Tár Fails To Stick Landing

When Cate Blanchett is involved in a movie, awards buzz always seems to follow, so I wasn’t surprised that Tar made the (not so) short Best Picture list. Even if I had missed every teaser and trailer. This may have affected my expectations for the movie.

In my head, I was thinking something similar to Whiplash. What I ended up getting was whiplash, of the mental variety.

Movies are more than just entertainment, especially when discussing those up for top honors. There’s an expectation that these films ask something of us and make us question and explore. But I don’t think the questions should be along the vein of “Did I fall asleep and not realize it?”

I hadn’t nodded off. I wasn’t scrolling through my phone. The most extended breaks in the viewing were for bathroom breaks. And yet, I felt like I had missed out on something. I still feel like that several days post watch.

Blanchett’s performance was superb. Which of her performances isn’t? Even her voice performance as Spazzatura in del Toro’s Pinocchio was fabulous. For this film, she put in the time to learn how to conduct, learn German, and, as if that wasn’t enough, relearn the piano for the role.

Blanchett wasn’t the only bright star in this film, although she was the story’s focal point. Incorporating the Dresden orchestra into the film and having live performances instead of using Cinemagic to create an orchestral vibe was perfection.

Anyone who’s watched the film knows Lydia Tár is a complicated, highly accomplished, and excessively flawed character. But just as evident, what we were meant to get out of this film has been buried under the weight of trying too hard.

What’s ambiguous is what Lydia is doing and what she’s trying to accomplish. Not everything we see actually happens in the storyline. I’m sure of that. But how much are her delusional fantasies and how many are her actual actions? I can’t say.

There’s too much dense fog to wade through to figure it out. Maybe the character can’t either, and that’s the whole point.

But the movie drives at pointing out more than just one woman’s greed and self-deception, or at least that’s what I was getting out of it. There are threads of cancel culture, abuse, and manipulation running through the narrative, but they aren’t fully developed and brought to the forefront.

The more I think about this movie, the feeling it leaves behind, at least for me, is a sense of pretentiousness. Tár made me feel like I wasn’t enough to understand the world the film showed me. That is fair, I suppose. I’m not an expert or even much interested in classical music and orchestration. But at the same time, it didn’t have to insult me.

The scene between Lydia and her brother toward the movie’s end keeps returning to me. He says in such an honest, unemotional way, “Linda, it seems like you don’t know who you are, where you come from, or where you’re going.” It strikes a chord with me because his line sums up my feelings about the movie.

Cate Blanchett has a good chance of taking the Best Actress Oscar because of her incredible performance. Although at the time of writing this, I have only seen this and Everything, Everywhere for comparison. Yeoh is still the odds-on favorite to win, and I can’t disagree with those odds.

As for the Best Picture award? I don’t think Tár has enough to take it across the finish line.

But those are my thoughts. What are yours?