Tár

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source: Tár

This movie is an absolute mess of a plot. There is no coherence to the scenes so there is no way of understanding what is going on. The music lingo the characters use is something literally only a person who went to Juilliard would comprehend. Tar is supposed to be a musical genius but can't write music to save her life. The way people speak in this movie is so high brow and snooty I'd rather listen to nails on a chalkboard. Cate Blanchett makes her voice super deep to sound like a man. Her daughter in the movie is being bullied at school and Tar tells the bully she is her daughter's father, not mother. The movie's premise shouldn't be that a woman has to act like a man to get notoriety. This is one of the worst movies I've seen in a really long time.

"I am Petra's father...I am going to get you." Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) Make no mistake, Tar is not about music: It is a fiction about naked power in the rarefied world of classical music conducting. As writer director Todd Field deftly orchestrates a drama that's almost a thriller about the first female conductor, Lydia Tar, in a major German orchestra, the audience is thrilled and mesmerized as if Leonard Bernstein (her mentor) were conducting Mahler in Lincoln Center. Cate Blanchett brilliantly becomes Tar, a world-renowned conductor, who has had stints from Cleveland to New York and finally Berlin. Blanchett is great enough to make the audience feel as if they had been intimate roommates with the maestro. No longer having to answer questions about gender, she commands with like a dictator from choosing orchestral leaders to changing a program to feature a potential lover soloing Elgar on a decidedly-different program dedicated to Mahler. When she dresses down a student at her Julliard lecture, she also handily deconstructs Bach's Prelude in C Major. She reveals in one incident her shredding personal side and her transcendent understanding of classical music. As the quote above displays, even in her personal life she exercises an outsized fearsomeness. She can dispatch her daughter's (Mila Bogojevic) bully with a force equivalent to conducting Mahler's Fifth (or "the five" as Lydia comfortably refers to it). When she asks permission from the orchestra to mount the Elgar, she is actually telling them that's what the program will be, at the same time informing them she's had to rotate out a beloved long-time player. Everyone is aware of the politics, especially her lust for a new cellist specializing in Elgar's Cello Concerto, replacing her assistant, Francesca (Noemie Merlant), who has seniority and maybe better skills. Yet Field, clearly schooled in Greek tragedy, loads the screenplay with hubris, the poison of numerous power players over the centuries. It's the conductor's old game in new times when social media will reveal peccadillos as well as crimes, real or figurative, and autocrats like James Levine and Lydia Tar cannot withstand the scrutiny. Because we have lived through all kinds of strong-man rule, from democracy-endangering fascism to indiscriminate pandemic, unfettered power seems eventually doomed to the moral demands of a populace chafing at the abuse of leadership for its personal gain, be it wealth or lust. It just takes a while for Nemesis to arrive. Tar may be the best film so far of 2022 and Blanchett the best actress. Start your Oscar adventure now in theaters with Tar.

Todd Fields made one of the best directing debuts ever in 2001 with "In the Bedroom". His latest feature doesn't quite live up to those standards, but the stylistic undercurrent is still there. The increasing neurosis and paranoia of the of the well-to-do protagonist, seeming to be undone by their toxic environment, is a through line to his previous features. Howard Hawks once said that a good movie has three great scenes and no bad scenes. Tár has three good scenes, and the rest are tolerable. The opening is middling, and the editing is choppy and lacks a strong pace. But Cate Blanchett's portrayal is enough to bring about the audience's sympathy of being a scapegoat, while some dramatic tension is revealed in the sequences at Juilliard, the deposition, and an unexpectedly creepy moment when Linda is pursued through a dark, dank basement. Unfortunately the film never quite comes together to unify into a cohesive hole.

I can't say this movie is good. Sure, the acting is good. The writing is okay. The movie isn't interesting though. The movie opens with a 10 minute dialogue purely about this character's life and her positions on classical music. I'm asking myself - why should I care? The movie makes no interest in making you like/sympathize with this character and you have to be dragged along her very boring and pretentious life for two and a half hours. Only reason I didn't walk out was because I paid full price. So what Cate Blanchett gets an Oscar. I want my 2 hours back for this boring movie. Never again. I can't believe the reviews on here are 10/10. At best this movie is a 4/10 because Blanchett carries. Nothing else about this movie is worth caring about. Makes me sick seeing these reviews.

This film uses the conventions of a documentary to explore its subject. The narrative progresses in small scenes, which are not always connected, but as we have seen this reality type format before, the viewer is acquainted with how to approach the film. It contains drama inasmuch as daily life has its moments, although it is not to be counted on to be interesting. The duration, at over two and half hours, imposes on the viewer the smug opinion that this is a serious subject about a worthy person, as if we were following a real conductor in the hallowed concert halls of classical music. However, like most of the material here, the duration is not enough to convince when there are too many longueurs, although there are moments where the politics of the orchestral world are reasonably credible. It does provide a pleasant passing scene where our fiery conductor tells a young musician his attitudes are uninformed and anachronistic. It's still not quite enough to put the popcorn down, though. The principal character is established with a quite preposterous career history. This element plays to an American cultural aesthetic. Tár is, a quasi-divine blend of mother creator and Fortune 500 CEO and makes her and the film, unbelievable. But then we are in such a rarefied cultural world that the project recording of Mahler's 5th implies that CDs have larger capacity than is possible. There are two eminence grises to this film. The first is Lenny Bernstein: his Mahler recordings are cited and he's mentioned in other places too. His identification with Mahler and his own ego - watch the 1981 Munich ''Tristan und Isolde'' - for insufferable conductor megalomania, provide the template in some degree to this movie. He still exercises a thrall which needs overturning. The second presence is the gigantic ego of Ayn Rand. She still exercises influence on the American comprehension of creative force, despite her own books being unreadable dross. Blanchett's performance channels Rand's supreme solipsism, for which she was infamous, and therefore has the ''charm'' associated with Rand's objectionable personality. A pretentious and dull film which proves again that Mahler and movies are a difficult proposition; something that executives knew in 1971 with ''Death in Venice'', though they did inquire if was still available to score other films.