'Tár': You think you know but you have no idea

Cate Blanchett conducts our hearts, minds, AND funny-bones

I wrote 'Tár' off the moment I heard the title. And the poster wasn’t helping, suffused with Oscar Movie™️ self-importance that might as well be written in neon. Todd Field, a venerated filmmaker emerging from sixteen years of cinematic hibernation! Cate Blanchett, a great actor whose assured greatness is frankly boring to talk about at this point! I was fully prepared to watch this a week before the 2023 Academy Awards, post a 3.5 star review on Letterboxd, and move on with my movie-loving life.

There is of course a big BUT coming. Wait for it…

Wait for it…

STRINGS!

'Tár' knows you assume it’s a self-important film, when in fact it’s the opposite: a skewering of self-importance, and pomposity, that’s ultimately way weirder and funner than you may have expected. It’s maybe even… a comedy?

We’ll cycle back to that. On the surface, 'Tár' scans, at first, as what you’ve probably read: “the movie where the female conductor gets cancelled.” Which, yes — that definitely happens. But I’d say the movie’s much more interested in imperiousness, and process; about losing yourself in your own bullshit, your own legend, to the point that of COURSE you’d think you were above any sort of recrimination, legal or otherwise.

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, of course) is sort of Leonard Bernstein and Gustavo Dudamel and Lin-Manuel Miranda all rolled into one: a celebrity conductor at the absolute APEX of her field, technically and culturally, and about to conduct a very important Mahler piece my friends with orchestral backgrounds assure me is a good, authentic detail. She dabbles in work-based adultery. She dismisses her students’ frailties. Like Olivia Wilde, she enjoys a very specific salad. Most importantly, Tár stands in total control of her world and all its movements, on and off stage.

She’s an asshole! Not to the point you could have ever called this movie, like, ‘Bad Conductor’,¹ but from the jump the movie is aware of how difficult -- and flat-out annoying -- this woman can be. It’s almost like the movie wants you to be annoyed, too. Director Todd Fields plays the below-the-line credits up-front, aping movies of old, and... I have no proof, but it almost feels like a troll? Lydia Tár is a serious person, starring in the serious movie 'Tár', and serious movies go out of their way to honor tradition. And then to follow it up with a near-real time New Yorker interview (with real New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik)? And the implication that Lydia Tár has guested on Alec Baldwin’s very real “Here’s the Thing” podcast? Don’t tell me this movie doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing. Hell, it ends on a punchline so good it feels like an episode of ‘Succession’ — that tonally aware, and in control.²

Without giving anything away³, I’ll say that much later in the film, we learn that “Lydia Tár” was not exactly born into this world of bon mots and canapés, that she comes from… less sophisticated stock, stock that wasn’t exactly getting suits tailored to exacting measure, let alone owning multiple Berlin apartments. Her life is one long act of politics and performance — knowing how to conduct (lol) herself and the way she moves through these spaces she’s chosen to inhabit.

‘Tár’ knows that Tár is full of shit. The movie knows that, to some extent, her whole ecosystem is full of shit. Their pithy exchanges, their restaurant orders (you have to try the cucumber salad, it’s really the only vegetarian option), the names they bestow on their charitable organizations all betray the degree to which this cloistered world is exactly that, an act of willed sophistication for all parties involved. But especially Tár, whose actions threaten to tear the whole goddamn thing down.

None of which is to dismiss Tár’s abject, borderline criminal abuses of power! It’s merely to say that — I think we could all imagine the bone-dry #MeToo/“cancel culture” (a term I can only put in quotes, less I normalize it) movie, full of important, necessary messages we can all clap and feel good about, but absent… I don’t know, a propensity toward entertainment? Or equally important, dimensionality?

‘Tár’ (the movie, not the person) demonstrates that you can be About Something and sharply funny at the same time. I can’t wait — and Lydia “Tár on Tár” Tár would have loved this — for it to absolutely clean up at the Oscars.

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Also, and I couldn’t find a way to organically fold this into my “‘Tár’ is a comedy!” thesis: 🎵 sound 🎶 is so fucking essential to this movie. Not a surprise given that it’s about a conductor — whose whole job is navigating sound — but ‘Tar’ hits ‘Sound of Metal’ levels of sonic inventiveness. We hear what she hears: the faint beeping of a phone, house sounds in the night, a far-off scream (?) while out on a run. Impeccable sound design goes a long, long way to placing us in this complicated woman’s aural headspace. You feel the sort of musical anxiety with which she moves through the world, this almost tell-tale heart following her wherever she goes.

1. Tagline: “In the key of D G A F”

2. Not coincidentally, I also pre-judged ‘Succession’ as self-important!

3. Hopefully I’ve largely talked around the events of the movie, which much like a great orchestra performance you need to see for yourself