Tárred and feathered
Tár, the official "movie for people who care about challenging cinema for adults" movie in the mix for the 2022 awards season, and writer-director Todd Field's return to filmmaking after 16 years, is the most perfect tabula rasa I have encountered in a long time. I have had conversations and read reviews stating, in essence, "the movie is putting forward Idea X and I can't believe anyone would think it's putting forward Idea Y", and also that it is just as clearly putting forward Idea Y and obviously not Idea X, and this is not necessarily attached to whether or not the person making that claim agrees with Y or X or if they in fact think Z. And to a certain extent, this is the thing I treasure most about the film. It is deeply and profoundly confused, and not pretending that it can offer any concrete answers about the topics it brings up. Tár is very "of the moment", diving headfirst into questions of "what is 'cancel culture' if in fact something of that name exists?" and "can a terrible human being create brilliant art, and if so does the art 'balance out' their awfulness?" and things of that nature, and while I take for granted that Field has clear ideas on those questions, I don't necessarily know that Tár agrees with him, not least because I think Tár absolutely doesn't have clear ideas on those questions. The whole time - all two hours and 38 minutes of it, which independently of all other considerations is just way fuck too long - I couldn't stop thinking about Joker, the last film this eager to start thrashing around in Pressing Social Issues about which the writer-director (also a Todd, weirdly) couldn't entirely articulate what the hell he was trying to say, but was worried that if he tried to pin it down too much he'd snuff something important out of the film's vitality.
To be clear: I think this is good and necessary. In the last few years, Important Prestige Films on Culturally Relevant Themes have been stricken down with a vulgar and repugnant sickness, wherein they have all become the most dead-eyed, stylistically arid form of tedious lecture, favoring didacticism over storytelling, reducing the role of artist to moral arbiter (which is, I think, a role specifically incompatible with making good art, which necessarily involves chasing intuitions and stray ideas even when they lead into weird and dark places). I like that Field isn't trying to claim that he knows shit; that his film is basically just throwing a bunch of stuff out - again, two hours and 38 minutes of stuff, which is more than ample - and saying, "here, I noticed this, let's discuss what the hell is going on and what it means". It's especially appropriate for Tár, a film about an artist who clearly has no sense of epistemic humility at all and would certainly not be capable of making an art object on the theme "I don't know what's going on, let's try to figure it out".
This is all as much to say that Tár is above all else a Film About Ideas, and I regret to say that I'm the very worst kind of viewer for such a film: I like my movies to slam into your guts and leave your brain out of it, and Tár is, in alignment with its prickly and complicated and chilly protagonist, a very brain-focused movie. None of which is to say that the film is bad or deficient, as in fact I think it's very obvious that what the film is doing appeals to a huge number of people and they're getting a ton of out of it. It's not even a tiny bit appealing to me, is all, and that seems especially necessary to admit in this case. I watch Tár, hear it demand "we must reckon with this! we must discuss these issues!" and all I can really do is shrug and say "nah, I'd rather not".
That all being said, there's no disputing that this is a polished, handsome, and incredibly thoughtful piece of filmmaking. I don't think it would be right to say that Field has gotten better since his most film, 2006's Little Children, so much as that American prestige filmmaking has atrophied to the point where Field's real but not exactly spectacular gifts as a filmmaker can feel like a grand statement of formal grandeur. At any rate, it's extremely gratifying to see a film, especially one this long, that understands that it's important for every single frame of a movie to tell a story, and that story is the total of where the characters stand, how they move, and where the edges of the image are relative to them. Tár is a movie of immaculate spaces which are presented immaculately, and the narrative is essentially about how all of that immaculate perfection is bulldozed because world-renowned conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) has made a disproportionate number of selfish decisions that she didn't expect to have to answer for. The calculated precision of the form is the calculated precision of Tár herself, a human metronome by profession, and one who believes that she is always correct in every situation and thus must spend her time with other people managing them into a position that they agree with her, or casting them into the outer darkness. It's also the calculated precision of Blanchett herself, giving a flawlessly-tuned performance in a script that was written specifically for her (Field has made it clear that if she had turned down the project, it wouldn't have gone forward), and therefore offers very little, if any room for surprise: it's pretty much exactly the performance I imagined based on the logline. That brings up the question of whether surprise matters, in the face of what is, basically, a perfect work of acting, with an enormous degree of difficulty attached: Blanchett conducts! Literally, conducts an orchestra as it plays before our eyes! She plays (simple) piano pieces! She speaks German! And she acts while doing all of it, though Tár hedges itself a little bit here by giving her a character we only get to know as a collection of well-honed surfaces - surfaces that to some extend obscure each other, so there's an illusion of interiority, but we never get to "know" Tár, instead merely observe her from an austere God's eye view.
