Who is Lydia Tár? Is she the acclaimed composer-conductor celebrated by The New Yorker in the opening of the movie that shares her fictional namesake as generational? Is she the heavily pruned and curated brand that she herself cultivates, her swishy suit pants as well-measured as her staccato? Or, indeed, is there an all-the-more sinister side: a narcissistic megalomaniac as beholden to her plaudits as she is driven by them?
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The truth, as is so often the case, is nestled in the center of the Venn Diagram, astutely observes director Todd Field in his first film for sixteen years, “Tár.” Though not without its blemishes, here’s a timely — and, indeed, timeless — piece about the corrupting essence of power, exploitation, and the burdensome nature of the crown, elevated by a hydrogen bomb of a performance from Cate Blanchett, inarguably at her best since 2015’s “Carol.”
The aforementioned questions emerge, of course, across the two hours and change of runtime; as far as we’re concerned, the Lydia Tár we’re initially introduced to is a flawless demigod. Evocative of a softened J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash,” this is a woman who has done it all: she’s headed up orchestras and symphonies from New York to Berlin, completed a five-year Ph.D.’s worth of ethnographic musical research with a remote tribe, and just completed on an expansive tome interrogating her own work (“Tár on Tár,” what else?)
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As the present skipper of the Berlin Philharmonic — to those of us not in the know, among the best in the world — she commands her troops with stoic aplomb, though that’s not without a little light-heartedness. This isn’t your typical composer cliché, her hair flying all over the place as she rouses the air with her hands; yeah, she’ll sometimes be the fiery priest commanding her pulpit, but she knows how to pick her moments.
What slowly emerges, bubbling under Tár’s glossy, well-kempt veneer, is a delicately concealed darkness. It’s to the great strength of “Tár” that the eponymous subject’s tragic villainy isn’t shockingly revealed in some grandiose display of evil so much through a trickle of ambiguity, like wickedness through a thousand, contestable paper cuts.
First, at a class in Julliard, she cruelly demeans a student for bringing his identity — he’s “BIPOC and pansexual,” continuing in pigeon-holing Twitter speak that no one, surely, uses in the real world — into his musical interest, refuting the age-old canon of “white cis male” maestros. Tár’s bitchiness aside, the political overtones of the sequence are grating: the Gen Z idpol pastiche is an egregiously thin bit of stock, there for the Boomers in the audience to clap and holler in the wake of Tár’s inevitable takedown. By any measure, it’s the lowest of hanging fruit, and aside from positioning the titular subject as a holier-than-thou, strangely apolitical mean-machine, one wonders why the scene made the final cut.
A generous read would be that it interweaves with the thematic lift of the second half, chronicling Tár’s downfall amid a web of historical sexual assault and abuse allegations. And therein lies our second clue: after Tár’s twenty-something, one-time mentee dies of suicide, an email trail suggests the composer had her blacklisted from all of the major conservatories and orchestras, playing a part in her death. Compounding these two major early events are hints at Tár’s deceitfulness, deliberately currying the jealousy of her wife (Nina Hoss) with her public flirtations and playing cut-throat backroom politics to concrete her iron hold.
It would be satisfying enough, then, if Tár was characterized as a monster, got her dues, and that was that — but thankfully, that’s far from the case. Enter now Blanchett, for whom the role was written, with her own generational penchant for making success out of slivers: her Tár is privately vulnerable, haunted — perhaps literally — by her myriad flaws, less a ghastly ghoul than caught in the throes of ego. She just has an aura of resilience that’s hard to ignore, terrible though her acts may be, and that’s also to the strength of Field, Alexandra Milchan, and Scott Lambert’s script: there’s hardly a shut-and-closed case here, subtly injecting a little nuance into the black-and-white culture of cancellation.
What we get, then, is a resplendently performed character study garnished nicely with psychological intrigue. As is often the case in this brand of starry performance piece, Blanchett is the talisman: she at least overshadows the drawbacks on the page, making them much easier to ignore, if not wholly invisible. [B]
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