Review of Tar (2022)

bram towbin
9 min readFeb 26, 2023

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Requiem for a Maestro

“In music one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. ”

Alan Watts, commenting on purposelessness

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

Leonard Bernstein

“Here’s to the battle, whatever it’s for.”

Winners, song by Joe Raposo

In the masterful documentary about the pianist Glen Gould, 32 Short Films About Glen Gould, the filmmakers never once showed him playing the piano. This disagreeable misanthrope shines despite never being seen tickling the ivories. This is how the writer/director Todd Field might have conceived of portraying the classical music virtuoso in his feature, Tar. Her story is the the off-key song of life, not the beautiful sounds of the orchestra. Sadly the breath her virtuosity matched her abhorrence as a character. The film needed less music, more art.

Would a person, who violently attacks a rival conductor on stage in front of an audience, react quietly to being banished from seeing their beloved child by an angry spouse? Imagine if Dickens decided to have Ebenezer Scrooge focus on improving his business practices rather than saving Tiny Tim. It is a tribute to the artistry of Todd Field, Cate Blanchett and an ensemble of pros that, despite the flaws, there is no hiding superb craftsmanship. This feature falls in the “uncanny valley” of greatness, having all the appearances of being sublime, but lacking the essential element of, attraction. The critics have been merciless, one going so far as to use the word “Tar-ible” in the title of her review. There have been some Oscar nominations but the project has lost Universal Pictures $50 million to date. Financial failure and critical scorn is not surprising given the film’s premise.

In an era where audience’s focus has been shaped by Tik Tok’s 3 minute limit, Mr. Field created a nearly 3 hour feature about: a classical music maestro; or as some would say maestra. Whatever quips one has with the final version, it is important to give a nod to the audacity of completing this project. No doubt there were a chorus of pre-production executives texting one another fire breathing emojis or simply…“WTF?” Given the films reception these have morphed into laughing smiley faces celebrating the downfall of the colleagues who gave the green light. But if you think feature film making is Machiavellian, wait until the curtain unveils the world of classical music. Tar isn’t so much a meditation on art as a portrait of a gangster. One associates such people with money and crime but the real mobsters show their colors when everything centers on prestige, not mammon.

Cate Blanchett is the protagonist, Linda Tar, a girl from a cultural nether region of a blue collar, Long Island suburb. Her first move is to drop her first name for the more exotic “Lydia”. The film is a view of her journey to the apex of the, male dominated, classical music world…. Field tracks our heroine as she stalks the cultural landscape. At the New Yorker Festival Tar’s assistant polishes her charge and mouths the words as the the real-life Adam Gopnik reads the bio from of Lydia’s latest book. The audience coos at the endless list of formidable accomplishments. Lydia has the sang-froid of a K-pop boy-band making a public appearance. She is flawlessly hitting her marks and giving NYers exactly what is expected. She also radiates contempt for her assistant whose life is eternally bonded to the master, think of Tom Courtenay in The Dresser.

After an interminable title sequence, the first image is our anti-hero getting ready to take the stage. Field rejects instantaneous clear meaning. Most mainstream features avoid pauses. Field gives Lydia life though the inaction of alone-time. Field’s character delineation relies on gesture and mood, more than the spoken word. Add to this unconventional presentation the use of obscure cutaways which build a sense of wonder. Who is changing Lydia’s Wikipedia profile? Who is spying and mocking Lydia via Instant Messenger? All this blurriness tends to collide with the ham-handed use of interviews and dinner conversation to move the exposition forward. The bloated backstory is too heavy a lift for the writer/director.

The words are the scaffolding that unpacks the complicated intrigue. Lydia is bringing a noted piece of Gustav Mahler’s work to life in a specially produced recording based on a live performance at Berlin’s most prestigious concert hall. The choice of Mahler underscores her connection the legendary New York classical wunderkind Leonard Bernstein, who was her original mentor/inspiration. The concert coincides with a book release, which is the basis of the New Yorker interview. Blanchett’s character devolves, as her life decomposes. The performative, self-assured, superstar morphs into the strident, defensive, crank. The expository dialogue slows as we see our heroine do battle with her family, colleagues, landlords, lovers, neighbors…. The film is precise, but a grind. Audience members might want to yell the old Led Zepplin line to the maestro and her writer/director: “does anyone remember laughter?”

