‘Tár’ review: Maestra Cate Blanchett tears up the rulebook with her best work in years in Todd Field’s wildly entertaining and expressionistic return [A-] | Venice Film Festival

Cate Blanchett has never been a bad actress, but she has rarely been this good. To say she “stars” in wildly entertaining, surprisingly funny drama Tár, Todd Field’s first work for 16 years, would be an understatement. Blanchett runs it, much like her EGOT-winning composer Lydia Tár runs every single aspect of her life. Until she doesn’t.

Weighing in at more than two and a half hours, Tár gives itself the time to be about many things, though its central theme appears to be that no one ever really controls their own life. The titular trailblazer is fawned over by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (not an easy lay — but a surprisingly good actor!), audiences around the world and, perhaps most importantly, the women she surrounds herself with. None of it is ultimately enough. A self-described “U-Haul lesbian,” Tár has a little too much desire for her own good, and seems to find love unattractive when other people show it to her. It’s painful to watch Tár disregard longtime partner Sharon (an incredible Nina Hoss) and her slavish assistant Francesca (Naomie Merlant), but it’s soon clear we would have no movie if Tár was as put together as her compositions. Life cannot be waved away with a pencil, even if Tár’s mentor “Lenny” Bernstein regarded music to be the enduring expression of inexpressible feelings. 

A character rather than plot-driven movie, Lydia’s life unravels as a result of three main, intersecting events: a contentious appearance guest lecturing at Julliard, her decision to “rotate” trusted yet uninventive assistant conductor Sebastian (Allan Corduner), and the death of someone once close to her. Each has ramifications that aren’t immediately clear to anyone, not even Tár. Watching it all unfold is truly riveting. It’s almost as gripping as when she takes the podium at the Berliner Philharmoniker, the world’s premiere symphony orchestra, where she is, of course, lead conductor.

To compliment Blanchett’s authorship of her character is not to take anything away from Field, whose initially steady direction marries brilliantly with Tár’s own straightforwardness. Eventually the camera flails as she does. Field shoots her dreams with expressionistic wonder: a recurring scene involves strange embraces with unidentified women; another shows Tár’s bed catch fire in a quiet jungle that could easily be the spot Luke Skywalker crash-lands at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. And when Tár conducts, Field soars. His film is so methodical and seemingly thought through that he could have spent the past decade planning it out. It’s only in a few near-implausible plot developments at the end of Tár that the film loses its cool. That’s a shame. It could be that Tár’s increasingly erratic behaviour is imagined, Rupert Pupkin-style. What’s more likely is that Blanchett wants to stretch the character to her very limits, show us all the emotions. But sometimes, as ex-German men’s soccer captain Phillip Lahm once said of his country’s comparatively small elite division, less is more. In its previous two hours Tár builds more than enough goodwill for its excesses to be mildly frustrating rather than deal-breakers. But I couldn’t help thinking what might’ve been had Field’s film showed just a spot more discipline.

Tár has been greeted in Venice as a movie for our touted “cancel culture” era (as if Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t “canceled”) and, thankfully with tongue firmly in cheek, a #SheToo film. It reflects on both themes, though to put it in any box would be unfair. For Tár to have a coherent moral message, anyway, would be a terminal error. Thankfully it doesn’t. Blanchett’s exacting iconoclast simply cannot be managed. It makes for a wild ride.

Grade: A-

This review is from the Venice Film Festival. Focus Features will release Tár only in theaters on October 7.