“In music one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the
composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played
fastest. ”
Alan Watts, commenting on purposelessness
“This will be our reply to
violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than
ever before.” Leonard Bernstein
“Here’s to the battle, whatever it’s for.”
Winners, song by Joe Raposo
In the masterful documentary about the pianist Glen
Gould, 32 Short Films About Glen Gould, the filmmakers never once showed him
playing the piano. This disagreeable misanthrope shines despite never being seen
tickling the ivories. This is how the writer/director Todd Field might have
conceived of portraying the classical music virtuoso in his feature, Tar. Her
story is the the off-key song of life, not the beautiful sounds of the
orchestra. Sadly the breath her virtuosity matched her abhorrence as a
character. The film needed less music, more art.
Would a person, who violently
attacks a rival conductor on stage in front of an audience, react quietly to
being banished from seeing their beloved child by an angry spouse? Imagine if
Dickens decided to have Ebenezer Scrooge focus on improving his business
practices rather than saving Tiny Tim. It is a tribute to the artistry of Todd
Field, Cate Blanchett and an ensemble of pros that, despite the flaws, there is
no hiding superb craftsmanship. This feature falls in the “uncanny valley” of
greatness, having all the appearances of being sublime, but lacking the
essential element of, attraction. The critics have been merciless, one going so
far as to use the word “Tar-ible” in the title of her review. There have been
some Oscar nominations but the project has lost Universal Pictures $50 million
to date. Financial failure and critical scorn is not surprising given the film’s
premise.
In an era where audience’s focus has been shaped by Tik Tok’s 3 minute
limit, Mr. Field created a nearly 3 hour feature about: a classical music
maestro; or as some would say maestra. Whatever quips one has with the final
version, it is important to give a nod to the audacity of completing this
project. No doubt there were a chorus of pre-production executives texting one
another fire breathing emojis or simply…“WTF?” Given the films reception these
have morphed into laughing smiley faces celebrating the downfall of the
colleagues who gave the green light. But if you think feature film making is
Machiavellian, wait until the curtain unveils the world of classical music. Tar
isn’t so much a meditation on art as a portrait of a gangster. One associates
such people with money and crime but the real mobsters show their colors when
everything centers on prestige, not mammon.
Cate Blanchett is the protagonist,
Linda Tar, a girl from a cultural nether region of a blue collar, Long Island
suburb. Her first move is to drop her first name for the more exotic “Lydia”.
The film is a view of her journey to the apex of the, male dominated, classical
music world…. Field tracks our heroine as she stalks the cultural landscape. At
the New Yorker Festival Tar’s assistant polishes her charge and mouths the words
as the the real-life Adam Gopnik reads the bio from of Lydia’s latest book. The
audience coos at the endless list of formidable accomplishments. Lydia has the
sang-froid of a K-pop boy-band making a public appearance. She is flawlessly
hitting her marks and giving NYers exactly what is expected. She also radiates
contempt for her assistant whose life is eternally bonded to the master, think
of Tom Courtenay in The Dresser.
After an interminable title sequence, the first
image is our anti-hero getting ready to take the stage. Field rejects
instantaneous clear meaning. Most mainstream features avoid pauses. Field gives
Lydia life though the inaction of alone-time. Field’s character delineation
relies on gesture and mood, more than the spoken word. Add to this
unconventional presentation the use of obscure cutaways which build a sense of
wonder. Who is changing Lydia’s Wikipedia profile? Who is spying and mocking
Lydia via Instant Messenger? All this blurriness tends to collide with the
ham-handed use of interviews and dinner conversation to move the exposition
forward. The bloated backstory is too heavy a lift for the writer/director.
The
words are the scaffolding that unpacks the complicated intrigue. Lydia is
bringing a noted piece of Gustav Mahler’s work to life in a specially produced
recording based on a live performance at Berlin’s most prestigious concert hall.
The choice of Mahler underscores her connection the legendary New York classical
wunderkind Leonard Bernstein, who was her original mentor/inspiration. The
concert coincides with a book release, which is the basis of the New Yorker
interview. Blanchett’s character devolves, as her life decomposes. The
performative, self-assured, superstar morphs into the strident, defensive,
crank. The expository dialogue slows as we see our heroine do battle with her
family, colleagues, landlords, lovers, neighbors…. The film is precise, but a
grind. Audience members might want to yell the old Led Zepplin line to the
maestro and her writer/director: “does anyone remember laughter?”
Both Blanchett
and Field strangely fall into the same deadening trap as Lydia. The protagonist,
the filmmaker and the actress are brimming with talent. There is a parallel
between Tar’s self-destruction and the film’s excruciating documentation of the
downfall. They were both avoidable. Lydia stage-manages her fall by, needlessly,
scorning those with the ability to destroy her career. Her backstabbing
cleverness falls prey to seemingly wanton cruelty fueled by blinding narcissism.
