“Time is the thing. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me. I start the clock,” our protagonist says in the opening moments of Tár. But that is the thing, she feels she can control that beyond the music. The first ten minutes of Todd Field’s film is the key to understanding the whole thing. For whom can get through the beginning moments, those people are in for a wild ride.
It has been sixteen long years since this director last mounted a project, that being 2006’s Little Children. That film suffered second feature doldrums, filled with too many plot threads and very little focus. His first film, In The Bedroom, showed promise, giving vitality to a simple tale of death and familial heartache. This makes me so happy to see Field return to form in his third feature.
At its center the film is truly a performance piece for Cate Blanchett. With every passing year she grows more and more complex as an acting talent. Many have called her the new Meryl Streep, but that really diminishes both. Any great actress stands on the shoulders of those you came before as in every profession. From her turn as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator to the fractured life put to screen in Blue Jasmine, Blanchett has cemented herself within the Hollywood firmament.
Lydia Tár will be among her finest moments. A conductor with many accolades for her name, Tár is on the verge of completing a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as a crowning achievement to her legacy. Head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, she exudes power among her staff. And it is that power which corrupts her in very predictable yet enthralling ways. To go on any further would be spoiling the message Field has laid out for us to connect the dots.
Never has the music world been more electrifying since 2014’s Whiplash; there it was jazz music, here classical. Imagine J.K. Simmons’s finely tuned anger brought into a singularity and given a baton. That is the kind of ferocity Cate has in just a look or silver-tongued retort.
The supporting cast are no slouches either. Mark Strong plays Elliot, a colleague that runs a fellowship she created for aspiring women. Noèmie Merlant is a welcome addition as Tár’s assistant Francesca. Her wonderful subtle expressions that served her role in Portrait of A Lady on Fire fit so well here; prostrate one moment, fed up the next. German actress Nina Hoss matches blow for blow as Lydia’s wife and musical partner Sharon. Scenes of their home life humanize; watching Tár and Sharon dance to Here’s That Rainy Day or taking her daughter Petra to school and singing. But when it is revealed a girl has been bullying Petra, the talons shoot out. Her controlled rage spares no one.
A sequence that spans one take, Tár teaches a group of Juilliard students while one of them conducts a modern Icelandic piece. Perhaps a nod to the film’s composer, Hildur Gudnadottir. I suspect that, after her Joker score, this will be her next shot as an Oscar. However back to the scene; Lydia, in a move not dissimilar to Simmons in Whiplash, dresses this student down in front of his peers. Pointing out his dependence on social media constraints and woke justice politics to inform his art, she instructs him that he must submit to the composer and obliterate his ego. This is funny considering the source.
Blanchett will, no doubt, earn that gilded statue when award season comes around. After 158 minutes, I was left stunned. So many unanswered questions left, but that is for the best. Like all great art, it is a window into a life. And what I was left with was a cello melody buzzing in my head and a smile on my face.
