Tár was released on Oct. 7, 2022, and for a while afterwards, I did everything I could, short of getting on an airplane, to see it. A big part of the reason was Cate Blanchett. I first saw her in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a magnificent film that on its release in 1999 was underappreciated but that I think has gained admirers in the intervening quarter-century. Besides having a terrific script, it was full of first-rate performances — not only by the stars Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but also by the late, great character actors James Rebhorn and Philip Baker Hall. But the standout was Blanchett. Her performance was full of brilliant little touches that brought out her character, a young American heiress named Meredith who’s in love — but perhaps even more in love with the idea of being in love.
Since then, Blanchett has shone in a number of movies, including The Aviator (2004), the Howard Hughes biopic in which her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn — for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar — is pretty much the only thing I remember about it; Blue Jasmine (2013), Woody Allen’s homage to A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she won Best Actress; and Carol (2015), a flimsy lesbian love story set in the 1950s that’s memorable only for Blanchett’s sharp essaying of the title role. Her eight Oscar nominations also include Best Actress nods for both Elizabeth (1999) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2008), in which she played Good Queen Bess. Blanchett is one of those rare actors who, however weak the material, can hold your attention by inhabiting a role with a fierce, fascinating thoroughness.
Anyway, I finally viewed Tár on New Year’s Eve. It was worth the wait. Blanchett plays a fictional character named Lydia Tár, a middle-aged American woman who since 2013 has been the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. We open with Tár being interviewed in New York, in front of a stylish audience, by Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker. Gopnick’s introduction is one big giant shameless dose of exposition: Tár, he says, is “one of the most important musical figures of our time.” A graduate of the Curtis Institute, Harvard (where she was Phi Beta Kappa), and the University of Vienna, she’s a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, did several years of “ethnographic field work” in Peru, won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony for her conducting and compositions, and led all of the Big Five U.S. philharmonics (Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York) before landing, in 2013, her current gig in Berlin.
Tar’s discussion with Gopnick goes on forever. It’s low-key. There’s no sense whatsoever that Todd Field, the film’s writer-director, is in a hurry to get this absolutely action-free sequence out of the way and to move on to something a tad more overtly dramatic. It’s quite a bold move, one that could have sunk the movie before it even started. But it works. Yes, the exposition gives us the CV in one neat package. But more important, the conversation starts to take us under the surface of our heroine. Blanchett’s Tár, we observe, is immensely assured, authoritative, and articulate; she knows her stuff cold, is accustomed to being in (and deserving) the spotlight, has deep thoughts that she’s ready to share, and possesses not a hint of humility. And why should she? Discussing the nature of music and, specifically, of conducting, she tells Gopnick, “We are dealing with time,” and it’s an interesting line to hear in the middle of this particular sequence, because the sequence itself is playing games with screen time, indeed taking a remarkable chance with it: how, after all, will viewers react to the fact that Tár starts with this visually static two-hander — an utter violation of every rule about moviemaking?
Speaking for myself, I was impressed. If nothing else, this opening sequence proves that Todd Field (whose acting credits include Woody Allen’s Radio Days and Eyes Wide Shut and who has directed two previous feature films, In the Bedroom and Little Children) has every bit as much self-confidence as his heroine. Besides, Blanchett is such a superb actress that it’s a joy just to watch her be Lydia Tár in conversation, and to begin to get to know her, at least on a superficial, public level, and in an entirely unrushed manner. (The unhurried pacing of this opening sequence reminds one, by the way, that Tár lost Best Picture last year to Everything Everywhere All at Once — a movie every bit as frantic and crazy as this one is muted and re strained — and that Blanchett lost Best Actress to its star, Michelle Yeoh.)
Not long after the interview with Gopnick we’re given a bravura sequence that tells us a whole lot about Tár the professional. Teaching a master class at Juilliard, she’s challenged by a student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist) who confesses that he’s “not really into Bach” because “as a BIPOC transgender person I can’t take Bach’s music seriously.” Tár isn’t having it. Quoting Emily Dickinson — “a soul selects its own society” — she rejects the idea of dismissing dead white men. She’s a lesbian, she tells Max, but that doesn’t keep her from loving Bach. “There’s a humility in Bach,” she says. “He’s not pretending he’s certain about anything:” She’s really trying to get through to Max, in a kind but firm way. But Max won’t budge: “White male cis composers are just not my thing.” His stubbornness inspires Tár to burst into a brilliant speech that it’s surprising to hear in a Hollywood movie in this era when the film industry has embraced identity politics:
Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity…. The problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic, epistemic dissident is that if Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth, country, religion, sexuality, and so on, then so can yours.
She’s stirring, inspiring; any smart student would die for such a teacher. Alas, Max is too brainwashed to learn from her wisdom. “You’re a f*****g b***h,” he tells her, stomping out.
