QADR: “Tar”
Tar is boring. So boring. Like, so boring, you might think you are watching the wrong movie. But there are moments of brilliance trapped inside this dull slog that I’m still thinking about days later. AND when I found out another angle to the film (see my other article on that), it made me appreciate what the movie was trying to do even more.
The movie is fascinating on some levels, and Cate Blanchett’s performance is one for the ages. Unfortunately, what we get is a long, hard-to-watch slog that seems to go on and on forever. Just that first scene, where Tar is being interviewed by NPR, is a test on how long can you have one scene go on without turning it off. Moments of brilliance are interspersed with awkwardness that seems to go nowhere.
The other long scene is fun for being a single take as Tar is talking to (and berating) a group of students. It’s a great statement on the perils of cancel culture, and a timely message, but it’s buried in an awkward, overlong film. Lydia Tar is a study in artistic arrogance, assuming she is shielded from her past bad choices. But time waits for no one and she has to deal with the consequences of a litany of bad decisions. And, like I said, you’ll be thinking about this one a few days later. 6 out of 10, maybe a 7 or 8 if they cut it down an hour.
From Slate, Don Kois runs us through the theory:
“The final act of Tár is, I think, so heightened and weird that it basically doesn’t make sense if you try to read it literally. But perhaps because the movie’s cultural questions are so fun to wrestle with, or because Field’s attention to sociological realism in the rest of the film is so acute, many viewers are determined to do so.
But when I finally watched Tár, it was the movie’s spookiness, and the uncertainty that spookiness casts over the film, that stuck with me. I think Todd Field is doing something entirely different from what almost every writer so far has thought he was doing. Field “moves smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror,” A.O. Scott wrote in a typically insightful review that still takes much of Tár’s “comeuppance” and the movie’s “ragged, wandering, superfluous denouement” at face value. Let’s explore the gothic horror of Tár.”
Read the whole story HERE - it’s a great read with lots of good images and GIFs.
