Tár

Movies

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a review/discussion of Tár. By the way, I’ve also done a couple of shorter write-ups on Field’s other movies, In The Bedroom and Little Children.

Best,

Sam

TAR (2022)

dir. Todd Field, with Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár

In 2001, Todd Field, a protégé of Stanley Kubrick and Victor Nuñez, made his directorial début with In The Bedroom, about as good a film as anybody had ever seen. Getting only a little carried away, Dennis Lim, in The Village Voice, wrote, “In the Bedroom alighted on the snowy peaks of Sundance as if from another universe. Here was a small miracle of patience and composure, so starkly removed from everything the festival had come to represent that it seemed almost to herald the overdue coming-of-age of American independent film.”

Five years later, Field’s Little Children materialized and was, if anything, even better and more critically-acclaimed – a film of such startling ambition and fearlessness (its most sympathetic character is a convicted sex offender) that it seemed to terrify its own distributor, New Line Cinema, and was effectively mothballed even in the run-up to the Academy Awards.

And then…silence. Field, at the height of his game, with the A-list of A-lists eager to work with him, disappeared for the next sixteen years before returning with Tár, the most acclaimed, most controversial movie of 2022. It turns out that there’s no great Kubrickian mystery about Field’s absence—just a very normal Hollywood story of projects getting stuck in development purgatory, of Field finding work that paid the bills. “I’ve basically been working in advertising for sixteen years,” he said mildly, in a New York Times interview, when asked what he’d been up to. But there was also the dazzling, substantial body of unmade work that died in development—the adaptations of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins; the poignant film on Bowe Bergdahl; the sweeping epic on the Mexican Revolution; the career-defining series based on Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, for which Field wrote 2,000 pages and which would have vaulted Showtime into the streaming universe but that, as Field says, “they ultimately didn’t have the belly for.”

Field’s largely submerged career serves as a sobering meditation on Hollywood life in an era when it’s possible to make a living with, essentially, no output—when the most talented artists we have (of which Field is one) get pulled into Hollywood, end up with a nice life, but have their creativity subject to studio roulette. It’s a bit moving to read about Field’s reaction to getting the call that Tár was green-lit – “I’m so used to turning in scripts and having everybody say ‘wow’ good job and then nothing happening….that the idea that I was going to have to go away from home and actually make a film just seemed so absurd to me,” Field says. And, moving too, his description of being around world-class actors after all that time doing, I’m sure, perfectly wonderful car commercials. “It’s the magical part of filmmaking, it’s beyond the camera, beyond the lighting, beyond your lens choices, beyond the art direction and everything else, it’s human beings in front of a camera that can do magical things - and that felt like a long overdue homecoming,” he said.

Todd Field - New York Times profile

On the other hand, there is no indication in Tár of any rustiness or of any loss of ambition. Taken together, Field’s three films, all masterpieces, seem to capture the archetypal structure of our era—the sort of thing that we could plausibly vault into deep space in the hopes that some Alpha Centaurians with blu-ray technology would get a pretty good sense of us and our sexual hang-ups. The films are also nicely distributed across socioeconomic lines—In The Bedroom, rural and enclosed, dealing with a small-town tragedy; Little Children taking on suburban anomie; and Tár tackling power. What they most have in common is that they are tragic—in the old-fashioned sense of the word, of dealing with insuperable obstacles, unsolvable problems. In The Bedroom is very Greek, concluding that the most satisfying resolution of a blood-crime isn’t any of the usual American cures, moving on, moving away, coping, healing, forgiving, so much as cold-blooded murderous revenge. Little Children contends, picturesquely, that the only way to survive in the suburbs is castration—that the annihilation of the self is the price to pay for ‘normalcy.’ And Tár moves the familiar #MeToo narratives out beyond questions of ethics and propriety and into the realm of tragedy—the thesis being that power inherently corrupts; that ethical accountability for the powerful is an unwinnable war; and that power is really to be understood in some different dimension, as a kind of insatiable, chthonic drive.