Moving on without haste, the film takes us deeper still into Tár, acquainting us with the landscape of her whirlwind, jet-setting, day-to-day life. She has a live-in lover, Sharon (Nina Hoss), who plays violin in the orchestra, who has psychiatric issues, and whose small daughter, Petra, lives with them; and she has a young and ambitious assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), something about whom sends out warning vibes from the get-go. The addition to the orchestra of a pretty, gifted young Russian cellist, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), introduces some personal and professional complications; so does Tár’s decision to give her aging assistant conductor, Sebastian Brix (Allan Corduner), the heave-ho. It’s a busy little world that Tár inhabits, full of intense competition, professional gossip, and diverting conversations about, for example, how the theme of the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth has the same sequence of intervals as the opening theme of the final movement of Mozart’s Fortieth. Nor, we discover, does Tár’s critical engagement with everything around her ever sleep: awakened in the morning by Shostakovich on the radio, she recognizes after a few seconds the conducting hand of Michael Tilson Thomas and chides him aloud for his execrable approach to the work.
Not until just over an hour into the film does it happen. Francesca informs Tár that Krista Taylor, a young women who, a while back, received a fellowship for female conductors as part of a program that Tár administers, has committed suicide. Krista, we gather, was emotionally unstable, and sent emails to Francesca charging Tár with inappropriate behavior — and, later, of trying to ruin her career. At first Tár doesn’t take the matter seriously. But it won’t go away. Over lunch, her retired predecessor, Andris Davis (Julian Glover), tells her he’s glad, in the current climate, to be out of the game: Met conductor James Levine was brought down by sexual-assault allegations; long before that, Davis recalls, Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was put through a “denazification” process even though he’d been passionately anti-Nazi.
Eventually Tár realizes her own career — and reputation — are in jeopardy because of the Taylor case. Soon other accusations surface. It turns out someone filmed the Juilliard master class in which Tár sparred with Max, and the edit posted on social media makes her sound not like a voice of reason but like a bigot. She’s called before a meeting of the orchestra’s board in Berlin and summoned to New York to be deposed. Francesca abandons her. So does Sharon. Fleeing Berlin, Tár returns to the States — and to the modest house in which she grew up (last name Tarr) — where she watches one of her old videotapes of Bernstein enthusing over the power of music. Some feelings, Bernstein declares, are too deep for words, but “music names them for us.” When her brother (Lee Sellers), turns up, he exhibits no sympathy for her. Next thing we know, she’s flying to the other side of the world — and to a major career comedown.
I mentioned Tár’s brother, and their childhood home. They’re both the opposite of her and her world. He looks like he’s on his way out to shoot deer. The house is dark and cramped and cluttered, a chaos of grungy colors and textures — the opposite of all the film’s earlier interiors, with their generous dimensions, high ceilings, and big bare surfaces in white, black, gray, and beige. The very sight of Tár in such a shabby setting underscores the totality with which her world has come apart.
Recently, when I saw Maestro — Bradley Cooper’s widely hailed film about Leonard Bernstein — I wished that I’d seen Tár first so that I could make comparisons. But it’s not too late for that. Maestro is long (129 minutes), and feels long, while Tár is longer (158 minutes), but feels shorter. When I wrote about Maestro, I criticized it for leaving out “the abundance of rich specifics that make up a life.” You can’t say that about Tár, which does an exciting job of depicting the nuts and bolts of orchestra conducting, and of the classical-music business generally. For me, Cooper’s performance as Bernstein was shallow from beginning to end. a matter largely of capturing gestures and a tone og voice; Blanchett, by contrast, is Tár through and through, guts and sinew, heart and mind. When Cooper conducts, he hams it up cartoonishly; when Blanchett’s on the podium, she does the job with a subtlety and absorption that makes you believe instantly that she’s the real thing.
Ultimately, Maestro is less a drama than a spectacle, a pageant consisting of various bravura tableaux; Tár is a tour de force of rising suspense and interpersonal tensions — and, above all, an extraordinarily engrossing study of a supremely complex and captivating character. If Bradley Cooper seems to have made Maestro because he was interested, in a rather superficial way, in celebrity (his previous directorial effort, A Star Is Born, was also about showbiz), or, shall we say, in the shiny trappings, if not the specifics, of high culture at its most glamorous, Todd Field is plainly interested not only in the way in which the power of great music can transform a soul but also in the way in which the originally pure and innocent love of that music can be soiled by the lure of fame and power — and how all of it can be quickly destroyed by baseless rumors and accusations. How to sum up? Simple: Tár is a masterpiece — and, given its take on identity politics and cancel culture, a gratifyingly gutsy one — and Blanchett is, I’m tempted to say, the great film actress of our time.
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