Tar (2022) Let's start with the obvious and get that out of the way.......
Cate Blanchett reaches a whole new level of performance.......she's unquestionably amazing.
And she has to be......for close to 160 minutes, she's the one and only focus of this movie. Its writer-director Todd Field, self-indulgently takes his own sweet time with long, long drawn out scenes illustrating the rise and humiliating fall of Blanchett's character......in every possible painstaking, painful detail.
She's Lydia Tar, a brilliant, genius-level Renaissance woman of music.....composer, conductor, author, and exacting teacher and mentor of music students and up and coming gifted musicians.
Watching this, I couldn't image Field leaving any deleted scenes on the cutting room floor......every sequence in this film seems extended to the point where not a thing was left out. As the film begins with a chatty TV interview of Tar (not unlike one of those "Inside The Actor's Studio" episodes), you'll think you're watching the broadcast in its entirety......
Too much? Sure. But a godsend for Blanchett who's given a huge chunk of time to lay our Tar's character for you. She's the smartest person in the room.....maybe the known Universe. There's nothing in music she doesn't grasp with total command, strong opinions and encyclopedic knowledge. And she suffers no fools......or anyone who'd dare to thwart her ambitions.......
After that extensive introduction, the rest of the film proceeds to Tar in action......where a variety of admirers and adversaries circle around her.....including Sharon (Nina Hoss), her wife and concertmaster in the Berlin Philharmonic that Tar conducts.
But Tar's reputation as an unstoppable creative force to be reckoned starts to crumble....eaten away by her supremely self-satisfied arrogance. She carries on as if she's living in the 1950's.....when a public figure's foibles, scandals and dark secrets could remain......secrets in the dark, leaving only the glossy persona visible.
Not in this era, though. Tar, oblivious to the overwhelming informational age of social media, pays dearly for her imperious ego-driven behavior. Her withering humiliation of a Julliard student in her class, captured on cellphones, goes viral. Far worse, her penchant of mentoring, grooming and then discarding young musicians in her orchestra drives one girl to suicide. And her new target, a gifted Cello player (Sophie Kauer) remains elusive to her......
In the final scenes, Tar's fall from grace and the destruction of her multi-faceted career are total. And yet, even in the film's final moments, as Tar's roughly yanked down from the cultural Mr. Olympus she once ruled, her great gift - her passion for music - still survives amid the wreckage left from her character flaws.
No day at the beach to sit through.......(I'm fairly certain I would've loved this movie like no other if it had only been trimmed of the excess 40 minutes it lugs around, deadening its pace). But every single cinema lover dare not miss Blanchett's spectacular work here.....perhaps her personal best, perhaps the best there is.....4 stars (****).
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