Tár — DVD Extras
A deeper dive into 2022’s second-best* monster movie
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”—Stephen King
I do kill ‘em. But I don’t bury them. Like deleted scenes from movies, my darlings live on in these DVD Extras. I like to think of them as my zombie darlings.
BONUS: The film is one of the most discussed of 2022. I offer a short list of items to read, watch, and listen to—you can learn people with far deeper insights into Tár than I can offer.
Beware of ZOMBIE SPOILERS
One of the keys to Lydia Tár is in something she says when chatting with her fan, Whitney Reese (Sydney Lemmon). Talking about Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, she says, “It’s the 11 pistol shots* — a prime number – that strike you as both victim and perpetrator.” Note that she says “and” not “or.” As we soon find out, she definitely is both.
Of all the podcasts in all the internet in all the world, Tár walks into… whose? Alec Baldwin’s. Hmmm. Pistol shot. Victim. Perpetrator. Gevalt!
Cast-member Adam Gopnik’s colleague at The New Yorker, film reviewer, Richard Brody lambasted the film as disjointed, politically regressive, and “utterly unilluminating about the music on which it’s centered.” Because Lydia’s transgressions are never explicitly spelled out and because Lydia is a victim of a deceptively edited viral video, Brody sees the film as an attack on cancel culture.
The movie scoots rapidly by the accusations that she faces; it blurs the details, eliminates the narratives, merely sketches hearings, leaves crucial events offscreen, and offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t)
I see what Brody sees. But I draw different conclusions. Regarding the music, he was looking for a stylish treatment of the orchestra scenes, à la Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1947 film Carnegie Hall (embedded below). But that’s an entirely different film than the one Field made. In Ulmer’s film, a hackneyed plot lifted from The Jazz Singer—mom who likes classics is distressed that her gifted son prefers jazz—serves merely as connective tissue for a film that’s centered on the musical performances. In Tár, the scenes with the orchestra aren’t about the music. The music is a MacGuffin—the term Hitchcock used for something that the characters care about but the audience don’t. Field filmed them as dramatic scenes where the characters just happen to be musicians playing music. Of course, they won’t be filmed like a concert movie. They focus on the emotional and political interactions between conductor, first violin, principle cellist, clarinetist and the new cellist who has caught the conductor’s fancy. And they’re performed by a cast that both acts and plays. Brody might just as well argue that the restaurant scenes in the film don’t find more dramatic ways to portray the food.
Most of what Brody sees as flaws in the film, I see as strengths. Maestro Tár’s exploitative relationships and near-constant lying are not papered over or minimized. Field gives us ample evidence regarding Tar’s attraction to—and exploitation of—younger women. Keeping the details offscreen doesn’t mean that Field is leading us to side with Tár over her accusers.
Indeed, rather than taking Lydia’s side, Field and Blanchett give us a portrait of Lydia so negative that Marin Alsop, a prominent woman conductor—the first one, in fact, that Tár name-checks in the Gopnik interview— was personally offended.
"So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”
The Seattle Film Critics Society recognized the film’s portrayal of Lydia’s flaws by honoring Cate Blanchett with two awards. Not only Best Lead Actress but also Villain of the Year.
A month after Richard Brody’s unfavorable review, The New Yorker published an essay by actor and writer Tavi Gevinson that powerfully refutes his case. She argues that the story isn’t about cancel culture or even about abuse of power per se. It’s about the impact on Tár of living with—and repressing—the knowledge of her actions. Gevinson notes that
… making the forces that threaten Lydia’s stature as muted to the viewer as they are to her turns out to be a highly effective way of conveying the insidiousness of power. Lydia does not have to contend with other people’s humanity—nor offer hers to them. The film immerses viewers in Lydia’s world of extreme control, which is to say, extreme isolation.
Adam Gopnik makes a parallel observation in an essay published in Esquire:
Our culture has a hard time with the simple concept that a human being, and an artist, in particular, admirable in a thousand ways, might also be given to deceitful or less admirable behaviour at the same time. This is, after all, where a grown-up appreciation of the arts begins, not where it ends…
In that article Gopnik reflects on his experience with the filmming, playing a character called “Adam Gopnik” opposite Cate Blanchett playing a character called “Lydia Tár.” He ponders how playing yourself in a movie sheds light on how we play ourselves in life.
“We all do this every day, of course – play ourselves – and only in the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of playing oneself playing oneself, does one become fully aware that that is what we are doing. Like the pretty nurse in “Penny Lane”: although she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway.”
By the way, Adam Gopnik is listed in the credits as playing “himself.” Egon Brandstetter, on the other hand, is listed merely as “Tailor #2.”
On my first viewing of Tár, I was so intrigued by her discussion of the Mahler 5, that I paused the film for two days just to listen to the music. Of course, I assumed that, within the film, the symphony was nothing more than a MacGuffin. Despite knowing that, I found Tár’s remarks about the composer, his 2nd wife, his 5th Symphony, and his 20th Century advocate (Leonard Bernstein) so intriguing, that I chose to spend a couple of days listening to the music before getting back to the film. Call that a tribute to how persuasive Field and Blanchett have made Maestro Tár. Or chalk it up to my ADHD. Either way, I felt I needed to do some homework before getting back to the film.
When I returned to the film and watched it through to the end, I was shocked to find that I had to wait nearly a full hour into the the movie before hearing the first note of Mahler. That delay reminded me of something I once heard Orson Welles say about star entrances. Most of the work of the star entrance is done before the star puts one foot onstage. Everyone else in the cast has already been talking about how imposing they are, building interest and anticipation to the point that when the star finally makes an entrance, the audience is conditioned to respond with awe. (Welles’s quintessential star entrance was as Harry Lime in The Third Man.)
