Tár

Tár

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source: Tár

This movie is an absolute mess of a plot. There is no coherence to the scenes so there is no way of understanding what is going on. The music lingo the characters use is something literally only a person who went to Juilliard would comprehend. Tar is supposed to be a musical genius but can't write music to save her life. The way people speak in this movie is so high brow and snooty I'd rather listen to nails on a chalkboard. Cate Blanchett makes her voice super deep to sound like a man. Her daughter in the movie is being bullied at school and Tar tells the bully she is her daughter's father, not mother. The movie's premise shouldn't be that a woman has to act like a man to get notoriety. This is one of the worst movies I've seen in a really long time.

"I am Petra's father...I am going to get you." Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) Make no mistake, Tar is not about music: It is a fiction about naked power in the rarefied world of classical music conducting. As writer director Todd Field deftly orchestrates a drama that's almost a thriller about the first female conductor, Lydia Tar, in a major German orchestra, the audience is thrilled and mesmerized as if Leonard Bernstein (her mentor) were conducting Mahler in Lincoln Center. Cate Blanchett brilliantly becomes Tar, a world-renowned conductor, who has had stints from Cleveland to New York and finally Berlin. Blanchett is great enough to make the audience feel as if they had been intimate roommates with the maestro. No longer having to answer questions about gender, she commands with like a dictator from choosing orchestral leaders to changing a program to feature a potential lover soloing Elgar on a decidedly-different program dedicated to Mahler. When she dresses down a student at her Julliard lecture, she also handily deconstructs Bach's Prelude in C Major. She reveals in one incident her shredding personal side and her transcendent understanding of classical music. As the quote above displays, even in her personal life she exercises an outsized fearsomeness. She can dispatch her daughter's (Mila Bogojevic) bully with a force equivalent to conducting Mahler's Fifth (or "the five" as Lydia comfortably refers to it). When she asks permission from the orchestra to mount the Elgar, she is actually telling them that's what the program will be, at the same time informing them she's had to rotate out a beloved long-time player. Everyone is aware of the politics, especially her lust for a new cellist specializing in Elgar's Cello Concerto, replacing her assistant, Francesca (Noemie Merlant), who has seniority and maybe better skills. Yet Field, clearly schooled in Greek tragedy, loads the screenplay with hubris, the poison of numerous power players over the centuries. It's the conductor's old game in new times when social media will reveal peccadillos as well as crimes, real or figurative, and autocrats like James Levine and Lydia Tar cannot withstand the scrutiny. Because we have lived through all kinds of strong-man rule, from democracy-endangering fascism to indiscriminate pandemic, unfettered power seems eventually doomed to the moral demands of a populace chafing at the abuse of leadership for its personal gain, be it wealth or lust. It just takes a while for Nemesis to arrive. Tar may be the best film so far of 2022 and Blanchett the best actress. Start your Oscar adventure now in theaters with Tar.

Todd Fields made one of the best directing debuts ever in 2001 with "In the Bedroom". His latest feature doesn't quite live up to those standards, but the stylistic undercurrent is still there. The increasing neurosis and paranoia of the of the well-to-do protagonist, seeming to be undone by their toxic environment, is a through line to his previous features. Howard Hawks once said that a good movie has three great scenes and no bad scenes. Tár has three good scenes, and the rest are tolerable. The opening is middling, and the editing is choppy and lacks a strong pace. But Cate Blanchett's portrayal is enough to bring about the audience's sympathy of being a scapegoat, while some dramatic tension is revealed in the sequences at Juilliard, the deposition, and an unexpectedly creepy moment when Linda is pursued through a dark, dank basement. Unfortunately the film never quite comes together to unify into a cohesive hole.

I can't say this movie is good. Sure, the acting is good. The writing is okay. The movie isn't interesting though. The movie opens with a 10 minute dialogue purely about this character's life and her positions on classical music. I'm asking myself - why should I care? The movie makes no interest in making you like/sympathize with this character and you have to be dragged along her very boring and pretentious life for two and a half hours. Only reason I didn't walk out was because I paid full price. So what Cate Blanchett gets an Oscar. I want my 2 hours back for this boring movie. Never again. I can't believe the reviews on here are 10/10. At best this movie is a 4/10 because Blanchett carries. Nothing else about this movie is worth caring about. Makes me sick seeing these reviews.