Tár

Lydia Tár is a genius composer and orchestra conductor at the top of her field. She is also a cad.

These two things are at the heart of Todd Field’s Tár.

The movie opens with a fawning interview in front of a live audience at The New Yorker Festival. And Cate Blanchett is perfect at playing that particular kind of celebrity. She says all the right things. She is smart, yet humble and she pushes back, in a polite way, when she disagrees with the interviewer. She charms the journalist, she charms the audience and she surely charms the people listening to the podcast of this interview on their way to work.

Someone has spent quality time with their publicist and gone to interview school and is incredibly well prepared.

I was lost in the weeds in a lot of this because I know absolutely nothing about the world of composers and symphonies and New Yorker festivals. But it was exciting to get immersed in this world even if the movie declines to give you much of a foothold. The screenplay never lets you sink into the bog though and Field deftly moves on from tuning up the band and into the deep interesting notes he wants to play.

So, we learn that Tár has already committed a great crime. And, even having done so, she is incapable of accepting responsibility for her actions, and if given the chance, she will continue to use her power over the women she works with to extract … personal performances outside of the workplace.

I did not expect the first great movie about the #MeToo movement to be about a woman and the Berlin symphony but here we are. As the movie continues we see that Tár is haunted. By her past? Certainly. By the consequences of her actions? You bet. By something even more supernatural in nature? Quite possibly.

Tár hears screaming in the woods while running. She wakes multiple times in the night. She thinks someone is doing something in her office. But who and why? The movie shows her running over and over again. It’s apparent that she’s not just running for her health.

For this part of the movie remembering Edgar Allen Poe could be instructive. This is not a remake of The Tell Tale Heart but the screenplay is imprinted with its themes.

It is a funny film too. In its way.

At several points while in charge of the orchestra, Tár makes moves that she thinks can be explained as something other than for her own desires. But her co-workers are not fooled. Field gets laughs with their looks of disgust. Our protagonist doesn’t know it, but Lydia Tár is finished long before the final note plays.

In 20 years as a director, Field has only made three films. When I looked him up I was delighted to find that his first feature was In the Bedroom. I saw it when it came out that year. There is nothing showy in that picture and no flashy or extravagant actor excesses. Sissy Spacek gets one grand scene where she is allowed to explode and everything else, including much of the plot, is kept under the surface.

Field gives Blanchett a whole lot more here and she chews every scene down to the bone. Then she sucks out the marrow and comes back for more.

And Field proves himself, once again, to be at the same level as anyone else in the movie business today. I sincerely hope he can now get the financing for more than two films over the next two decades.