‘Tár’ Review: Cate Blanchett Acts With Ferocious Force in Todd Field’s Masterful Drama
The actor creates a study in power, passion, and entitlement in a movie so real it's immersive.
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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“Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field , tells the story of a world-famous symphony orchestra conductor played by Cate Blanchett , and let me say right up front: It’s the work of a master filmmaker. That’s not a total surprise. Field has made only two previous films, and the first of them, the domestic revenge drama “In the Bedroom” (2001), was languorous and lacerating — a small, compact indie-world explosion. His second feature, “Little Children” (2006), was a misfire, though his talent was all over it.
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Blanchett’s performance first strikes us as a tad theatrical; she almost seems to be reciting the lines. But what we realize is that Lydia herself is giving a performance, pitching her persona to the New York swells, stitching together pensées and anecdotes she has told dozens of times. Offstage, she’s as fiery and spontaneous as she was fake-spontaneous in the interview, as we see her in assorted encounters, like a gossipy lunch with Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), the nerdish investment banker and part-time conductor with whom she founded the Accordian fellowship, an organization devoted to the cultivating and placing of aspiring young women conductors, or the quippy back-and-forth she enjoys with Francesca (Noémie Merlant), her comely and recessive assistant, who multitasks as devotedly as if Lydia were a high-maintenance studio executive.
One of the fascinations of “Tár” is its portrait of Lydia as a highbrow paragon who has created herself as a kind of brand. She’s a passionate scholar who lives and breathes the scores she’s conducting. She’s an ardent teacher, who in one exhilarating sequence leads a master class at Juilliard with a whiplash provocation designed to slice through the pieties — about atonal music and identity politics — that, in her opinion, have blunted the students’ sense of possibility. She’s a global celebrity who understands that conducting is a dictatorship, something she enforces within the democratic-socialist protocols that supposedly rule the Berlin orchestra. She’s a technologist of recordings, micromanaging the nuances of how her albums are made (right down to the pose on the cover photos), and an author as well, about to publicize a coffee-table book called “Tár on Tár.” And she is, in effect, a CEO, enmeshed in the office politics of managing the symphony personnel, organizing benefit concerts, constructing a fearsome global reach that’s the cornerstone of her mystique.
In this scene and so many others, Field’s script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works. He creates such an elaborately enticing portrait of Lydia Tár as a public figure that when she travels back to Berlin and walks into her impossibly luxe designer home, it comes as a slight shock to realize that she also has a personal life. She is married, to the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic (played by the radiantly sane-tempered Nina Hoss), and they have a young daughter, Petra, who Lydia, amusingly, rescues from a mean-girl situation at school by speaking to the young bully in question with such a perfect terrorist threat (“I am Petra’s father…I am going to get you”) that you realize she can master the politics of any situation. Except for one.
In “Tár,” Todd Field enmeshes us in a tautly unfolding narrative of quiet duplicity, corporate intrigue, and — ultimately — erotic obsession. Yet he does it so organically that for a while you don’t even realize you’re watching a “story.” But that’s what a great story is. It doesn’t hit you over the head with telegraphed arcs. It sneaks up on you, the way that life does. Field, working with the cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, has shot “Tár” so that it looks like a documentary directed by Stanley Kubrick (who Field worked with on “Eyes Wide Shut,” back when he was an actor). The compositions are naturalistic in an imposing, ice-cool way, and what they express is the casual calculation with which Lydia monitors every facet of her existence. Her personal life, artistic career, and highly charged, verbally domineering personality are all in such powerful sync that we can’t imagine how anything could upset this apple cart.
Yet there’s one aspect of Lydia’s life that she understandably keeps on the down-low: the women she has flings with on the side. She is, in her way, a not untypical celebrity, treating sexual indulgence as something she has the license to do. In this case, part of the flavor of it emerges from the classical-music world, which has had more than its share of philanderers and predators. The reason for that, Field suggests, is that there’s something about the exalted nature of this music that leads the people who live everyday within its heady majesty to feel as if pleasure, in every realm, is their divine right.