There are two popular parking-lot conversations for people who’ve seen Tár. One is to have all the usual debates about taking sides in a sexual harassment case. In a furious broadside against Tár in The New Yorker, Richard Brody calls it “a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics.” The contention is that the film entirely takes the perspective of its protagonist Lydia Tár—who grooms and provides favors to young women in her orchestra with the expectation that they will sleep with her—and that we are never given the vantage-point of Tár’s victims. But that’s really missing what the film is all about. There’s never any question that Tár is guilty of what she’s accused of. We see her grooming a young cellist in her orchestra. We see the e-mails she’s sent blocking the career of a former protégée, Krista, who has been jilted by Tár and is, from the film’s start, desperate and suicidal. And as the accusations mount, we see Tár move nimbly into damage-control mode, using the promise of a promotion to attempt to buy off her long-suffering assistant, and portraying Krista as a deranged stalker. What Field is doing is to very economically take care of all of the facts of the case and to move to the real heart of it—which is to contemplate the nature of power. To that end, he scrupulously keeps Krista offstage—she has already been banished from the seat of power at the start of the film; and there’s never a thought of some atoning visit to her parents, anything like that. And, most critically, Field makes the abuser a woman—the point being that the deep question of #MeToo isn’t toxic masculinity or maybe even the sex drive at all; that it’s about dealing with the inherent cruelty of power and the extent to which those who have power belong to some other dispensation, in which they are beyond ethics and beyond judgment. Again, thinking in this way does nothing to diminish Tár’s culpability—Field damningly lays out all the facts against her—but it says, essentially, that we are all in some sort of agreement about the politics and social realities of #MeToo and that art is now capable of dealing with its underlying themes in the same sort of mythopoetic realm in which Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies meditated, in their own ways, on the nature of power. Seen in that way, Brody’s critique of the film is a bit like attacking Richard III for not spending enough time with the boys in the tower.

Tár and the sense of dread

The other parking lot conversation on Tár is more intricate—and is about figuring out what really drives her, whether it’s art or power. I would say power, but it’s a close call. The first two-thirds of the movie—astonishingly slow-moving, actually—are really about the sense of dread that accompanies Tár’s picture-perfect life. She hears a blood-curdling scream in the park as she’s out running. The crazy neighbor next door keeps knocking demanding her newspaper. Her daughter is coming home from school with bruises on her shins. Within this sense of dread, possible cancelation via Krista is just one source of worry among many. The leisurely lunches Tár takes with Andris, her predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic, are meant to hit this point home—the talk is all about the underlying anxieties of power, the terror of “being pulled from the podium,” and, in Andris’ long view (he came to Berlin when denazification was still very much part of the cultural memory), it really makes very little difference whether what one is accused of is sexual harassment or of having been overly compliant with the Nazi régime. “Surely you’re not equating sexual impropriety with being an accused Nazi,” Tár says, the one time in the movie when she’s genuinely shocked—but that’s exactly what Andris is saying, that the world divides into those who have power and those who are determined to take it from them. But it can be easy to miss the extent to which the early parts of the film are a portrait of power, and its attendant anxieties, given that the foreground is taken up almost entirely by art. It’s a given within the film that Tár is a great artist—a maestro conductor at the absolute top of her game—and there is no question either that she is a true believer in classical music, grappling ferociously with her masters, Bach, Beethoven, Mahler. But, as the more persnickety critics have noticed, the sections in which Tár is working with the Berlin Philharmonic are oddly lifeless—Cate Blanchett turns Tár into some sort of jaguar in the way that she conducts, but it doesn’t feel as if she is trying to solve any urgent musical questions as she works on Mahler’s Fifth Symphony: she just wants to ‘complete the cycle’ of Mahler’s symphonies and have some more glowing press clippings that she can add to the folder of ‘sundries’ that she keeps discreetly tucked away in a drawer. It’s not as if Tár doesn’t care about art but, in the complex brew of narcissism, creativity, ambition that comprise her personality, art—as the end of the film demonstrates—turns out to be less central to her than she might have anticipated.

