Tár
At a glance...
- Directed by Todd Field
- Released in 2022
- Runtime 158 minutes
- Watched at The Regal Meridian 16
- Final feelings: a comedy where I'm the punchline!
I don't think I laughed through the whole movie and then the last 60 seconds were so funny I think this film might be a comedy???
That's mostly a joke, Tár covers a lot of dark themes and Cate Blanchett delivers an all-time great performance that made me feel truly disgusted for 2 1/2 hours. Maybe that's why I laughed so hard at the end, I felt like, "oh yeah, she deserves this".
But then I think about the messaging in the film around music and musicality. The fact that Lydia starts rehearsal at her new job with the same question of interpretation, and that she still gets nervous before her cue to enter the stage. The conversation at the beginning of the film between Lydia and Max about how to value music from people we can more openly say are despicable, and the surrounding question of when do we get to say no to art from bad people. This obsession with "selection", in the players, the score, the interpretation, that (in my own lived experience, limited as that may be) is so essential to the power dynamic of the world of classical "art music".
It all comes together at the end like a big joke, like the movie is laughing at me laughing at the movie. I instinctively give Mahler, Bach, Elgar respect, by listening with intention, allowing myself to be moved by the snippets of music shown in the film (sidenote: I was a very bad cellist in the youth symphony as a kid, and I will never hear the Elgar cello concerto the same ever again). My dismissive reaction to the music from the monster hunter video game franchise is so predictable, the movie doesn't even bother to give me a dramatic cut to Tár gesticulating seriously with swelling strings in the background, even though I've played monster hunter and I know there are parts of the soundtrack that could fit that shot. I just think it's funny that the conductor and the musicians all take their work seriously in both cases, and they each garner enthusiastic audiences, but I don't give equal, or even comparable respect.
And then you think about how alien the conversations in the movie between all the classical music people are. How everyone around Tár is willing to look the other way or enable her abusive behavior, how they all still want to be chummy with her. No one sitting next to Lydia in the board rooms and fancy restaurants is innocent.
All these details highlight how niche this movie is, and within its niche it's yet even more niche, even to someone like me, who has spent at least a lot of my childhood involved in the world of classical music performance. I guess my point is that this is a movie that points a deeply sardonic light at our way of thinking about music, especially classical music, especially among people who have a more serious relationship with classic music.
(Another sidenote: I'm reminded of an episode of This American Life where they interview members of the pit orchestra for phantom of the opera. The indifference and disdain many of these musicians feel towards the music they perform for thousands of people a week is shocking to hear.)
Finally, Tár herself feels like a joke of a character. She is so weighted with shame and fear that she can't sleep, she uses her status and power to take advantage of people in a way only an experienced abuser can, but she's also a germaphobe, insistent on keeping up the illusion of cleanliness and purity, and that need brings her a great deal of anxiety. She's a caring parent, although she is way too willing to cross the line and literally intimidate a child at school, again, like only an abuser could. At the end we even learn her birth name is Linda, making her own professional alias seem like a complete fabrication.
As I watch her sit in front of the old family TV, wearing a childhood medal and crying while watching a VHS of Leonard Bernstein (probably the only way she could have "studied" under him), I feel an inkling of pity for her. Lenny waxes poetic about the way music can make you feel, and she cries because she so wants to live in the fantasy that those feelings are the only things that matter, and that all of this will go away because she can make great music. Maybe the fact that she can still get a job and work with musicians and play to a full audience at the end means, on some level, she's right.