TÁR (2022)
dir. Todd Field
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Focus Features
In a distinguished career marked by multiple award nominations and wins – including two Oscars – actor Cate Blanchett adds another hypnotic, utterly engrossing performance to her formidable body of work with her latest effort. In TÁR, Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a virtuoso conductor and musician in her own right, and the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. With all that power, wealth, and fame comes the tempting ability to abuse it, and Blanchett’s fictional Lydia Tár suffers a complete breakdown when her abuses are made public.
Blanchett’s performance is intense and unrelenting in a movie that shares those same qualities, but writer/director Todd Field’s psychologically fraught character study keeps us at a frustrating remove from Lydia Tár, even as we see her come undone. TÁR is a movie that uses current hot-button societal issues like cancel culture, the #metoo movement, and abusing institutional power as window dressing to explore an emotional and psychological crisis. It offers no solutions to these issues, never so much as takes an ideological stance in the face of them. While that kept me at arm’s length from TÁR – enough so that I never fully fell under the picture’s sway – Field constructs a nuanced and complicated portrait of his troubled protagonist that is compelling.
TÁR is Field’s return to filmmaking after a sixteen-year hiatus. The actor/writer/director, who counts Stanley Kubrick as a former mentor – Field appeared in a pivotal role in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut – has made only three feature films in his career. First was 2001’s emotionally pulverizing In the Bedroom, then came the equally emotionally fraught 2006 adaptation of author Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, and now TÁR.
Field’s preternatural ability at character study when adapting the work of others is fully intact with his first original screenplay. From the opening minutes of TÁR, we understand Lydia’s bona fides as a musician, composer, and conductor. Field goes (possibly) slightly overboard by making his character an EGOT winner – an artist who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony – an achievement earned by fewer than 30 people, in his effort to make us understand how remarkable she is.
In a brilliant introductory sequence, Field dispatches with the obligatory expository passages about Lydia by including it in an extended interview in which she waxes philosophic about the art of conducting an orchestra. (There’s also a hint of the territory we’re embarking for when there is an exchage about how foolish the distinction between “maestro” and “maestra” is, since gender is the only difference.)
Aside from giving the audience all we need to know about the character, Field uses this New Yorker Q&A – in which New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik plays himself – to create a sense of the complete mastery Lydia has over her chosen discipline.
The world Field crafts is explicitly for grown-ups: it’s about sophisticated, erudite adults saying and doing sophisticated and erudite things. Like a David Lynch fever dream, though – at least in ethos, if not in execution – TÁR ever so slowly pulls back the curtain over its 158 minutes on the ugly callousness of the very sophisticated and erudite Lydia Tár.
It all begins to unravel when one of Lydia’s former protégés dies by suicide. Whispers about sexual advances, in exchange for professional progress, being spurned by the protégé grow louder after a deceptively edited lecture Lydia delivers to students at Juilliard is made public.
The tension of Lydia being unmasked as an abuser by means of a doctored video and the bad-faith effort behind it makes the world of Field’s movie feel as complex and frustrating as our own. The lecture at Juilliard is a bracing version of the separating-the-art-from-the-artist discussion that’s been happening in the culture for at least the last decade. In the sequence, one of Lydia’s students admits that he would rather not conduct a piece by Bach because of the abhorrent behavior the composer engaged in during his life. Lydia chastises the student, practically bullies him, to the point that the student collects his belongings and walks out of the lecture. The unedited video would not have made her look good, but the intentional dishonest editing makes her look worse. As a consequence, the uneasy question that Field leaves hanging in the air asks if the ends justify the means when the target really is a danger to those around her.
I find it interesting that Field, a straight man, decided to make his monster not only a woman, but a gay woman. He has said in interviews that he wrote the part specifically for Blanchett, who is also straight. Did he surmise that making a male #metoo monster protagonist in the vein of Harvey Weinstein would never be accepted by audiences? Are we more receptive to Lydia Tár’s fall from grace than we would have been had the movie focused on Larry Tár? These are the complicated questions that Field forces you to entertain during and after screening the movie.
As I wrote in my introduction, for her part, Cate Blanchett crafts a singular and mesmerizing performance in Lydia Tár. In one of the early scenes of the movie, the character has dinner with a fellow conductor – an almost unrecognizable Mark Strong – in which she repeatedly brushes crumbs from the table with her hand.
In this smallest – but very deliberate – of motions, Blanchett perfectly telegraphs a core trait of Lydia. She is exacting to the point of being controlling; everything must be just so. The most compelling thing about watching this titan of her field begin to unravel is the way in which Blanchett makes that core trait too much to bear as the film goes on. It becomes as forgotten as her former prestige the longer we observe her downfall.
Together, Field and Blanchett are meticulous in building Lydia up in order to make the fall from grace that more impactful. She uses her skill of raw intimidation to protect Petra, her young, Syrian-born adopted daughter that she is raising with her wife, Sharon, from a school bully. It takes one to know one, of course, and it’s easy to see how Lydia can use her power over people – she tells the bully not to bother telling anyone about the threat Lydia has made in defense of her daughter, because “I’m a grownup; no one will believe you.” – to make her own victims while also protecting her daughter from becoming one.
Blanchett is chilling in the scene, as she is when she taunts neighbors across the hall from her rented workspace apartment – and, we’re supposed to assume, a space for her trysts that is hidden from the prying eyes of her wife – after they tell her they’re concerned that her constant piano playing will discourage prospective buyers from taking the apartment. Seeing Lydia, through Blanchett’s unhinged performance, stomping around her apartment while obnoxiously singing and playing an accordion at top volume makes obvious what happens when the great genius wants to punish someone.
That’s about all we get, though, of seeing the monster that hides under the surface of Lydia’s carefully crafted persona. And carefully crafted it is; a late reveal makes us realize that Lydia isn’t who we thought she was. We never see Lydia abusing her power for sexual favors, although we see her try with a new member of the Berlin Philharmonic. We learn about her uglier behavior as the rest of the world within the movie does, through whispered conversations and innuendo.
That coyness from Field is frustrating at times. He’s crafted a world as complex and maddening as our own when I needed him to let us get closer to Lydia in order to truly understand her. It might be frustrating, but it’s also incredibly nuanced storytelling. Combined with Blanchett’s powerhouse performance at the movie’s center, TÁR ends up being a rich, if not wholly satisfying, experience.
Why it got 4 stars:
- TÁR is a bit too much of an ideological squish for me. It wants to use pressing issues in the culture as a way to build an intense character study. It succeeds in its goal; with the help of Cate Blanchett’s performance, which is stunning, Todd Field has created an engrossing examination of his main character. I only wish it had done more than that.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There’s a wonderful little moment of Lydia playing a piece of music numerous times as interpreted by other famous musicians. To my mind, there’s no way Field wasn’t paying homage to a similar scene in Amadeus.
- Field includes several striking and otherworldly dream/nightmare sequences as Lydia begins to unravel.
- The muted cinematography from Florian Hoffmeister is gorgeous.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I attended a press-only screening for TÁR. There were probably 12 or 15 of us in attendance. The film is currently available only in theaters.