Tár jaguar

That analysis, I believe, is a key to decoding the film’s somewhat bewildering dénouement. After Tár’s fall—spinning and deflecting for as long as humanly possible; and then, finally, cracking up—she doesn’t quite do what would be expected of her. She goes back to her mother’s, watches old videos, feels sorry for herself—and then, after not very long at all, she keeps moving; starts her career again. She ends up in Southeast Asia, and the ending sequence feels like a buffet of all the different sides of her personality laid out before her. Inadvertently, she visits a brothel, finds herself in front of the ‘fishbowl’ of women holding up numbers—which sends her retching into the street. So—as it turns out—exploitative sex isn’t really who she is. And high-end classical music isn’t exactly who she is either—the video she watches at her mother’s, of Leonard Bernstein conducting, sends her into bitter tears; and, after her firing from Berlin, there is never again a word about Mahler. And she’s not really poky old Linda living with her mother in the outskirts of New York City. As her brother recriminatorily says, “You don’t seem to know where the hell you came from or where you’re going.” Which is fair enough as a criticism, but who Tár turns out to be is a bit of a surprise—the closing shots of the film are Tár at the podium, resplendent and haloed by stage lights, conducting the soundtrack of a video game for an audience of cosplayers; followed by a tracking shot of the cosplayers themselves, in their monster costumes, taking up the auditorium.

And we are given to understand that this is the right fulfillment for Tár. There’s a clue earlier on when, in firing an assistant conductor, she airily announces that “Our only home is the podium. We all live out of a suitcase.” In other words, Tár can take it—the beautiful homes don’t really matter, and neither do the private jets, the ‘transactional relationships,’ the ‘sundries’; and neither does the relationship with her wife Sharon or even that with her daughter Petra. But that still begs the question of what is really animating Tár when she’s standing at the podium in the unnamed Southeast Asian country—whether it’s art or power. The clue, for me, comes all the way at the film’s beginning in her discussion with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik on the art of conducting. A distinction is drawn between Tár and her mentor, Bernstein. “Lenny believed in teshuvah, the Talmudic power to reach back into time and transform the significance of one’s past deeds,” she says. But, for Tár, the formative experience occurred in the five years she spent with the Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazon. “The Shipibo-Konibo only receive an icaros, or song, if the singer is there on the same side as the spirit who created it, and in that way past and present converge,” she says. Her way is exactly what her brother is accusing her of—she is a person without a past or future; but the more positive way of phrasing that is that she belongs to an eternal present, to shamanic time. As she says in the Gopnik interview, describing her role as a conductor, “Time is the thing, time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me. I start the clock.”

In terms of the exploitation conversation, Tár is walking a very fine line. Her heroes have a way of wearing pith helmets. The ending places her as the only white person in an auditorium—and the one in the position of power. Her excursions in the unnamed Southeast Asian country are all disquisitions on the unintended consequences of power and imperialism—the crocodiles in a river she paddles down were left behind by a Marlon Brando movie (presumably Apocalypse Now); a sincere request for a massage leads to her face-to-face with the numbered girls in the fishbowl. But it strikes me as important that Tár, in her youth, spent five years with the Shipibo-Konibo—i.e. she wasn’t just a tourist. The Shipibo-Konibo are the ‘weavers of music’—known, as it’s described online, for “generating recursive patterns that create a concrescence between sound and vision.” The ‘concrescence between sound and vision’ isn’t a bad way of describing what film, as a whole, is meant to do, but, in the case of Tár, it’s specifically about the creation of enchanted time—the role of the shaman which is the same as that of the conductor. What the content itself is seems not to matter all that much—it can be Mahler; it can be the theme song of Monster Hunter. What’s important is the puissant creation of a very particular temporal state, an eternal present, in which, incidentally, the subconscious has free play—and this is the beauty of the film’s closing shot, the auditorium full of all the monsters free to express themselves. And Tár, as a figure with a tragic arc, seems, in the end, to have shifted to a very different conception of power. Not power with its familiar trappings; and with its inherent inequality and abuse. But power as the ability to create rifts in time and space, to shape, to summon spirit and to allow spirit to protect us all.