Intellectually stimulating, abundantly rewarding and furiously relevant, Todd Field’s Tár is a work of such herculean achievement that I can hardly deign to do it justice. While it remains to be seen if it will top my list of the best films of 2022, it is superior to anything I saw last year, with the possible exception of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, of which it occasionally resembles.
But the most apt comparison of all may be to Orson Welles, whose interest in the towering fall from grace, and in the gray areas between what the camera shows and doesn’t show, are shared by Field. Field has made estimable films in the past, with Little Children and In the Bedroom, but Tár is his hulking Kane, updated for a post-pandemic, post-MeToo, post-woke America.
Cate Blanchett, in a career-defining performance that is already aswarm with Oscar buzz, plays Lydia Tár, one of the top composer-conductors in contemporary classical music. We meet Lydia, an EGOT winner and a protégé of Leonard Bernstein now living in Berlin, on the precipice of a career apotheosis: In the coming weeks, she is to lead the German Philharmonic through a complete Mahler cycle while simultaneously toasting the release of her memoir. In the extended opening sequence, she is interviewed at the New Yorker Festival by Adam Gopnik (playing himself) in a captivating bit of formal realism that reveals her to be a charming, gregarious, thoughtful and cerebral artist of the highest magnitude.
Cut to the next scene, at a guest-artist class for conducting students at Juilliard, in which we encounter a different side of Lydia. Out of reach of the cameras and klieg lights of the elite and friendly media, she’s coarser with her words, more pointed in her criticisms. She is an intimidating presence, especially for Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), a BIPOC student who, when Lydia brings up Bach, is dismissive of the “cis white male” classical canon and its womanizing progenitors, and who is brave (or foolish) enough to raise his objections, despite the frog in his throat and the nervous shaking of his left leg. This is, after all, the effect she has even on her colleagues, let alone the meek social-justice warriors under her tutelage.
“Don’t be so eager to be offended,” she offers, in her most lucid rejoinder, and a line that may well apply to a generation. (She also describes herself to the students as a “U-Haul lesbian,” another of Field’s colorful turns of phrase.) But then she goes overboard, into actual cruelty, and Max leaves the auditorium in a huff. It’s a moment Lydia will soon forget — just another scalp on her mantel — but it’s not the only action that will come back to haunt her.
It’s a scene that casts its thematic shadow over the remainder of Tár, a movie that addresses the perennially topical debate of separating the art from the artist — of the extent to which odious personal actions, real or imagined, can and should deprive a creative talent of their livelihood. When it comes out, through the apparently self-inflicted death of a former player in Lydia’s orchestra and a subsequent lawsuit, that the great conductor may have been “grooming” the troubled musician, it sets off a string of calamitous events that threaten to torpedo Lydia’s career at its apogee. Meanwhile, she has taken a shine to a pretty young cellist (Sophie Kauer), rigging rehearsals and programming selections in her favor, in a pattern that seems to mirror the accusations leveled against her.
There’s a pivotal moment in which Lydia, finding herself seeking a massage in East Asia, is directed to a showcase of teenage girls, all presumably sex workers, positioned in a semicircle, just like in an orchestra, and she’s told to pick one. Confronted with a decision that mirrors her power dynamic in Berlin, she bolts from the parlor and vomits in the street. It’s her most genuinely human moment in the movie.
But the thing is, as in most of the cases that surface here in real life, we don’t know the truth about Lydia’s alleged actions, and Field wisely avoids tilting his revelations in either direction. The central question of her guilt or innocence is as unanswered as the film’s other layered mysteries, both massive and picayune. Like the bandage that appears on her finger, its provenance unknown. Or the sounds that torment her at night, from the strange hum from the refrigerator or the ticking metronome that nobody seems to have turned on. Or the visions that suddenly grab her attention, as she gazes intently at … what? Field doesn’t give us the pleasure of cutting to what she sees, all the better to let us trip through the wires of her mind, wondering along with Lydia if the stresses of her life are prompting audiovisual schisms in her reality. Then again, conductors hear things we don’t. There is music in everything, and Tár has the effect of elevating our ears.
Rapturous filmmaking on every level, Tár is as directed with as much care and precision as its screenplay. As in a flawless symphonic performance, neither contains a false note. This extends to Field’s savvy combination of montage and long takes; he knows when to cut among the various players in each psychologically loaded scene, and when to step away, his camera distant, and observe scenes of excruciating intimacy without the crutch of an edit.
Is Lydia Tár a monster? This is the thorny question at the heart of Field’s film, and in the cancel-culture era in which we live, many in the movie’s audience will reach a definite conclusion. Field presents a character who is objectively hypocritical — take notes from those first two formative scenes on the festival stage and at Juilliard, and how many of her high-minded statements ring false throughout the movie’s two hours and 38 minutes — as well as vindictive and self-centered to the detriment of anyone who enters her inner circle. She arguably abuses her power.
Blanchett, mesmerizing for every second she’s onscreen, performed and really did conduct much of the music in Tár. She wields her baton like a samurai, slicing and dicing at invading armies only she can see. Is this the work of a genius who is elevating masterworks to new heights of depth and feeling? Or is she a force of destruction whose radioactive fallout will take down many others with her? The answer, I reckon, is yes.
TÁR. Director: Todd Field; Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noemie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Mark Strong, Sylvia Flote; Distributor: Focus Features; Rated R; Opens Oct. 21 at most area theaters