Tár is writer/director Todd Field’s first film since 2006’s Little Children, and only his second since his debut feature In the Bedroom, which was nominated for Best Picture in 2001. And for about two hours, Tár feels like the best film of 2022, anchored by an incredible lead performance by Cate Blanchett as the title character, until it sputters out with a jarring increase in the tempo and increasingly unrealistic resolution to the main narrative event in the story.
Lydia Tár is the world-famous conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, arriving there after stops in New York, London, and so on. As the film opens, she’s sitting for an interview with Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker, in front of a live audience, in part to promote her new memoir Tár on Tár. Once the Q&A is over, we follow Tár to a class she’s teaching at Julliard and to her work in Berlin, where she’s preparing for a live performance of Mahler’s 5th Symphony that will be recorded for release. She’s extremely reliant on her assistant Francesca, who looks jealous of any contact Lydia has with any young woman, and there are mentions of a former student in her fellowship program who may be having personal problems and could be stalking Lydia. It’s clear that there are demons in Lydia’s closet, and that she hasn’t and still doesn’t treat the people around or below her well, including the patron Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong in the world’s worst hairpiece), which at some point has to come crashing down around her. She’s also a rare woman leading a major symphony orchestra – there’s just one in the U.S. right now, Nathalie Stutzmann in Atlanta – and is also queer, married to a woman (played by Nina Hoss), bringing intersectionality into play even as she’s going to face the wrath of cancel culture later in the story.
For the first two-thirds of the film, Tár casts an incredible spell with its taut, intelligent dialogue and sense of tension simmering below the surface. Blanchett is at her absolute zenith here, with such precise intonation and micro-gestures that it’s hard to believe this isn’t her actual self, bouncing between English and German while standing in front of the orchestra, expressing this meticulous level of control over herself and those around her. She is Lydia Tár, even though Lydia Tár is herself a creation, which means that when the chickens come home to roost, as they must in any such story, the character comes apart at the seams so quickly and so melodramatically in the final third.
The film moves at such a perfect pace for the first two-thirds that it feels like Field either didn’t know how best to depict Tár’s fall from grace or that he might have wanted to make the film three and half hours long. We see Lydia’s imperious nature at home and work through scenes that leave the subtext, and sometimes the entire meaning, ambiguous, so that the picture of her character emerges gradually but the specifics – such as what happened with the former student, and whether she’s a victim or aggressor or both – remain uncertain. She’s clearly balancing on the knife’s edge mentally and professionally, so when the denouement comes, it’s cataclysmic, but the film shifts from second gear to sixth (is that a thing?) after that, and the script’s extreme commitment to realism evaporates. (I actually might put the start of its deterioration slightly when Lydia goes into what is supposed to be an apartment building in a less affluent part of town, only to find herself in a maze of hallways straight out of Piranesi.)
Tár does ask you to suspend some disbelief before that, but I could agree to those terms without too much trouble. The mere idea of a celebrity conductor of classical music in 2021 is kind of absurd; we only have a few classical musicians who might be near Tár’s presumed level of fame. Other aspects of the character are more plausible, such as her apparent lack of any friends or meaningful relationships beyond work and the one she has with her daughter Petra, the last of which also leads to a pivotal scene where we see just how far Lydia will go to protect her child. She even blows off her own mother on one of her trips to New York, which also foreshadows a scene later in the film, and is oddly dismissive to Kaplan (modeled after the financier and amateur conductor Miles Kaplan) even though he’s critical to her career and the foundation that runs her fellowship program.
One theory around the conclusion of Tár is that at least some of it is happening in her head, and the further I’ve gotten from watching it, the more I lean towards this interpretation. Either this is true, in which case I am more sympathetic towards the film as a whole, or it’s not, in which case I think the film fails to stick its landing. I think we’re watching her breakdown in accelerated time, some of which might be happening, but some of which is unreal – a dream, a hallucination, perhaps just a series of anxious thoughts from someone who has already been showing signs that she was seeing or hearing things.
Blanchett does give the best performance I’ve seen by an actress this year – probably the best performance by any actor – even though my sentimental pick for the Oscar will be Michelle Yeoh, who is great in Everything Everywhere All at Once. And even with the concerns I have about Tár’s script, and to some extent Field’s direction, it’s probably going to deserve and get nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, because the first two hours or so are just that good, and even the tumble it takes at the end can’t completely undo what comes before. It’s not among my top five for the year so far, though.