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This is an exceptionally clever film about human nature, with outstanding performances, not least by Blanchett: it is inexplicable that she did not win the best actress Oscar for which she was nominated. To portray this level of brilliance and loathsomeness on the screen in a single character is an awesome achievement.
But it was also clever of Field to show that a world in which numerous male conductors have been accused of improprieties towards junior musicians should be exposed as one in which an empowered woman can behave monstrously, too. We are invited to consider, again, the separation of the art from the artist: if, for example, you play a recording conducted by James Levine, whose history of sexual abuse was known long before he was exposed in 2018, or of music by the anti-Semite Wagner, does that make you morally defective? As Tár shows, true art takes no account of moral failures.
I was alerted to the film by a colleague who sent me a clip of Tár’s devastating attack on a preposterous, privileged, black male student who has rejected Bach because the composer was privileged, male and white. Field has fun with the ludicrousness of cancel culture, and his attack is not diminished by choosing Tár herself to articulate it. Life is not black and white. Those in the music world who disliked this film – notably the conductor Marin Alsop, whom some critics identified as the model for Lydia Tár – either felt it came too close to the truth, or offended their own prejudices. Ignore them, and revel in Tár’s multilayered genius.
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