PREMISE
The story of Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and first-ever female music director of a major German orchestra.
THE GOOD STUFF
BLANCHETT- Lydia Tár is a person basking in her own greatness. An artist who fails to separate her private life from her professional one, who allows her sexual desires and personal relationships to influence her artistic judgment. There’s a lot of complicated stuff going on all at once, and there is much of that to show from scene to scene. We also get many sequences of her being absolutely brilliant at her job, with shots of Blanchett composing the symphony in a way that is both primal, and elegant.
At this point, the only thing that there is to debate about Cate Blanchett is what her greatest role may be. I understand how corny it may sound for anybody who’s been watching her for as long as I have to say that this performance is THE performance given that it’s the most recent one, but I will say this… this is the best individual performance in a movie in 2022, it’s almost an assured lock for an Oscar nomination, and when it comes to talking about the career of Cate Blanchett, if you are as much a fan of her as I am, you would be a fool not to mention this in the top 5 performances of hers.
THE BAD STUFF
THE RUNNING TIME- TÁR runs at a solid 158 minutes. A lot of that time is spent explaining how good Tár is at what she does, and showing her in action. It does so in a very detailed and slow-moving way. This may be the longest first act of any movie I’ve seen in many many years, and though I feel it’s a very good first act, it really could have been trimmed down substantially. Mark Strong pops up in this film and gives a good performance on his own for what it’s worth. But in all honesty, you can cut his performance because he only exists to further explain what the movie is already trying to tell us about the artistic greatness of Blanchett’s character. There is a lot here that does get kinda repetitive honestly.
THE UGLY STUFF
The third act– Though it takes a long time to get going, once this movie finds it’s rhythm, the pace quickens up quite a bit, and it stays there until the end of the film. However, the climax of the film, and the build-up for that climax come in the form of heavily implied situations that are never really fully explained, scenes that are shown in a faster pace than we’re used to seeing in the movie up until that point, in a time frame that is never fully explained in itself.
There are a series of scenes towards the end of the 3rd act that are told back to back that I’m pretty sure took place in between a span of weeks given the things that happen in those individual scenes. But it happens so quickly that the emotion of the scenes themselves do not really have an impact. It’s a strange way to cap this story off.
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Art house movies such as TÁR can be very divisive when it comes to the common moviegoer, and I get that. However, if you are at all a fan of the art form known as acting, then you must understand that Cate Blanchett is one of the very few actors around that have meritorious performances on a regular basis, and a movie in which she is in every single solitary scene giving a performance like this is indefinitely worth your time.
TÁR is in theatres now
