Tár

Continuing Oscar catch-up: Todd Field’s Tár seems like long, dry homework — it’s a character study of a great artist, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), who may not be such a good person, and it tips the scales at two hours and thirty-eight minutes — but it’s well put-together, with spaces left open for interpretation. It’s an art object about art, and whether a person who can create or at least facilitate art also owes society good personal behavior. Tár is a revered conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic; she has a book coming out, and she’s about to complete her Mahler project by conducting his Fifth Symphony. 

Then, slowly and then briskly, her life falls apart. Tár, it turns out, has a habit of having affairs with young, smitten musicians, and one of them, named Krista Taylor, has recently killed herself. Legal attention soon follows, it comes out that Krista is far from the only musician to drift into Tár’s orbit, and Tár is “cancelled.” There’s foreshadowing early on, when Tár teaches a class and is at odds with a student who doesn’t respect Bach’s reputation as a womanizer. The student’s response to flawed artists is as valid as Tár’s — most of us choose which real-world actions are dealbreakers for us when it comes to the artists we love. One point of the movie might be that saying there are no dealbreakers can be as limited as saying, yes, there are dealbreakers, things we can’t forgive.

Todd Field keeps a lot of things ambiguous. Tár of course denies any wrongdoing on her part, and she could be lying or she could be on the level. Past a certain point it doesn’t matter. Her name is connected publicly with grooming and sexual predation, and it becomes poison. Most of the film, though — I’d say the first two hours — has little to do with “cancel culture” other than occasional omens. While we wait for Tár’s house of cards to riffle to the floor, we study Tár, a somewhat arrogant and fairly high-strung woman who seems like what can happen when a high-school music nerd gets some power and gets drunk on it, then accustomed to it. 

Tár has a wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss), who plays in Tár’s orchestra, and they share a small daughter, Petra. One day, Tár comes to see Petra at school and pays an intimidating visit to a girl who’s been bullying Petra. Tár assures the kid that she will “get her” if she doesn’t leave Petra alone, and nobody will believe the kid if she tries to tell anyone. This seems like a key moment, almost the sole reason Tár is even given a daughter in the film. Here we see a menacing, will-to-power side of Tár that perhaps young, trusting musicians also saw. Aside from this scene, and one other in the film’s final act, Tár doesn’t seem overtly abusive. She is smart and talented, and other smart and talented people in major cities put her on a pedestal — she’s a woman and gay and excels in a career traditionally dominated by men. Tár has taken advantage of all of that — or maybe she hasn’t. We get glimpses of evidence that, to us, seems inconclusive. It may also seem that way to the Berlin Philharmonic, but Tár has become radioactive and must be cast out regardless.

I don’t think Tár means to say much about the supposed “woke mob” thirsting to ruin the lives of artists by falsely accusing them of salacious deeds. It may have interested Todd Field as a sidebar issue he wanted to explore in the downfall of an artist, but I don’t get the sense that he’s decrying anything. The ambiguity about whether Tár is actually guilty as charged can provoke literal-minded debate, but I suspect Field has a good deal more to say about the creators we lift up and tear down, not limited to churlish-sounding Fox News editorials about woke hysteria. We’re given enough clues, both by the allusive script and by Cate Blanchett’s brittle, richly detailed performance, to deduce that Tár is probably guilty as sin; if not of driving Krista Taylor to suicide, then of other casualties left bleeding on the side of Tár’s road to glory.

That road leads far away from her humble origins as a kid named Linda Tarr. That may sound like a bridge too far in terms of a diagnosis of Tár’s disease. Ah, an artist is driven to the top by the fear of dying anonymous and obscure in her home town. In an alternate universe, is there a Linda Tarr who stayed and maybe taught piano lessons and was never given the opportunity — the rich white privilege — to follow her darkest impulses? Would that person have been happier? Is Tár truly happy? We never see her uncomplicatedly happy. The narrative is full of little hostilities Tár commits — the mini-arc having to do with Tár’s neighbor and her ailing mother shows us how unused she is to normal social exchanges. Tár doesn’t crowd our emotions; it lets us respond how we will. A note of caution, though: the price Field pays for his nonjudgmental, emotionally arid approach is a certain emotional recoil on our part. The movie is intelligent and artful. And we don’t finally give a damn about Lydia Tár or what happens to her. 

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