It’s the eleven pistol shots – it’s a prime number – that strikes you as both victim and perpetrator. You know, it’s not until I conducted it that I became convinced we’re all capable of murder.
What Todd Field and Cate Blanchett have done here with Tar is just mindblowing to me really. I just kind of want to highlight from the jump that I think this is a masterful screenplay given masterful direction with a masterful performance at its heart. It’s a case of those three elements just working together in perfect concert (no pun intended) to give us a dark, unsettling and riveting portrait of one particular woman’s soul. And, yet, as it is a portrait of that one particular woman, ideas and themes drift in and out of the film, coming into focus at times and then receding into the background and then drifting through again.
I think one of the best things about the writing is how the film manages to evoke so many different things about modern society and yet not feel like it’s ever focused on those things to the film’s detriment. In a way, it’s about cancel culture; in a way, it’s a #MeToo story; in a way, it’s about the way we view art and the artist; in a way, it’s about cultural tourism and appropriation. But it’s never didactic and it never feels like the film is hitting you over the head with what it’s saying. I read a line in one review that has stayed with me. I forget the author, but they said something along the lines of Tar’s story being told so smartly that for a long time, you don’t even realize a story is being told and I think that’s absolutely correct. The film has serious and important themes. It also has a serious and emotional story. But, moment to moment, darned if it doesn’t just feel a mood piece most of the time; this movie is just a vibe and a dark one at that. One should give credit to Hildur Guodnodottir’s minimal, but effective score as a big part of this mood. It’s another classic from her.
The film just does this tremendous job of crafting Lydia Tar, the central character, and then placing her in a world that she at once seems the master of and strangely isolated and adrift within. Field is able to create a palpable sense of dread and uncertainty through things as simple as a ticking metronome or a vague and distant scream. Blanchett’s performance, meanwhile, is revealing the hidden existential terror inside Lydia, an existential terror that she hardly keeps at bay. She’s deeply skilled at manipulating other people; we see an amazing series of scenes at one point, where we don’t really understand what she’s doing until it’s over and then it suddenly dawns on us that every word she has said has been perfectly calculated to get the outcome she wants while appearing to have nothing to do with it. But for all her ability to manipulate others, she can’t seem to gain control of herself. This lack of control gnaws at the edges of her carefully controlled world. In a way I found really chilling, there are a couple of instances where she ventures outside her comfort zone and finds that people that she has in her life seem to almost be incomplete, to be living lives that are only half-finished when they’re away from her. An attempt to follow someone into their apartment leads only into a crumbling and abandoned building and a terrifying encounter with a menacing black dog. A visit to another character’s home reveals a complete hovel, filled with scraps of paper with nonsensical scrawls. I found this really disturbing and powerful as a concept, this sense that these seemingly normal people aren’t actually normal people, that when Lydia starts to pick at the threads that surround her, things just begin to unravel. That loss of control eventually, as we know it will, begins to spread and we find ourselves again in an evergreen and ever satisfying tale: the genius, the hero, the master undone by their own deadly flaws.
While it’s definitely Blanchett’s movie, I should mention the rest of the cast before I wrap up. The always phenomenal Nina Hoss brings both ferocity and vulnerability to her role as Lydia’s long-time partner. Noemie Merlant is great as Lydia’s harried assistant. Cellist Sophie Kauer gives a fantastic performance in what is, unbelievably, her acting debut. Mark Strong and Julian Glover both bring real weight to their small roles and their scenes are really delightful.
The one part of this movie I did initially struggle with was the ending. Watching the movie in the theater, it struck me as a joke and I didn’t understand why the film would want to reduce everything we’d just spent two-and-a-half hours going through to the build-up to a kind of silly punchline. The movie builds to a really emotional climax and the ending didn’t seem to feel quite right. But after spending a lot of time thinking about the movie and the ending, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s something very different than it at first seemed to me. I’m not going to say what I think it’s saying; that’s for you to figure out for yourself. But I think I know and I think it is something serious and in keeping with the tone of the movie as a whole. But it’s the kind of ending that one really doesn’t see that often, an ending where I think there’s a legitimate case to be made for it as a hopeful ending and a legitimate case to be made for it as an incredibly bleak ending. Wherever you come down in that argument, it is, at least, definitely not a joke. The movie’s not either. It’s the real deal. 4 stars.
tl;dr – screenplay, direction and lead performance all work together to create a nuanced, complex, absolutely fascinating character study that also functions as a musing on the modern world. 4 stars.