Some Brief TAR Discussion

 The idea of there being such a thing as "Tar" discourse amuses me. It's not that the film is sooo great that it becomes immune to criticism. It's just that it seems destined to end up with a box office take under $5 mil. Does that matter as far as any individual's enjoyment of the film, no of course not, but the number of people outside of NYC/LA film circles and smaller city newspaper critics who have any thoughts on "Tar" at all must be riding in the range of a few hundreds. 

 "Tar" is probably best described as a schadenfreude satire, where you watch a bad person suffer a downfall while she insists that she must be too big to fail in spite of all the evidence in the world against her. The person is fictional composer Lydia Tar, brought to life really well by Cate Blanchett, put-on German accent and all. The actual premise of the movie is that Lydia get caught up in a sex scandal, although the fact that there is a sex scandal takes writer/director Todd Field an awful long time to directly say. It is not a choice I would have made, to have the whole thing be as slow as it is, or to have the film run over 2.5 hours. But at the same time the script ends up feeling literary in how all of the pieces fit together. Lydia avoids having to deal directly with the sex scandal by filtering it through a personal assistant, who she is also probably having sex with, probably in exchange for a future job promotion, although again Todd Field holds back this information for a very long time. The fact that Lydia's wife is also a player in her orchestra raises the thought that there's a third person who is getting beneficial job placement in exchange for having sex with Lydia, although Field directly never addresses that one. How many more? We can only speculate. All of this information is drip fed to the audience, so that you can barely connect it all together before the bottom falls out, and that aspect of the storytelling was a lot of fun to me. 

 I've seen people of all sorts of political leanings call this a movie about "cancel culture", which I think I find a bit baffling (I suppose I understand why a conservative who sees no fundamental issue with employee sexual harassment would believe the film is about this, but I can't imagine more than a few people like that were rushing out to see a Cate Blanchett indie in limited release!). In the sense that Todd Field seems to draw a line between real and fake issues, a poorly edited viral video vs a suicide, sure, I guess you can call it that. No part of me left the theater thinking that Lydia Tar was innocent or deserved a better fate than she got. If Field were to publicly say that this is what his film is about, I think I would have to say: "Sure, okay. It's good that deeply awful people are bullied into taking low-prestige jobs". 

 High up on my list of nitpicks is the total lack of a score outside of performance scenes. Hildur Guðnadóttir is one of the finest new composers in the movie business right now, and she's on duty for a film about a supremely talented composer, this should have been a slam dunk. And yet, the use of music outside of concert and rehearsal scenes is basically non-existent (I know nothing about classical music, and walked out of the theater assuming that concert pieces were existing famous pieces of music. If Guðnadóttir wrote anything in those pieces, they're very impressive, but I'm still underwhelmed by the use of music on the whole). 

 Ultimately, I think "TAR" is good. I'm not totally convinced of its greatness. I doubt I will be putting it on my list of favorite films of the year. But I am totally convinced of Blanchett's brilliance, and of how thought-provoking I found the story.