Quick Take: TAR

 

It tickles me silly to see TAR playing in virtually every suburban multiplex in the Chicago area (albeit in small, cozy auditoriums sandwiched between the mammoth ones where mainstream darlings like Black Adam and Ticket to Paradise will play to sold-out crowds this weekend.) TAR is anything but multiplex fare: an esoteric, intellectually demanding, two-hour-and-forty minute roller coaster ride of an art film anchored by Cate Blanchett's triumphant performance.in the title role.

Todd Field, who wrote and directed (and who hasn't made a film since Little Children in 2006), sets high expectations for the audience’s attention span from the get-go. He opens with  Lydia Tar (Blanchett), the celebrated conductor of Berlin's symphony orchestra, being interviewed before an adoring audience by Adam Gopnik (a staff writer for the New Yorker, playing himself). The conversation is rarefied and dense as it delves into the finer points of conducting Mahler symphonies, and I defy the average moviegoer to understand or even care about the discussion. From there, she goes on to have lunch with a colleague where wait staff appear regularly in servile silence to fill water glasses and deliver bread baskets as she coldly discusses her plan to 'rotate' an aging colleague to a lesser orchestra. And then she's off to teach a class at Julliard where she's particularly pedantic and brutal towards a young, queer person of color who "can't get on board with Bach as a while cisgender male." It's a lot to follow...

The character's emotional life, if a bit easier to get our heads around, is just as complicated. She has a long-term partner (the orchestra's first violinist, played with simmering, dwindling patience by Nina Hoss), a stalker who commits suicide in the wake of Tar's coldness, an almost predatory flirtation with a young Russian cellist, and an implied romantic history with her quietly disgruntled personal assistant. By contrast, she’s also a loving, doting mother to her young daughter.

Lydia Tar, in the end, is the sort of complicated, fiercely talented -- and just as fiercely arrogant - artist that men were allowed to be (even indulged in being) for centuries. But Field doesn't take an obvious stand on whether Tar's persecution is excessive due to her gender. Instead he depicts her decline with a cool, detached lack of escalating intensity, an emotional temperature which suits and complement's Tar's own chilly, cerebral personality. (And one which is echoed and underlined by the production design, particularly in Tar's spacious but hard-edged Berlin apartment.)  The film concludes in an extended coda showing us Tar's life in professional exile. Some reviewers have deemed this section superfluous, but I found it not only a perfect denouement, but one laced with welcome comic relief as well. The final scene of TAR is a startling and funny metaphor for Lydia Tar's new start in an unfamiliar and far less privileged life.

Blanchett's portrayal of a brilliant, difficult artist brought low by the potent combination of cancel culture and her own obstinate hubris, is not so much dazzling as it is flawlessly committed. It's a masterful performance that doesn't draw attention to itself; you're never aware that you're watching Cate Blanchett act. Instead you're captivated by the character herself - by her intellect and her passion, but also by her self-destructive blindness to the cultural and emotional  tectonic shifts taking place just under her feet. It's a stunningly executed tale of a fall from grace.