It didn’t have to happen, even for the meanest of the mean girls. A touch of
restraint combined with a kind word every now and then and her demise would have
been averted. The monster would pass as a lovable hero, except only to the most
intimate and the post mortem biographer. The director and Blanchett are equally
blind to a conceit that seems so elemental as to be the first lesson for those
interested in drama: the audience must care. Tar is a humorless, self obsessed,
mean-spirited bore. It’s not impossible to win the audience over to cheer-on the
monster…. But you have to try. This film is an unvarnished procedural, rather
than an empathetic portrait of a troubled individual.
The Lydia of the first
fifth of the film has a profession-obsessed weariness that repulses even the
most ardent admirers of an anti-hero. The New Yorker interview sequence and the
following meetings and diners with classical music insiders buttress her
credentials as a genuine expert. Everything is… pitch perfect. Everything except
the director’s ability to create empathy for this narcissist superstar. The
memorable performance is accurate, but undesirable. Why would students
passionately climb into bed with her; or executives trip over themselves to
spend any time with her? Her exquisite taste and command of music never matches
her supposed elan. She is the mirror image of her universally beloved mentor,
Leonard Bernstein. The tragedy of Tar is that, despite the phenomenal craftsman
of these immensely talented artists, the denouement leads to the strange
emptiness at the heart of those poor soul’s afflicted by personality disorders.
The point is for the audience to care for this person who doesn’t care. Instead
we have a superb clinical portrait of a sociopath.
Strangely there is one
relationship that proves Lydia isn't completely heartless. Her spouse comments
on the fact that the only non-transactional bond she has formed is with their
daughter. The unbridled love is illustrated by tender moments and one of the
most chilling scenes in the film. Her child is being bullied at school and Lydia
channels Tony Soprano in the moment when another mobster propositions his
daughter. Lydia doesn’t shatter teeth, but her warning to the classmate is
equally chilling; in fact more so, as the maestro simply uses words without even
raising her voice. The bully is immediately vanquished and even the most ardent
detractor of our anti-hero is happy that the daughter, Petra, will be free of
abuse. The actress, Mila Bogojevic, gives a remarkable performance that radiates
pathos and warmth. If the audience had felt the same about Tar this would have
been a film for the ages.
The way to artfully hide Lydia’s deficits would be the
mask of abstraction. Sadly Field clings to the straightforward chronological
narrative. This only serves to place the story in the low earth orbit of Lydia’s
zero-sum-game. Fields gives the narrative a rise and fall arc of gleaning
lessons from a parable. Weirdly this is the un-nuanced world-view of deluded
sociopaths living under the perpetual yoke of striving. Lydia will either win or
lose….PERIOD! This might work for comic books but not character studies of
complicated people. A careful portrait of a life should reject absolutism in
favor of rendering the the infinite small moments that are more ambiguous.
Tar
is at its best with the small moments: the tailoring of the suit, the
realization of being in a brothel, the mysterious noises, the metronome ticking
onward…. There is too much on point proselytizing. The nadir is when she
humiliates a student who finds fault with the heroes of the established canon.
It seems a contrived set-piece to give commentary on the raging culture wars.
Tar, unsurprisingly, champions the established order. The back and forth has a
tiresome quality of assigned characters towing the party line. We needed more of
Tar’s time in Queens as a child or her genuine interactions with her mentors….
Or even, perhaps, her time with the aboriginals in a South American jungle.
These interactions would show vulnerability, rather than gloating. The tragedy
isn’t her professional suicide, but her never-ending isolation. The denouement
should have been the breakup with her daughter in Berlin, rather than exile as a
leader of a cosplay video-game orchestra in a remote Asian backwater. The
spectacle of her public downfall is breathtaking but rings hollow compared to
the missing crescendo of the emotional cataclysm. The superstar pitcher banished
to the grapefruit league is not as compelling as the loving mother who has
forever lost her child; or the striver who realizes they have spent a lifetime
on a fool’s errand….. think the final scene in Mephisto when the actor realizes
he’s playing Faustus NOT Mephistopheles.
Field and Blanchett seem to be
captivated by the pyrotechnics of Lydia on stage. The real drama, however, is in
the wings. What makes this film so frustrating is the glimmers of what might
have been. There are moments of our anti-hero slides into the gooey,
unmotivated…. tenderness. Lydia’s acrobatics, rather than the torment of her
diseased soul, are center stage in Tar. The misstep bring to mind The
Shakespearian actor Ian McKellen commenting on playing Macbeth. The epiphany
came when a fellow actor gave him a small note regarding a famous soliloquy.
When playing, “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” the emphasis should be on
the word “and”, not “tomorrow.” This seemingly incidental direction helped the
great thespian unpack the force of the tale “full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing.” No doubt it would have been a memorable performance without the
insight, but it might only have been “sound and fury.” This is Tar’s fate, to be
merely impressive, rather than sublime.
