If any concept is embodied in the fabric of Todd Field’s long-gestating return to feature filmmaking, Tár (USA, 2022), it’s framing. Framing in the sense of visual composition and its effect on the subjects of a shot or shots, framing as a thoughtfully considered context for descriptions or discussions of things, events and emotions, and framing in the detective-novel sense, where the arrangement of past events are manipulated to cast blame on the blameless, guilt upon the innocent or the righteous indictment of guilty parties.
In the frame of the film’s metaphorical spotlight is Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, in a performance of immense resource and command), who has worked her way up through music academies, piano performances, education and research, and orchestra conducting to one of the pinnacles, conductor and music director for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Her own personal hero and mentor is Leonard Bernstein, another prodigiously gifted musician, educator, humanitarian and conflicted gay person who eventually came out to little if any effect on his career or reputation. We first meet Lydia in a public interview with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnick. (The New Yorker is the sponsor, but, trust me, the interview is conducted by Lydia.) Brandishing a remarkable facility for music history, religious and cultural theory, and working the crowd with little pokes of contrarianism and disarming humor, Lydia seems to have already acquired all of the access to respect and admiration she might ever want. Her approaching recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor will complete a landmark recording cycle she’s wanted to finish since pre-Covid. Director Field even uses the film’s credits to telegraph how subsequent events will go (another framing device): except for acting credits and his own, the crawl of complete film credits rolls before any other filmed action starts, as if those credits are the end of the ‘film’ of Lydia’s rise. Over our film’s 158 minutes, she is slowly dismantled. She hasn’t been very nice to people on the way up; Field’s film chronicles Lydia meeting them all on her way back down.
Lydia is the primary engine of her own downfall, but she has some motivated help. Her wife, Sharon Goodnow (the superbly slow-burning German actor Nina Hoss) is 1st violin and concertmaster for the Philharmonic, as well as Lydia’s wife. They’re raising a daughter together, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), and Sharon is devoted to both of them in all regards, despite Lydia’s occasional indulgent missteps. Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant) serves as Lydia’s personal assistant and looks forward to succeeding longtime fixture Sebastian Brix (Allan Corduner) as Lydia’s Assistant Conductor. Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong) is an investment banker, and another aspiring conductor, who co-founded (and co-funded) Lydia’s foundation to help develop aspiring young female conductors. One of those aspiring graduates, one Krista Taylor, is allegedly being blacklisted by Lydia for alleged amorous exploits gone wrong, and Krista’s well-being is loudly eroding. After Krista’s suicide, and the family’s subsequent lawsuit, Francesca is instructed by Lydia to destroy all evidence of correspondence between them.
One other early episode in the film presents a master class Lydia is conducting at the Juilliard School in New York. Lydia, like Bernstein, prioritizes using classical music, both technically and evocatively, to express monumental ideas and emotions. But she runs up against a student who has little use for the Old Rich White Commissioned Masters through European history who make up most of the canon. Tár presents a spirited defense of prioritizing the music, The Work, over judging the people who created it, and plants another subsequent small time-bomb for herself. Everything is a video these days…
In quick little insert shots, we see cell-phone video messaging between two people. It isn’t tough to figure out that one of them is Francesca, but with whom is she corresponding? We see Lydia’s Wikipedia page being edited, but whose hands do we see typing? Francesca, in fact, has an enormous e-mail correspondence with the late Krista Taylor, but will she delete it to protect Lydia?
The primary conflict, though, if those aren’t enough, is the arrival of a young and attractive Russian female cello player, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer, a trained cellist making her acting debut) in whom Lydia takes a characteristically ardent and self-destructive interest. Lydia puts a thumb on the scale of Olga’s audition for the Philharmonic, then gives her a featured soloist slot in the piece to be recorded with Mahler’s 5th. Lydia, in her arrogance, is oblivious, but the others in her life see disaster coming from a mile away…
When not on the podium, surrounded by her semi-circle of artful soldiers, Field often shows Tár on the far side of the film frame, against Juilliard’s concrete rehearsal-room walls or the bookshelves of her Berlin home. She’s skilled at parrying-and-thrusting herself into spaces and circumstances. When she’s dealing with poorer, unpleasant neighbors, it’s as if the apartments dissolve into squalor, unwalled; she flails in disgust, retreating back to her own white symmetrical sanctum. Otherwise, she is the fulcrum, left, right or center.
Between his last feature film, Little Children (2006) and this current work, Field worked on getting no less than six large projects off the ground, for film and television, all hibernating in, or succumbing to, development hell. He feigns surprise that Tár was picked up and financed, but each of those other projects were, no doubt, as exhaustively researched and concisely written and structured as Tár clearly is. He was due.
That’s not to say everyone will love this movie. I found it pretty humorless, and a little over 2-1/2 hours is a long slow-burning stretch to wait for a few high-dynamic moments preceding the just-desserts ending. Cate Blanchett does a great job of portraying a highly performative character in an almost seamlessly naturalistic way. She’ll be tough to beat for Best Actress, as will Field in the Best Director category. It’s an almost-great movie, but I suspect I’m overestimating how many others will feel that way.
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