Portrait of the Artist as a Megalomaniac

Tar a film by Todd Field.  With Cate Blanchett, Noemie Merlat, Nina Hoss.  In theaters and available for an arm and a leg on Prime Video.  Well worth the money. *****

Tar begins brilliantly, with its protagonist Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) calming herself for a performance, fidgeting, doing special breathing and relaxation exercises, readying herself in general.  As it turns out, she isn’t going into a concert hall, but onto a performance stage, where she is being interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who plays himself (what a thrill that must have been).  This gives him an opportunity to introduce her as an incredibly accomplished conductor, composer, writer, performer, God knows what else; she is one of only four people to have won the four major entertainment awards (I think they’re the Academy Award, Emmy, Grammy, and Golden Globe).  We’re two minutes into the movie and know what a colossus we’re dealing with.

We also see how arrogant she is.  She answers Gopnik’s questions rapidly and brilliantly, with a mind that moves like wildfire, even manages to be occasionally funny and entertaining, but she seems to have such contempt for the process, for the questioner, for the whole situation (oh why do I, of all people, have to go through this?) that we’re simultaneously impressed and put off by her.  She is a name dropper par excellence (Lenny appears frequently in her conversational asides).  She is multi-talented, important and powerful person, and she knows it.

She is soon joined by her assistant and fellow composer (probably former student) Francesca (Noemie Merlat), who manages to be obsequious and helpful while giving off a vibe that she absolutely cannot stand this woman.  Giver her a dagger and we know whose back it’s going into.  We soon see a scene where Tar is being interviewed by yet another woman reporter, and she obviously flirts with the woman, in a way that doesn’t seem appropriate.  She seems unable to stop herself.  How Cate Blanchett, who has been so sympathetic in other film roles, manages to pull this off I do not know.  But she personifies superiority and arrogance.  She not only doesn’t suffer fools gladly; she doesn’t suffer anyone.  Period.

We soon see her teaching a class at Julliard, to a bunch of students who, if not at her level, might be similarly talented, and aspire to be who she is.  As someone who retired fairly recently from the academic world, I cringed at the (pardon the expression) balls she had in taking on her students.  One young man self-describes as BIPOC and pan-gender, and explains that he is therefore not interested in Bach, and she basically says to him, Don’t be such a fucking idiot.  Get over yourself.  She even reached over and pushed down his pulsating leg.  She touched a student!  That might have been typical behavior from the old days, when I was a student (who never went to Julliard, I hasten to add), but it doesn’t fly these days.  We can see that the hammer is about to fall.

One columnist (my wife mentioned this to me) said that this is the first mature movie about cancel culture, and though cancel culture figures in eventually, I wouldn’t call it that.  I saw it as a portrait of the artist as a deeply flawed human being, one still in touch with the deep place inside her that inspired all her ambition (we see her in rehearsal with an orchestra, and she’s extremely exacting in getting it to sound exactly the way she wants) but is unable to relate to human beings at all.

She has a wife named Sharon (Nina Hoss), who is actually the first violinist in the orchestra, and therefore perhaps worthy of her; they seem to get along reasonably well, at least for a while (they both depend on self-medicating in a way that seems telling).  The two of them share a daughter, though we’re not sure how this progeny came about.  If one of them gave birth to her, I feel sure it wasn’t Lydia.  (At one point, in fact, she is speaking to one of her daughter’s playmates, telling her to stop bullying, and she describes herself as the girl’s “father”).  This little girl is the one human being she seems to care for unconditionally, but we might notice that the child is in no way a threat to her.  She’s not going to take her place as a conductor.  At least not yet.

This movie poses the question: can a woman of huge talent and power and influence be as much of an asshole as any man, and answers it with a resounding yes.  My wife thought the movie was brilliantly written and directed, but she didn’t fundamentally believe in the reality of the protagonist.  She didn’t think a woman, especially one who was still connected to her creative core, could be so cold and cruel.  She’s worked with many powerful women, and has never seen one like this.  I’ve never run into such a person either, but I also haven’t traveled in such heady precincts.  I don’t know what life is like at the very top.  Having seen this movie, I’m glad I don’t.

She is eventually brought down by her arrogance, and it is the young people around her who do it, using cancel culture unfairly (someone took a video of that Julliard class, and distorted the hell out of it).  They didn’t actually need to be unfair.  The evidence that existed (I haven’t mentioned another subplot, about a student and prodigy who fell by the wayside, committing suicide) was plenty to bring Lydia down.

Her fall is rapid and astonishing and deeply humiliating.  On the way there, we see her stop by the family home where she grew up, and look at the videos that once inspired her, and led her into that world that she had succeeded in.  I admit that the woman was an arrogant turd, but I also felt sorry for her.  She was totally dedicated to her art, but neglected human beings, and that brought her down.  She deserved what she got.  But my God, what a fall.