Both Blanchett and Field strangely fall into the same deadening trap as Lydia. The protagonist, the filmmaker and the actress are brimming with talent. There is a parallel between Tar’s self-destruction and the film’s excruciating documentation of the downfall. They were both avoidable. Lydia stage-manages her fall by, needlessly, scorning those with the ability to destroy her career. Her backstabbing cleverness falls prey to seemingly wanton cruelty fueled by blinding narcissism. It didn’t have to happen, even for the meanest of the mean girls. A touch of restraint combined with a kind word every now and then and her demise would have been averted. The monster would pass as a lovable hero, except only to the most intimate and the post mortem biographer. The director and Blanchett are equally blind to a conceit that seems so elemental as to be the first lesson for those interested in drama: the audience must care. Tar is a humorless, self obsessed, mean-spirited bore. It’s not impossible to win the audience over to cheer-on the monster…. But you have to try. This film is an unvarnished procedural, rather than an empathetic portrait of a troubled individual.

The Lydia of the first fifth of the film has a profession-obsessed weariness that repulses even the most ardent admirers of an anti-hero. The New Yorker interview sequence and the following meetings and diners with classical music insiders buttress her credentials as a genuine expert. Everything is… pitch perfect. Everything except the director’s ability to create empathy for this narcissist superstar. The memorable performance is accurate, but undesirable. Why would students passionately climb into bed with her; or executives trip over themselves to spend any time with her? Her exquisite taste and command of music never matches her supposed elan. She is the mirror image of her universally beloved mentor, Leonard Bernstein. The tragedy of Tar is that, despite the phenomenal craftsman of these immensely talented artists, the denouement leads to the strange emptiness at the heart of those poor soul’s afflicted by personality disorders. The point is for the audience to care for this person who doesn’t care. Instead we have a superb clinical portrait of a sociopath.

Strangely there is one relationship that proves Lydia isn’t completely heartless. Her spouse comments on the fact that the only non-transactional bond she has formed is with their daughter. The unbridled love is illustrated by tender moments and one of the most chilling scenes in the film. Her child is being bullied at school and Lydia channels Tony Soprano in the moment when another mobster propositions his daughter. Lydia doesn’t shatter teeth, but her warning to the classmate is equally chilling; in fact more so, as the maestro simply uses words without even raising her voice. The bully is immediately vanquished and even the most ardent detractor of our anti-hero is happy that the daughter, Petra, will be free of abuse. The actress, Mila Bogojevic, gives a remarkable performance that radiates pathos and warmth. If the audience had felt the same about Tar this would have been a film for the ages.

The way to artfully hide Lydia’s deficits would be the mask of abstraction. Sadly Field clings to the straightforward chronological narrative. This only serves to place the story in the low earth orbit of Lydia’s zero-sum-game. Fields gives the narrative a rise and fall arc of gleaning lessons from a parable. Weirdly this is the un-nuanced world-view of deluded sociopaths living under the perpetual yoke of striving. Lydia will either win or lose….PERIOD! This might work for comic books but not character studies of complicated people. A careful portrait of a life should reject absolutism in favor of rendering the the infinite small moments that are more ambiguous.

Tar is at its best with the small moments: the tailoring of the suit, the realization of being in a brothel, the mysterious noises, the metronome ticking onward…. There is too much on point proselytizing. The nadir is when she humiliates a student who finds fault with the heroes of the established canon. It seems a contrived set-piece to give commentary on the raging culture wars. Tar, unsurprisingly, champions the established order. The back and forth has a tiresome quality of assigned characters towing the party line. We needed more of Tar’s time in Queens as a child or her genuine interactions with her mentors…. Or even, perhaps, her time with the aboriginals in a South American jungle. These interactions would show vulnerability, rather than gloating. The tragedy isn’t her professional suicide, but her never-ending isolation. The denouement should have been the breakup with her daughter in Berlin, rather than exile as a leader of a cosplay video-game orchestra in a remote Asian backwater. The spectacle of her public downfall is breathtaking but rings hollow compared to the missing crescendo of the emotional cataclysm. The superstar pitcher banished to the grapefruit league is not as compelling as the loving mother who has forever lost her child; or the striver who realizes they have spent a lifetime on a fool’s errand….. think the final scene in Mephisto when the actor realizes he’s playing Faustus NOT Mephistopheles.

Field and Blanchett seem to be captivated by the pyrotechnics of Lydia on stage. The real drama, however, is in the wings. What makes this film so frustrating is the glimmers of what might have been. There are moments of our anti-hero slides into the gooey, unmotivated…. tenderness. Lydia’s acrobatics, rather than the torment of her diseased soul, are center stage in Tar. The misstep bring to mind The Shakespearian actor Ian McKellen commenting on playing Macbeth. The epiphany came when a fellow actor gave him a small note regarding a famous soliloquy. When playing, “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” the emphasis should be on the word “and”, not “tomorrow.” This seemingly incidental direction helped the great thespian unpack the force of the tale “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” No doubt it would have been a memorable performance without the insight, but it might only have been “sound and fury.” This is Tar’s fate, to be merely impressive, rather than sublime.

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bram towbin
bram towbin

Written by bram towbin

flower farmer, road commissioner

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