Another year, another slightly febrile Oscars row: this time, substantively about lobbying techniques, and how it can be that a film that hardly anyone’s seen has been nominated for a major award – specifically, Andrea Riseborough’s Best Actress nod for To Leslie. To be honest, I think the question is rather more interesting than the answer – the implication seems to be that, as far as the Academy Awards are concerned, it’s more important that a film is successful than that it’s good. Doesn’t that just undermine the whole notion of rewarding excellence? Then again, the Oscars remain so absurdly compromised (Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun Maverick are up for Best Picture, for crying out loud) that one perhaps should not be surprised.
Of course, the spectre floating around this particular feast is, perhaps inevitably, identity politics, with the suggestion being that Riseborough has somehow robbed a non-caucasian performer of their nomination. Again, it’s the implied assumptions here which are really fascinating. Oh what a circus, oh what a show.
It should all be academic, really, given that one of the nominees this year is Cate Blanchett, for Todd Field’s Tár. For the Oscars to retain any kind of credibility, Blanchett should get this award… but then it’s the Oscars, and you never can tell. (You can make a pretty good case for Tár being the recipient of the Best Picture gong as well, but it’s not as open-and-shut as the acting award.)
Tár is concerned with the character of Lydia Tár (Blanchett), who as the film begins is a world-famous and extremely accomplished and successful conductor, currently of the Berlin Philharmonic. The script takes great pains to point out just how talented and celebrated she is, and the ways in which she has used her success to help others – establishing a foundation to help other aspiring female conductors, for instance. On the other hand, as Tár herself says, an orchestra is not a democracy and she is ruthless in getting her own way, very definitely not suffering fools gladly. From nearly the start of the film there are hints that, for all her dazzling talent, she may not be an exactly wonderful human being – she harshly threatens a young girl who has been bullying her daughter, for example. In another scene, she brutally demolishes a student who says that he’s not interested in the music of straight white male composers, as they don’t speak to him as an individual. He is dismissed as a robot who gets his world-view from Instagram.
Tár returns to Berlin to work on a new recording, but there are the first whisperings of trouble. A troubled young graduate of her conductor’s foundation commits suicide, prompting her to hurriedly delete all her correspondence with the woman. Orchestra politics becomes an issue, in particular the appointment of a new cellist, and a new assistant conductor – in both cases the leading candidates being younger women who seem to have caught Tár’s eye. Strange events begin to plague Tár – objects are inexplicably moved or vanish entirely. The issue of the woman who committed suicide refuses to go away, and begins to gather significance. Forces of our modern culture have been stirred into action, and it may be that there is nothing Tár can do to assuage them…
This is one of the most lauded films of the year, named as the best by dozens of critics – and yet there has also been some commentary on the fact that, for whatever reason, it looks very likely that Tár will end up as a box office disappointment: this is a big, quite lavish film, with sequences set on three continents, and (at the time of writing) it has only recouped $10m of its $35m budget. (An Oscar bounce may help with that, but this film is never going to be considered a hit, I suspect.)
Suggestions as to the reason why usually focus either on the fact that Tár herself is a challenging, often unsympathetic character, and thus not someone that audiences want to watch on screen (this argument is frequently accompanied by commentary on the double-standard involved: people seem quite happy to watch films about morally-compromised men, but vote with their feet to avoid films with ‘difficult’ female protagonists), or the subject matter of the film, which is essentially concerned with cancel culture.
Personally, I think of obscurity as my natural home, given that many of my opinions would likely get me insta-cancelled if some miracle ever brought me to public prominence. And that’s fine. But that doesn’t stop me getting angry about – I was about to say, the excesses of cancel culture, but then if you’re against cancel culture as a concept then you probably feel everything about it is excessive. The question of whether you can distinguish between the artist and their art is an age-old one – cancel culture’s answer seems to be an absolute no, and we should surely have learned to be wary of absolutes by now.
It probably goes without saying that Tár is critical of the notion, though not unconditionally – if anything, the film is about the very fact that the world is a difficult, complicated place, about which it is not possible to make absolute judgements with any credibility. Broadly speaking, the film seems to be somewhat sympathetic to Tár, but at the same time it is very clear that – despite all her talent and achievements – she is still a deeply flawed and probably quite unpleasant human being. Ambiguity is a feature rather than a bug, in this film’s case, and the messiness of its conception is carried throughout it – things apparently happen for no reason, or are never explained, there are non sequiturs, and moments which appear significant but end up going nowhere. It’s only after watching the film that you appreciate the intense thought which has clearly gone into its details.
Field has said the script was written for Blanchett, and the film would not exist if she had not been interested in making it. It’s a tremendous performance, needless to say: cool imperiousness has been Blanchett’s stock-in-trade for decades now, but here she finds new depth and vulnerability as the story proceeds. It turns out that, to some extent, Tár has been lying to the world for years, but has she been lying to herself as well? Blanchett hints at but never declares a definite answer. The rest of the film is essentially a setting for the jewel of Blanchett’s turn, but the supporting cast are uniformly strong – Nina Hoss plays Tár’s long-suffering wife, while there is also the great pleasure of cameo appearances by Julian Glover and Mark Strong (wearing a stupendously ghastly hairpiece).
Whatever your views on cancelling people, you could probably argue that there is a distinct whiff of culture snobbery about the film – if it’s suggesting that what happens to Tár as the film goes on is unjustified, then it follows that the film’s thesis is either that talented and brilliant people in the arts should be held to a lower moral standard when it comes to their behaviour, which is a tough position to defend, or that abuse of power and exploitation of other people for your own gratification isn’t a problem no matter who you are, which is surely an indefensible one. There also seems to me to be something rather mean-spirited about the presentation of what is clearly intended to be Tár’s ultimate humiliation at the very end of the film.
Nevertheless, this is an outstanding and challenging movie that is happy to ask questions without feeling the need to offer definite or easy answers, made with enormous skill and sophistication. Cinema without films like Tár would be an immensely impoverished place – but then cultural impoverishment is, to some extent, what it’s about. The fact the film seems to be struggling is a shame, but also feels weirdly appropriate. Nevertheless: a tremendous film.