Note: While I’m not personally spoiler-averse, I increasingly try to avoid them in reviews unless they become long-form review essays like this one. That is to say there are spoilers, including discussion of the ending.
Tár is a drama about a narcissistic, maybe sociopathic master of classical music; an EGOT-winning conductor who sees her life disassembled by her hubris and lack of care for others. She is surrounded by people in tension with her methods but impressed by or beholden to her results. There’s a wife she cheats on as a matter of course that’s also first violin and music director of the orchestra which Tár leads, several colleagues she looks down on, a protégé she hopes to woo. It’s a film about lies, carelessness, wealth, and arrogance. The intentional sterility of its depicted world helps reinforce the practiced artifice of its haughty protagonist. I quite like it as an observation of the way corrupt and immoral behavior is overlooked if you’re great in the right contexts, and also an admission that that moral corruption is not a prerequisite of success, per se, just a commonality among those who possess it.
The film opens on a publicly-held interview with The New Yorker as part of Lydia Tár’s (Cate Blanchett) tour to promote her upcoming album and memoir. It’s a great first look into her world, the self-assured arena of a wealthy specialist in fine arts. The opening interview drops some names I had to look up and informs the audience that she’s currently conducting the Berlin Orchestra. It sets the stage by defining and ensuring her expertise, her goals, and notifying us of the core personal-professional relationships with her wife (Nina Hoss as Sharon Goodnow), in part by way of her exploration of conducting history and the way the lead violinist used to do the job of the conductor, keeping time. It also lets us know of past ethnographic work with indigenous people while, surrounding the scene is the understanding of her high expectations of and dependence on her assistant (Noémie Merlant as Francesca Lentini), whom she occasionally treats with affection but who has also, away from Lydia’s eye, grown resentful of her career stagnating in a holding pattern orbiting Tár.
It's hard to pick a best scene from the picture. Tár threatens a child who’s been bullying her daughter; she has a controversial visit to Julliard; the near-montage of her fall from grace is emotionally effective in evoking the ways our lives can feel like a blur in moments of high stress; there are genuinely blurry brief dream sequences; and there’s an ending that people have called a punchline. This, in my estimation, is a concise term for summarizing a conclusion which ties all the themes together in ways so smart and alternatingly subtle and overt as to be funny, but only in the bleakest or most absurd terms could one consider the film a comedy.
The scene with the daughter’s bully is an expression of several truths of the film’s world – Lydia Tár is powerful, is convicted, is fluent in German, and knows that she can do things that other people cannot catch or will not challenge her on. This is the only time, perhaps, which we see her use her cunning and manipulations and penchant for bullying ofr good. Another truth expressed is made explicit by her wife later – her daughter is the only person with whom Tár has ever had a non-transactional relationship.
As I say, it’s hard to pick a favorite because there are lots of compelling, meaningful scenes. The next big standout for me is the “cancel culture”/generational clash scene: Lydia is visiting a calss at Julliard. A brown-skinned student (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist as Max) is conducting. Once they complete their performance, they’re nervous for Lydia’s response. A student in the crowd gives a bright answer to a question Tár asks about the piece: it’s got “atonal harmony;” Tár isn’t totally dismissive of the student but rather dismissive of that idea. Max, the conductor, says that when the composer (not Tár) visited, she said the piece was related to spring or nature or something (Max says it more articulately than I’m relating) but that Max got the feeling that the composter wasn’t interested in what the things she was describing sounded like. If my recollection isn’t perfect, I apologize, but it's not the point. Tár likes the answer, and wants more, asking why Max didn’t try an older, classical composer. Max says they don’t usually like “old white men,” invoking their status as either an “agender pansexual” (I think) or “pangender asexual” (maybe) person. Tár thinks this is a bad way to look at art. They go back and forth, with Tár sitting with Max at a piano playing, I believe, Bach, even singing in a friendly, joyous way. Max won’t open up to it. Their conflict escalates, with Tár eventually throwing a gap into Max’s historical knowledge into Max’s face, and Max storming out, calling Tár a “bitch” and leaving.
