Tar

                      

I liked, but didn't love, Todd Field's Tar. It is the first Field film that I was even remotely satisfied by, but my mixed feelings about the film mostly stem from my reactions to Cate Blanchett's commanding performance. Her character, Lydia Tar, is a genius conductor and musician with feet of clay, a visionary who has long ago ignored traditional ethical boundaries. I felt Blanchett meticulous performance got the genius part right, but the elemental fire needed to show the conductor losing her mental mooring was absent. When Blanchett is showing the conductor at the top of her game, she inhabits the character, but when the conductor goes mad, I felt I was watching Blanchett give a performance.

In each of  Field's three films, human intimacy is undermined by the distance between people and their different agendas. Their are moments of comfort here between Tar and her spouse, Sharon (an underused Nina Hoss), but Field usually emphasizes the distance between the two characters; often using long shots, even in domestic scenes. Another example is a scene in an auto between Hoss and Blanchett when Tar's frantic driving is frightening her spouse. This scene pictures Tar's growing mental derangement and augurs the couple's split. Field shoots the scene from the back seat of the auto, primarily focused on Sharon and only showing Lydia's reflection in the rearview mirror. Tar is with her spouse in the car (until Sharon bolts out), but truly exists only on a different spiritual and spatial plane.

I rather enjoyed Field's playing with the the theme of the conflict between elitism and democracy in culture. As the West trends towards a more inclusive and multi-cultural society, the cult of the solitary genius and seer is being eroded. I suspect Mr. Fields, who worked with Stanley Kubrick and is a director (or regie or ruler as the Germans put it) himself after all, respects the value of following one person's singular vision within the artistic field. Tar's true love is not her spouse or whatever lovers she may or may not have had, but music itself. That love of music, and Field is a musician himself, suffuses Tar from beginning to end and is ultimately pictured as its heroine's balm and salvation.