"Tár": Best Picture Nominees 2023 Review Series

What point is a film, in which the anti-woke protagonist is a villain, trying to make?

Focus Features

Lydia Tár lies constantly, to her family, her colleagues, and her friends, all of whom put up with her ego and impatience because she’s one of the greatest living composers and conductors in the world. Most of the first act of “Tár” reveals the film’s namesake’s eminence through seemingly mundane conversations. Superficially, the audience discovers that she’s earned EGOT status, learned her art under Leonard Bernstein, and directs the world-renowned Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but the details within the chit-chat setup this fable about corruption and power. 

In a lengthy continuous-take scene, Tár tussles with a student at Julliard who says, that as a BIPOC pangender person, they aren’t into studying the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. "Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity," she tells them, before they huffily pack up their bag and call her a bitch. 

The astonishing scene leaves the self-described “U-Haul lesbian” victorious in a small battle over whether Bach should be canceled from modern music studies. On the one hand, she tallies points on the intersectional politics scoreboard for being a queer woman. On the other, her successes and acclaim validate her conviction to separate the art from the man; this hand wins out, for a moment. This exchange, which other students in the room filmed and later deceptively edited to frame Tár as a sexual harasser, ultimately accelerates her career’s implosion when the videos go viral online. In this invented scandal, she is the victim of an unfair cancel culture attack, but it turns out she deserves no sympathy. 

At the start of the film, Tár’s fame and acclaim have already reached a peak, but no one knows it yet. She has exploited the power accompanying the height of her career to use and manipulate the women around her. At home, she steals heart medication from her own wife and lies about missing her calls. Within the orchestra, she breaks house rules trying to win the affections of a hot Russian cellist import then discards colleagues when they point this out. There are mountains of sexual tension between Tár and her assistant, who held on to a professional relationship even after their own affair fizzled. 

This story mirrors many #MeToo themes but it’s jarring to see a powerful woman treating other women so terribly, and even more so for Big Hollywood to throw the movie so many accolades – even though Cate Blanchett plays the titular character as a masculine woman, in dress and demeanor, even lowering her voice to a husky drawl.  While not necessarily a scripted narrator reading voiced-over lines, Blanchett's unpredictable quips and brooding expressions expose whatever inner monologue might be playing in her mind. We’re only privy to what she sees and hears and there’s little obvious to point toward what’s coming next. It’s a masterful performance that writer and director Todd Field said he wrote with her in mind, and that he didn’t want to make the movie at all unless Blanchett played the part. 

Field takes his time to untangle Tár’s improprieties, employing the subtle clues and references implanted in the dialogue throughout the story’s exposition. This storytelling tactic leaves plenty to the imagination, though Field leaves the audience with plenty of color to paint the empty spaces. While the movie is long, at nearly two hours and forty minutes, this was the intention from the beginning. Field acknowledges as such in the script, just after the title page:

"Based on this script’s page count, it would be reasonable to assume that the total running time for TÁR will be well under two hours. However, this will not be a reasonable film. There will be tempo changes, and soundscapes that require more time than is represented on the page, and of course a great deal of music performed on screen. All this to say, if you are mad enough to greenlight this film, be prepared for one whose necessary length represents these practical accommodations."

The length leaves the space and opportunity for Blanchett to turn subtle gestures and quirky tics in the first two acts into deranged madness in the third. There is no one isolated event that knocks the protagonist from glory, but rather compounding incidents resulting from her endless lies and manipulations. Blanchett's long journey from subtlety to hysteria unfolds inside this length, and makes the ultimate collapse more impactful – and actually pretty funny. 

Where Tár is a hero in the story that comments on the pitfalls of gender and woke politics, she’s a villain in the broader study about the integrity of powerful people, and that’s the point that matters here. The story fails to answer whether the ends justify the means in taking down someone abusing their position of power when their public downfall is impelled by a manufactured scandal. For the audience, her downfall is both satisfying and unsettling, which is what Field likely wanted to accomplish, and why he specifically employed Blanchett to pull it off in a way only she could. That scene at Julliard raises the film’s central question about separating art from artist over the backdrop of politically-charged times. “There’s a humility in Bach,” she tells the class. “He’s not pretending he’s certain about anything because he knows it’s always the question that involves the listener. It’s never the answer, right?” 

In a simmering society addicted to absolutist pablum, Field succeeds in explaining that sometimes asking the question is the entire point.

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