This scene is obviously an allusion to current conversations about youth social expression of gender identity and generational gaps in how these things are discussed and understood. It also calls back to that opening interview, where Tár talks about how many of the exclusionary practices around women composers and conductors has ended, and a scene I forgot to mention earlier, a meeting with fellow conductor Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong) where she discusses ending the gender-focus of her scholarship for musical higher education (“The Accordion Fellowship,” the board of which Kaplan is a member of).
The central argument in the moment is between two people who are right and wrong about different parts of the conversation, at the expense of sounding a bit centrist. Essentially, what we have here is a failure to communicate brought on by arrogance and self-assuredness. Tár is correct that the race, gender, or sexuality of a creator is a poor way to evaluate art which in fact limits one’s opportunity to engage and grow and learn (if also omitting the historical reality that the way it figures into people’s preemptive analyses is tied to traditions of class oppression which elevated and excluded people from artistic canons and academic-artistic-commercial opportunities correlating with if not entirely caused by these identity markers). She’s just so closed off to outside perspectives that she can’t communicate her point in a way that doesn’t eventually devolve into cruelty when not met with ascent.
Meanwhile, there’s no accounting for taste and Max is within their rights to not use the traditional pieces if they so choose. It’s easy enough for me to intuit that Max’s point is that, as a person whose life experience has included some degree of being excluded, they find interest in the margins. Irrespective of whether one’s socially ascribed or prescribed identity ought to be the first thing one considers when deciding what art (or other activities) to engage with (and I don’t think it should, for whatever it’s worth), there is indeed value in highlighting those artists and artworks and cultural traditions thereof that are highlighted less often. But Max, a young adult meting an expert in their field, an expert who has gone from agreement and apparent praise to trying to draw out a response, from courteous and curious to increasingly punitive, is not prepared for the situation. While no neurodivergence or disability is named, Max bobs their leg the whole time, nervous. Whether it’s a diagnosed condition or just a situational consequence, it’s an expression of coping with discomfort that Tár literally physically tries to stop, as if annoyed by this kid wilting under the pressure she’s introduced into a learning environment situation. When I first watched the scene, it seemed a little unsubtle, but the more I thought about it, the more authentic the moment felt. Its later sloppy reconstruction is too hasty to be a commentary on cancel culture, or at least the common refrains of the last several years of cancel culture going too far. It’s textually not taken seriously within Tár’s circles and community because it’s a clear hatchet job intended to play on people’s well-meaning instincts; but it comes in the context of something that should be taken seriously, a suicide she may have had a hand in provoking.
The sort-of roughly-edited video is released, apparently by the assistant Francesca after she’s passed over for an administrative spot higher up the hierarchy to being a conductor. It happens contemporaneously with Francesca releasing emails to the girl that killed herself which Tár had told her to delete. When Lydia goes to confront her, she’s fled her apartment, and then Tár’s life begins to fall apart.
One of my favorite parts in Tár’s fall from grace comes from her playing an accordion very loudly. There’s a mysterious beeping in the building of her old apartment that haunts her. She learns, eventually, that it’s related to some life-preserving machinery that keeps an old woman alive across the hall. She meets that woman exactly once, conscripted to help her by the woman’s daughter. After the woman dies, her other kids stop by to ask about Lydia about her rehearsal schedule, because they’re selling the apartment (they’ve thrown their sister in an institution) and they don’t want to scare off prospective buyers. Blanchett’s playing of the accordion, dancing and scream-singing bemusedly about the low moral character of the siblings is one of last year’s best performances.
There are too many tremendous scenes and this isn’t intended to be quit a minute-to-minute breakdown. I’ve had to gloss over too much that would add context and value. But I want to discuss the ending:
After a brief return to her American Midwestern childhood home (where we learn Lydia’s name used to be Linda), she heads to Southeast Asia. I initially thought it was Thailand but the subtitles (it’s streaming now on Peacock) said her hosts were speaking Tagolag. The change of setting is stark – it’s not prim, upper-class Berlin or Manhattan, but lively and lush, the Philippines invite a different understanding of space and the world. In the end, the star is ‘brought low’ in conducting a youth orchestra performing themes from one of the newest editions of the Monster Hunter video game franchise for an audience of cosplayers. These ending sequences leave room, as much of the film does, for a variety of interpretations, many of them less generous than mine.
