TÁR

Year of release: 2022. Directed by Todd Field. Starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong, and Sophie Kauer.

Earlier this year I went to hear the National Youth Orchestra perform their summer program at Carnegie Hall. The program was the Elgar Cello Concerto and Mahler 5. My personal feelings about Elgar aside, the summer academy for those high schoolers yielded amazing results in a concert that culminated in one of the most daunting symphonies ever composed. (Actually, it culminated with an encore medley of E.T. themes, which was a perfect digestif to the concert.)

My personal feelings about Elgar not aside, the only reason to program a work as horrendously boring as his Cello Concerto is to have the audience take a nap so they’re refreshed for the Mahler. (For the record, I do like some Elgar, but he’s a very hit or miss composer for me, and the Cello Concerto is a big miss.)

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett in a ferocious performance that’s probably her greatest work yet) presumably does not share my antipathy toward the Elgar Cello Concerto, and thus she chooses to pair it with the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Mahler 5 under her baton. However, by the time she selects it, it is clear Lydia has ulterior motives and is trying to groom a young, new cellist who has just joined her orchestra.

Lydia is not a monster from the first scene; indeed, the backstage shots of her taking pills to calm her nerves and being reassured by her assistant before an interview with Adam Gopnik (himself) garners her some sympathy, even if her responses to the interview are a little off-putting and clearly somewhat phony. However, as the film progresses, she becomes more and more unlikeable and the depths of her inhumanity and arrogance become increasingly apparent. That Blanchett maintains our interest in Lydia and what happens to her while also making her so repulsive is a testament to the power of her performance.

Shortly after that interview, Lydia has lunch with a colleague who clearly worships her and then teaches a conducting masterclass at Juilliard. The masterclass takes an interesting turn, when a BIPOC, pangender student insists that they can’t really be into Bach because he was a straight, cis, white man who fathered too many kids.

I’ll be honest, as a professional musician who has reckoned with truly problematic composers and performers, dismissing Bach for those reasons reeks of glib, lazy involvement with one’s art while doing nothing to actually address past and present injustices, and it gives wokism a bad name. (If you want to talk about the anti-Semitism in the St. Matthew Passion and how we reconcile that, or don’t, with current performances, that’s an entirely different question.)

Lydia’s response, however, is even worse. Her tirade humiliates the student and builds on her belief that there is no gender discrimination in classical music, and we should examine all music in a vacuum as if it exists independently of its creator, and the works have no bearing on the lives of their composers.

This is a striking contrast to the opening New Yorker interview where she reverently describes her mentor Leonard Bernstein grappling with the greater context of Mahler 5 and changing his interpretation of it depending on where he was conducting it. In that interview, she insists it’s impossible to conduct Mahler 5 unless you know the details of what was going on in Mahler’s personal life, because that influenced how he composed the symphony.

If this juxtaposition of scenes and attitudes doesn’t reveal Lydia’s hypocrisy and shallowness at first, her later interactions with everyone in her life do. A notable scene for a “blind” cello audition shows Lydia noticing that one auditionee is the attractive young female she saw earlier, because she sees the same shoes beneath the stage curtain. Lydia promptly erases whatever criticism she had written on her form.

According to Lydia’s wife (Nina Hoss), the concertmistress for the Berlin Philharmonic, the only non-transactional relationship Lydia has ever held is with their daughter. And yet, even that relationship is tainted, as Lydia has strict rules the girl must follow. Lydia’s handling of a school bully is nothing short of emotional child abuse, because in her world power and favoritism are how you achieve anything.

TÁR isn’t really a cautionary tale about power corrupting or a feminist who broke glass ceilings and then sealed them over behind herself. It’s a character study of an absolute monster from that monster’s perspective.

If that sounds tiring, or if this review’s focus on Lydia’s unethical behavior makes it seems like she’s an overbearing presence on the film, that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a riveting descent into madness by a character who has replaced human interactions with artistic ones, and director Todd Field knows how to punctuate the film with reminders of the humanity Lydia is so lacking.

The film is shot entirely from Lydia’s perspective, and the unreliable narrator trope is brilliantly reflected in the editing. The opening scenes use long takes as Lydia’s confidence in asserting her worldview and her power comes across. As challenges and reckonings to that enter, the film becomes increasingly choppy and disjointed.

The one possible flaw (a second viewing my change my mind) is the final sequence which seemingly comes out of left field, because Lydia has completely lost her mind and her career. I briefly wondered if the last thirty minutes or so all took place in her mind, but I don’t think that interpretation is right.

The final breakdown of Lydia is perfectly filmed and choreographed, drawing from nearly every prominent scene that led to that climax. The hazy tracking shots perfectly reflect Lydia’s nightmares, and earlier exchanges all come to a head there.

In our culture of #metoo and canceling problematic artists, Lydia’s cancellation is a shattering of her world. That shattering is likewise reflected in the quicker editing as a world of abuse falls apart and Lydia loses her accomplishments. To claim that the film shares Lydia’s disdain of cancel culture is not accurate. For one thing, she is an unreliable narrator. More importantly, depiction of an obviously toxic world does not equal an endorsement of that world, and cancel culture is a threat to Lydia’s toxic world.

If Lydia has any real life counterpart, it’s probably James Levine, whom the film name drops by a character who sympathizes with him. While her crimes don’t equal his, and while her cancellation ends up being more severe than his ever was during his life, the question of how does one reckon with art created by monsters permeates the film.

I remember someone once saying “for every ‘separate the art from the artist’ person, there’s a better artist who isn’t a swamp monster.” I sadly disagree. Sometimes, there is a monster who is unparalleled in their artistic ability. (Confession: every time I make a list of who I think the ten greatest directors are, there’s one person I leave off, because I don’t want to entertain the conversation about the quality of his films given the crimes he committed.)

What we do with those monsters and their work is a crucial conversation. The romanticization of the asshole artist has created centuries of abuse and turning a blind eye to countless victims. TÁR is an unflinching depiction of that world, which challenges it through the toll it takes on everyone and everything: the asshole artist, the victims, their colleagues, and the art itself.

It is entirely appropriate that TÁR issues this challenge through the story of a conductor, a profession that has housed countless asshole artists. Even more appropriately, that conductor is on the brink of her career’s pinnacle achievement, and she is a woman who has fully imbibed the toxicity imbued in her profession’s past, a toxicity that at one point would have shut her out.

It’s no secret that conductors have a reputation for being arrogant, and TÁR is an example of that arrogance taken to an 11. If there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy, it’s the tragic side of one of the most famous musician jokes:

Four conductors were sitting in a bar. Bernstein and Boulez were arguing over who was the greatest conductor. Bernstein insisted it must be him, because he had made more recordings than any other conductor. Boulez countered that he had conducted more of the world’s top orchestras, so he must be the greatest conductor. This went back and forth for some time. Looking to resolve this argument, Kleiber leaned over and said, “Fellows, you’re both wrong. God himself told me I’m the greatest conductor ever.” At which point, von Karajan slammed down his drink and said, “That’s not true, I never said that!”

Personal recommendation: A