There is also a foreshadowing glimpse, in the audience at the New Yorker interview, of a woman we see only from behind — a redhead named Krista, 25 years old and one of the Accordian fellows, who Lydia enjoyed a brief intense relationship with, until it became clear that Krista was fixated on her in a compulsive and unstable way. Lydia not only cut her loose; she campaigned, in private, against her landing a conducting position with an orchestra. But Krista can’t let go — of Lydia or of her own demons. And this is the wrong era for that to happen in.
“Tár” has been constructed ingeniously, so that the various situations Lydia is dealing with in the orchestra — like her scheme to get rid of Sebastian (Allan Corduner), the old mule of an assistant conductor — interlock in unexpected ways. Lydia cuts Sebastian loose with icy efficiency, but that means Francesca thinks it’s her time to step up and occupy the assistant-conductor slot. Lydia, however, decrees that it’s not the time. And that’s a big mistake. She’s counting on the loyalty of Francesca to get rid of the desperate, telltale email messages Krista has been sending to the two of them. Why the two of them? Because this fling was a lot more sensually complicated than other office flings.
The movie starts off as the chronicle of a magnetic, brilliant, difficult artist navigating a sea of career drama. Then, just like that, it evolves into another kind of movie — a study in what can happen when social media, the death of privacy, and a merciless new public morality conspire to hold someone, in all their flaws (including some rather monstrous ones), up to the light. Lydia rides high, only to confront the rapid spectacle of her downfall. Which is riveting, in a Greek-tragedy-in-the-age-of-YouTube-and-the-New-York-Post sort of way. There’s a moment near the end that rivals the Jackson-Maine-peeing-at-the-Grammys scene in the 2018 “A Star Is Born” for sheer jaw-dropping wowness.
Yet “Tár” also raises a fundamental question, one that will be discussed and debated with singular intensity as the movie gets released in October and then heads into awards season. That question is: Where does the film stand on the issue of what happens to Lydia? I would say that it shows her, very much, to be a predatory soul (and she herself comes face-to-face with that reality in a scene where she tries to get a massage in Thailand). Yet she is also a great artist. You could say, and I would, that the film strikes a note of ambivalence, but in a haunting sense the final judgment offered by “Tár” is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world. One where people wear masks. And where the power of the sublime no longer holds sway.
Reviewed at Dolby 88 (Venice Film Festival), Aug. 22, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 158 MIN.
- Production: A Focus Features release of a Standard Film Company, EMJAG Productions release. Producers: Todd Field, Scott Lambert, Alexandra Milchan. Executive producers: Cate Blanchett, Nigel Wooll.
- Crew: Director, screenplay: Todd Field. Camera: Florian Hoffmeister. Editor: Monika Willi. Music: Hildur Guonadóttir.
- With: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Mark Strong, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Sylvia Flote.
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‘Tár’: Cate Blanchett’s Staggering Work of Complicated Genius
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But she needs an image for the cover. Tár’s Mahler run is going to be released as a digital box set by Deutsche-Grammophon, the prestigious label whose album covers are surely among the most iconic, recognizable images in classical music, powerful assertions of musicians — conductors and soloists and small ensembles — as larger-than-life auteurs, with faces and names on par with the legendary composers that they’re playing. The occasion of a career-capping Mahler set calls for a statement piece. Tár’s instinct, in designing that image, is to look to the past.
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That “maybe” is because Fields has made Tár a somewhat mysterious endeavor. Someone — maybe someones — is working to undo Tár from the inside. We see the computer screen of someone editing Tár’s Wikipedia page, but we don’t know who. A livestream from within Tár’s hotel room in New York is held by an unidentified hand, typing out gibes about the conductor to some equally unknown person. Someone turns on the metronome in Tár’s study one night. Someone else — this time a person we know — sets her loose on a cat and mouse game in an old building complex in Berlin, to horrifying results that may or may not have been intended. At one point, Tár goes on a jog through a park and hears a woman screaming for her life in the distance. She never finds the woman. It’s enough to drive a person mad.
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