Firstly, while I think it’s okay if not everyone immediately knows it’s the Philippines from references (I didn’t), the references are there. It’s underwritten in part by the mention by one of Tár’s hosts that there are alligators in the water brought to the region for “ a Marlon Brando movie;” which was Apocalypse Now. The southeast as a playground for Westerners, a place where indigenous populations suffer the indignities of neocolonialism, imperialism, is here alluded to. There’s also a certain symbolism in her mentioning that it must have been several decades ago; her host responds, “they survive,” much as Tár is surviving, in this strange place and new country, a predator in any environment. To that end, when Lydia tells a hotel concierge she’s seeking a massage, he directs her to a parlor where the masseuses are picked from what the manager refers to as “a fishbowl.” It’s a bit like the masseuse-selection scene from Rush Hour 2, but instead of being played for laughs, it’s a dark hint toward sex work. Young women, in Tár’s mind, being taken advantage of, exploited. She throws up outside, and it feels to me that she’s got the universe or luck or fate throwing her past exploitation of vulnerable young women that looked up to and aspired to be her in her face.
To another end, the general irony of the moment, with the film ending as a videogame soundtrack plays over the credits after the camera scans young people in ornate videogame-inspired costumes, isn’t because someone great and white has to work in Asia and the director of the film thinks that’s awful, it’s that she has to work in relative obscurity. And it’s not that a video game score isn’t a valuable piece of art – it’s that she’s established herself as a fan of the classics and might see it beneath her; you, as an audience member, are not obligated to. In fact, in between parts of writing this I was reading about Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu in Aidan Moher’s book and listening to their themes from the Final Fantasy franchise as well as Mitsuda’s work on Chrono Trigger (here’s Chrono Trigger at Boston Symphony Hall in 2012). It’s clear from there – or from the recently-released Phantasy Star episode of Abnormal Mapping – that music is one place where games are much closer to equal with film than other places where games usually aspire to be or are compared (story). I mean, it’s truly great stuff. And Akihiko Narita’s Monster Hunter: World score is also terrific. Further, at Loyola University New Orleans, when I was there, there were at least two Super Smash Bros tournaments with orchestral accompaniment. It was awesome; there’s value to it.
The question is around how a woman who cultivated power and wealth around herself through her musical aptitude, how she handles her removal from ornate “Western” (North American/European) spaces to Asia, how she rebounds from her undoing. Has she learned anything? Will she change? Does she feel any remorse?
As we’ve seen, what got Tár removed from her post wasn’t a Twitter ‘cancellation’ because of a harsh guest lecture. The video was released contemporaneously with revelations that she’s being sued and subpoenaed because of the psychological abuse and harassment of a former protégé who’s killed herself after Tár kicked her out of her program and stood in the way of her career advancement. The emails she told Francesca to delete were full of negative recommendations to other orchestras where the now-dead girl had applied. When Francesca first told her this happened, coming to her in tears to return her house key, Tár just says the girl wasn’t right and tells her to delete the emails. When Francesca is tossed to the side, she strikes back.
There’s so much I can’t cover or uncover here, but what’s worth noting is that the film is about chickens coming home to roost, but it’s also about how we evaluate punishment for the well-to-do. She returns to a youth orchestra, following after her hero Leonard Bernstein (she watched old VHS tapes of him in her childhood home). She gets a shot at redemption doing something she may consider beneath her but where, for many, would be a dream to go.
Tár is about many things – unfulfilled wishes, wasted potential, relative morality, and people thinking they’re much smarter than they are. Todd Field may in fact be a great writer-director (all three of his features have been nominated for one of two best screenplay Oscars and two of three for best picture). In any case, he and Cate Blanchett and the rest of their collaborators made a very good movie. It’s nearly impossible for me to say what was the best movie last year, but Tár is among the most deceptively interesting.