The film's precision certainly isn't anything to throw away, and it results in several excellent moments, generally bunched up towards the start of the film: there's an early scene where Tár insults a student in front of a class at Julliard, all captured in one nerve-shredding take as the student shakes his leg like a terrified baby deer and Blanchett stalks around as the camera whirls around in beautiful, perfect arcs following her, and I think it would be very hard to come up with any argument that this isn't the best scene in the whole film. The early scenes in general, before the story really kicks in, tend to be the slowest, feature the longest shots, make the most of the coldly chic locations where Tár lives her life as compositional elements, and are accordingly the most formally satisfying. The film tries to execute this turn where it picks up speed with shorter scenes that jump ahead more in time in its last third and especially its last fifth-or-so, and I think this is more satisfying in theory than in execution. But it does speak to the amount of planning and consideration that have gone into the film, the desire to have everything work together - as if it were a symphony, one might say, except that probably the single thing I liked least about Tár is that it has almost nothing at all to do with classical music; as long as it's it set in some high-culture bastion of smug overeducated people like Tár, as well as her enablers and the people who ultimately turn on her, it could tell exactly the same story almost exactly the same way, and not leave me grumpy that we only get about four cumulative minutes of Mahler in a film that has announced itself as being, in part, about recording Mahler.
Beyond the precision of the filmmaking and Blanchett's performance, there's plenty of other stuff to admire: Nina Hoss is superb as Tár's wife, the foremost of all the human props in the artist's chilly conception of other people as psychologically inert window dressing, and Noémie Merlant is also pretty great as her assistant and current lover, the newest fly being lazily sucked dry by the genius spider. Being a strong character drama isn't really the film's main goal, though the three central performances certainly would permit it to be an extremely strong one. And it's portrait of how the international orchestral music industry works as a cultural business is terrifically interesting and intimately-detailed, though that's even less the goal. That's all to say: there's a lot here that works very well, and even as though whole thing left me totally unruffled at the end, I'm glad this exists for the people who'll do better than I could at getting on its prickly wavelength.
To be clear: I think this is good and necessary. In the last few years, Important Prestige Films on Culturally Relevant Themes have been stricken down with a vulgar and repugnant sickness, wherein they have all become the most dead-eyed, stylistically arid form of tedious lecture, favoring didacticism over storytelling, reducing the role of artist to moral arbiter (which is, I think, a role specifically incompatible with making good art, which necessarily involves chasing intuitions and stray ideas even when they lead into weird and dark places). I like that Field isn't trying to claim that he knows shit; that his film is basically just throwing a bunch of stuff out - again, two hours and 38 minutes of stuff, which is more than ample - and saying, "here, I noticed this, let's discuss what the hell is going on and what it means". It's especially appropriate for Tár, a film about an artist who clearly has no sense of epistemic humility at all and would certainly not be capable of making an art object on the theme "I don't know what's going on, let's try to figure it out".
This is all as much to say that Tár is above all else a Film About Ideas, and I regret to say that I'm the very worst kind of viewer for such a film: I like my movies to slam into your guts and leave your brain out of it, and Tár is, in alignment with its prickly and complicated and chilly protagonist, a very brain-focused movie. None of which is to say that the film is bad or deficient, as in fact I think it's very obvious that what the film is doing appeals to a huge number of people and they're getting a ton of out of it. It's not even a tiny bit appealing to me, is all, and that seems especially necessary to admit in this case. I watch Tár, hear it demand "we must reckon with this! we must discuss these issues!" and all I can really do is shrug and say "nah, I'd rather not".