That’s the kind of buildup Todd Field gives Mahler’s 5th. And indeed, it makes a spectacular star entrance—complete with this dramatic angle on Maestro Tár.
More pencils
In my main review of Tár, I promised more about pencils. Here it is.
When Eliot Kaplan presses Lydia for a peek into her performing score, she pushes back, “Trust me. You do not want to go to school on someone else’s red-and-blue pencil.”
Field probably picked up that detail about score-marking from his chief musical advisor, conductor John Mauceri. In his book, Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting, Mauceri explains that the practice of using red and blue pencils to mark up scores originated with Mahler himself. Leonard Bernstein adopted and refined the practice, using red for any annotations that he wanted the orchestra’s librarian to add to the player's parts and blue for his own personal notations to the score to aid him in performance.
Ripped from the headlines
In naming Tár's foundation fundraiser and hobbyist conductor, “Kaplan,” Field was winking at the strange story of businessman Gilbert Kaplan, a wealthy guy so obsessed with Mahler's 2nd Symphony he spent most of his spare time conducting it. With only three years of piano lessons as a kid, no advanced musical training, and no ability to read scores, Kaplan hired musicians to teach him how to conduct that one symphony. It was the only piece he ever conducted. But he did so more than 100 times, all over the world, including with The Vienna Philharmonic, The London Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, and the NY Philharmonic. The proverbial one-trick pony. Here's Kaplan's NYTimes obit. from January of 2016. Oddly enough, the same edition of the paper also carried the obituary of a musical giant, Pierre Boulez who died at 90.)
Tár’s Hebrew Lesson
In the Gopnik interview, Lydia Tár throws in a couple of Hebrew words—kavanah and teshuvah—that she says she learned from Leonard Bernstein. But she gives them in her own specific meanings.
Kavanah traditionally means one's inner intention and purpose in performing an act or saying a prayer. In Western terms, it’s motivation or sincerity—have you put your heart into it? As Lydia uses kavanah, it’s, specifically, the composer’s intent in creating their art and the conductor’s in interpreting it.
Teshuvah literally means turning (or returning), usually in the context of turning away from misdeeds. In Western terms, it’s repentance. But in Tár’s telling, teshuvah means reaching into the past and retconning the intent of a composition. In her example, she says Bernstein transformed the fourth movement of the Mahler 5 from a joyous celebration of love into a lament when he played it at Robert Kennedy’s funeral. She tells Gopnik that she plans a faster tempo to turn it back to love, and wins some appreciative aahhs from the audience.
This is a film that is so dense it rewards repeated viewings. No wonder so much is being written about it. I can warn you that I’m still not finished watching it or writing about it.
For further reading, listening, and watching
Molly Lambert’s short review… and jokes (thread):
“my review of Tár is movies rock”
Interviews with director and cast
Bradley Cooper interviews Cate Blanchett, Todd Field, and Nina Hoss on the film. Cooper is uniquely positioned to conduct this interview, having recently directing himself in Maestro, a biopic about Leonard Bernstein (set for release in Netflix in 2023). He homes in on aspects of the acting and filmmaking that most interviewers would miss.
I was astonished at Cate Blanchett in this interview—her affect, voice, face, and rhythms are nothing like Lydia Tár’s. That woman can act.
Radio interview: Todd Field and Cate Blanchett talk with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. on the meaning and the making of Tár.
"I firmly believe that whoever holds power, it's going to corrupt them. That's just an unfortunate fact; we're part animal, sometimes the animal takes over our better angels.”
Cellist Sophie Kauer on auditioning over Zoom, getting the part of Olga and learning to act by studying YouTube videos by Michael Caine. A NYTimes interview.
“The release of this film is very timely because the Independent Society of Musicians just released a study saying that sexual harassment, bullying and racism is at its all-time worst in the classical music industry, and that people feel like they can’t speak out about it because they’re freelancers. And when they do speak out, they face repercussions and are not rebooked.”
Tár and the Jews
Molly Lambert, on the Twitter thread linked above said, “kinda glad I watched at home cause I laughed so hard every time she said "the Jews!" like Richard Nixon” There’s a surprising amount of Jewish content in the film. For a complete rundown, see this article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
An alternate take on the film’s last act
An essay by Dan Kois in that spots a few more ghostly appearances by Krista than I had caught and who finds enough clues to propose a radical interpretation of the film’s last act
“… I will go to the mat to say that reading the “plot” of Tár literally is a mistake. For long stretches of the film, we have exited the realm of realism and are firmly in the world of the supernatural. Tár is not truly a cancel culture movie. Tár is a kind of ghost story, in which we’re so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár’s psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate.”
**Eleven pistol shots x 206 = 2,266 pistol shots
Five years ago, composer-conductor Quinn Mason went to the trouble of compiling those eleven beats from more than a hundred recordings of The Rite of Spring. The clips are arranged chronologically beginning with a 1929 recording conducted by the Stravinsky.But wait, there’s more... Two year later, Mason uploaded a second compilation of more than 100 additional perfomances, including airchecks of live concerts. He writes that this passage could be called the origin of heavy metal
“Scored for timpani, bass drum and tutti strings doing all downbows, it is some of the most brutal and heaviest music ever written. And it was written in 1913.”
Leopold Stokowski at Carnegie Hall
This is the visual treatment of concert music that Richard Brody prefers to Tár.
* The Best Monster Movie of 2022
Jordan Peele’s NOPE. Savvy script. Terrifying sound design. A genre-fusing hybrid of Horror-Western-SciFi-Showbiz.
Invite your friends to subscribe to Mickeleh’s Take
Such a fascinating deep dive, Michael! I missed so very much! Can’t wait for your next installment.