Tár Review – Acerbic Composer’s Fall From Grace Captures American Cinema’s Identity Crisis

Image courtesy of IMP Awards

Tár isn’t afraid to move slowly and give the audience time to think. The entire credits are played at the start of the film, and the first twenty minutes are presented as an extended Q&A that composer Lydia Tár is undergoing to promote her new book. She is revered by the crowd, respected by the critics, and the first chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. However, across the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime, we see her lose control of her career, relationships and health; her life’s work reduced to nothing in a matter of months. 

Tár is a film that is deeply concerned with the role and legacy of the artist. Looking back is as important as looking forward, with Tár constantly going back to her inspirations Mahler and Beethoven, having lunch with her old mentor, and rewatching old tapes of great composers explaining their craft. It’s hard to ignore the thematic similarities with recent films, such as Chazelle’s Babylon, Spielberg’s The Fablemans and Mendes’ City of Light. Hollywood has been put into a state of anxiety, induced by the dominance of streaming-services, the effects of social media, and pandemic-induced suspicion of the public space. Filmmakers have been creating nostalgic work that edifies the importance of the filmmaker and cinema to society, with very mixed results. 

Tár likewise celebrates the cult of genius, with a remorseless amount of exposition focused on convincing the audience of Tár’s brilliance as a musician. The early scene of her having an argument with a student who refuses to listen to Bach or Beethoven demonstrates the reverence she has for the great canonical musical figures, and the film has been heavily marketed with quotes like ‘Todd Field is a genius’ and ‘Cate Blanchett puts in the performance of a lifetime’, foregrounding the achievements of the individual. Despite this, the genius is shown to have little power in the face of larger cultural forces and institutions. In fact, she is an intensely vulnerable figure; most of the film sees Tár struggling to protect her family from external threats, being at the whims of political power plays in her orchestra, and haunted by things just out of sight. Whether it be strange noises in the night, or screams in the park during her morning run, there is a subtle anxiety that pervades throughout. However, these elements of psychological horror are done without dominating and distracting from the core of the plot, allowing the elegance of its construction to shine through. 

Field’s camera is similarly tactful, employing chic tracking shots that often last for a couple of minutes. It’s filmed with a graceful leisure that doesn’t call attention to itself. Much like the Q&A format at the start, the way Tár is filmed encourages the audience to reflect on what they’re seeing in front of them. In this way, it is the most successful attempt in recent memory at making a film where the audience too can seriously consider the value of the artist, and therefore  cinema, without descending into the mouth-foaming nostalgia that other films addressing Hollywood’s past and present have fallen into. 

Despite much of Tár’s explicit reverence of genius, there are moments in the film where the value of this is called into doubt. When Tár is in bed with her partner, she reminds her that the main reason she climbed the career ladder was skillful political manoeuvring, rather than her capabilities as a conductor. The film never has a moment like Whiplash or Black Swan where the main character's skills are shown with a climactic display, again casting doubt on who, or what, Lydia Tár is outside of her media and public perception. 

Here is what makes Tár such a compelling, and perhaps the most important, watch of this Oscar season. Gone is the conceited cynicism of The Banshees of Inisherin, and so is the suffocating jingoism and egotism of Top Gun: Maverick or The Fablemans. That is not to say these films don’t have great qualities, but rather that Tár subtly addresses these troubling ethical and aesthetic issues facing modern cinema without dumping any easy solutions onto the audience. It’s not a perfect film; its attempted comments on cancel culture, and straw-manning of progressive views, mark it not as a film that accurately captures the world it lives in, but the way that Hollywood perceives and fears this world. It’s a critical cliché to praise a film for ‘not giving easy answers’, when all too often this mask’s a film-maker’s inability to do anything more than raise difficult questions without genuinely unpicking them. Tár, however, does pursue these questions and difficulties surrounding genius, power, expression and desire with enough depth that it has marked itself as the most important mainstream film this decade regarding Hollywood’s existential anxieties. To see it is to be warned about the questions and themes ‘the movies’ will be forced to reckon with in the coming decade.