sophie Kauer holds her own opposite Cate Blanchett with a brutally defiant - and very funny - performance, but it’s Nina Hoss who shines the brightest as Tár’s put-upon wife. Possessing a scintillating quiet and absorbed pensiveness, Hoss does the most with the subtlest shifts in posture and tone: with a single gaze or raised eyebrow, Hoss’s Sharon walks the difficult tightrope between victim and enabler.
What’s remarkable about a film like Tár is that it’s already being reduced to its simplest non-ideas even before its wide release. Whether Lydia Tár is someone to root for isn’t the point; its depiction of “cancel culture” is nothing at all. Field is uninterested in such things. Instead, Tár is a ruthless interrogation of public image, private failings, art, power, and ego. It also breathes rarefied air as a true-blue performance movie: Cate Blanchett is the powerhouse of nearly every second of its 158-minute runtime, and despite its on-the-pulse topicality, the reason it will endure: a swirl of guilt and a tempest of comeuppance about how prestige renders an illusory shield from consequences. A searing portrait in the gray about power and those who wield it.