That all being said, there's no disputing that this is a polished, handsome, and incredibly thoughtful piece of filmmaking. I don't think it would be right to say that Field has gotten better since his most film, 2006's Little Children, so much as that American prestige filmmaking has atrophied to the point where Field's real but not exactly spectacular gifts as a filmmaker can feel like a grand statement of formal grandeur. At any rate, it's extremely gratifying to see a film, especially one this long, that understands that it's important for every single frame of a movie to tell a story, and that story is the total of where the characters stand, how they move, and where the edges of the image are relative to them. Tár is a movie of immaculate spaces which are presented immaculately, and the narrative is essentially about how all of that immaculate perfection is bulldozed because world-renowned conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) has made a disproportionate number of selfish decisions that she didn't expect to have to answer for. The calculated precision of the form is the calculated precision of Tár herself, a human metronome by profession, and one who believes that she is always correct in every situation and thus must spend her time with other people managing them into a position that they agree with her, or casting them into the outer darkness. It's also the calculated precision of Blanchett herself, giving a flawlessly-tuned performance in a script that was written specifically for her (Field has made it clear that if she had turned down the project, it wouldn't have gone forward), and therefore offers very little, if any room for surprise: it's pretty much exactly the performance I imagined based on the logline. That brings up the question of whether surprise matters, in the face of what is, basically, a perfect work of acting, with an enormous degree of difficulty attached: Blanchett conducts! Literally, conducts an orchestra as it plays before our eyes! She plays (simple) piano pieces! She speaks German! And she acts while doing all of it, though Tár hedges itself a little bit here by giving her a character we only get to know as a collection of well-honed surfaces - surfaces that to some extend obscure each other, so there's an illusion of interiority, but we never get to "know" Tár, instead merely observe her from an austere God's eye view.
The film's precision certainly isn't anything to throw away, and it results in several excellent moments, generally bunched up towards the start of the film: there's an early scene where Tár insults a student in front of a class at Julliard, all captured in one nerve-shredding take as the student shakes his leg like a terrified baby deer and Blanchett stalks around as the camera whirls around in beautiful, perfect arcs following her, and I think it would be very hard to come up with any argument that this isn't the best scene in the whole film. The early scenes in general, before the story really kicks in, tend to be the slowest, feature the longest shots, make the most of the coldly chic locations where Tár lives her life as compositional elements, and are accordingly the most formally satisfying. The film tries to execute this turn where it picks up speed with shorter scenes that jump ahead more in time in its last third and especially its last fifth-or-so, and I think this is more satisfying in theory than in execution. But it does speak to the amount of planning and consideration that have gone into the film, the desire to have everything work together - as if it were a symphony, one might say, except that probably the single thing I liked least about Tár is that it has almost nothing at all to do with classical music; as long as it's it set in some high-culture bastion of smug overeducated people like Tár, as well as her enablers and the people who ultimately turn on her, it could tell exactly the same story almost exactly the same way, and not leave me grumpy that we only get about four cumulative minutes of Mahler in a film that has announced itself as being, in part, about recording Mahler.
Beyond the precision of the filmmaking and Blanchett's performance, there's plenty of other stuff to admire: Nina Hoss is superb as Tár's wife, the foremost of all the human props in the artist's chilly conception of other people as psychologically inert window dressing, and Noémie Merlant is also pretty great as her assistant and current lover, the newest fly being lazily sucked dry by the genius spider. Being a strong character drama isn't really the film's main goal, though the three central performances certainly would permit it to be an extremely strong one. And it's portrait of how the international orchestral music industry works as a cultural business is terrifically interesting and intimately-detailed, though that's even less the goal. That's all to say: there's a lot here that works very well, and even as though whole thing left me totally unruffled at the end, I'm glad this exists for the people who'll do better than I could at getting on its prickly wavelength.
