Dancing about architecture

Some thoughts on Todd Field's Tár

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” goes the old unattributed maxim, to which I would add that making films about conductors is like singing about calculus: not impossible, but no promenade in the park. The original quip was meant as a dig against music criticism, and I’m not sure I agree with its substance. Examples of prose that illuminate music are in ample supply: the fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Richard Powers, criticism by Amanda Petrusich and Alex Ross, not to mention musicology-laced confessions by the pianist Jeremy Denk, all come to mind. On the page, music is described but not heard; there is ample room for a reader to imagine and complete a sonic landscape. But the naturalism of (mainstream) cinema, coupled with the ineffable physical, intellectual, and psychological art of conducting, makes for a difficult marriage, and sets a skyscrapingly high bar for verisimilitude.

Which brings us to Todd Field’s much discussed 2022 psychodrama, Tár, which left me bored, bemused, and angry. The world is obviously not lacking for critical responses to the film; I’m writing mine to try to understand why this tepid entertainment pissed me off.

Field set himself a freakishly difficult task: to demonstrate to the viewer his protagonist’s creative genius, against which her failures as a person might create dramatic tension. But Field has no point of view about music, and therefore neither has his character. And while many have argued that the movie is best understood as a character study and/or a meditation on abuse of power, the flimsiness of the film’s engagement with the art itself—classical music, the craft of conducting, Mahler’s 5th Symphony—causes those readings to collapse. In the absence of a sound foundation, there’s no possibility for a dynamic relationship between art, power, character, and psychology.

To synopsize briefly: Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, doing the best she can with spoiled goods) is a Big Deal. She’s a conductor, a composer, an ethnomusicologist. She’s an EGOT! She promotes the work of young female composers and has a foundation that supports promising musicians! And now, she’s preparing to make a live recording of Mahler’s 5th Symphony—awkwardly referred to as “The Five,” one of many tells that Field lacks fluency in classical music patois—with the Berlin Philharmonic, for whom she serves as artistic director, and whose concertmaster, Sharon, is her wife. The two have a daughter named Petra, whose cipher-like presence in the film seems designed to show the viewer that the otherwise monstrous Lydia is capable of tenderness. Oh, and there’s some kind of anxiety-related prescription med dependency.

Tension is meant to arrive through a trail of bad behavior/abuse-of-power crumbs. A former fellow of Tár’s foundation commits suicide. Did Lydia abuse her? We see her scroll through and delete emails in which she’s instructed industry figures not to advance the young woman’s career. But wait! Lydia refers to the woman as having been “troubled!” Perhaps those emails were sent in good faith, rather than as the vengeful retribution of a jilted lover? It’s something of a Rorschach test. The closest thing we get to a smoking gun is a scene in which Lydia threatens a bullying schoolmate of Petra’s. “If you tell a grown-up that I said any of this, they won’t believe you.”

Then there’s the Hot Young Cellist™ who wins a seat with the Berlin Phil. Lydia ventures into ethical grey area with her, too, the details of which aren’t worth rehearsing. The point is that Field seems to want to maintain plausible deniability on Tár’s behalf, to complicate her eventual downfall when a deceptively edited video of a Juilliard master class turns up on social media, which, in conjunction with the investigation into the deceased pupil, proves a bridge too far for Tár’s various institutional supporters, and she loses everything. The back half of the film toggles between these events and Tár’s descent into madness, expressed through a variety of mental illness clichés (screaming voices, a ticking metronome, hallucinations). In the final scene, Tár, somewhere in Southeast Asia, conducts what turns out to be a video game orchestral concert; the final shot pans to the audience, cosplaying animated characters. It’s hard not to view that last gesture as a joke, and if it’s a joke, it’s tremendously condescending.

Cate Blanchett as the titular maestro in Todd Field’s Tár - ©2022 Focus Features

So what went wrong? For one thing, there is very little “showing,” and a whole lot of “telling.” When we observe Tár lead a rehearsal, she offers corrections and adjustments that seem plausible enough, but we never witness the shorthand of a great artist at work, in which, say, we hear the same passage twice, before and after the intervention of a great conductor for whom a few words or a slice of the left hand is enough to transform a phrase. Field can’t give her the language to do this because he’s not a musician, let alone a great one. And Blanchett can’t do this physically because, for all of her gifts as an actor, she’s not a conductor. We cannot feel Tár’s genius; we can only be told that she is one.

Thus, in place of the substance of Tár’s artistry, we get—in a wearying expositional scene made tolerable only by the charm of Adam Gopnik affably and credibly playing himself—a laundry list of incredible accomplishments. (And here I use that last adjective intending its most literal meaning; the notion that a single conductor would have music director posts with each of the big five orchestras—Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York—is pure fantasy; it’s never happened, and likely never will.)

One could fill a substantial volume with the technical inaccuracies that litter the 158-minute film. But these blemishes might be forgiven were they not symptomatic of a deeper flaw: without fluency in the language of classical music and the social and professional worlds that its artists inhabit, Field’s writing weighs down his actors. We see them laboring, as if in an unfamiliar second language, to make the text feel organic and lived in.

At the same time, Field renders the turn in our culture toward a certain brand of identity politics as a stick-figure drawing. In an early and much discussed scene, Tár gives a master class at Juilliard, during which she upbraids a student named Max for his dismissal of the Western canon. "Honestly, as a BIPOC, pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously,” he says, sounding like the stuff one reads on Twitter, sure, but unlike anything I’ve ever heard someone say aloud, i.e., when not trying to please the algorithm. (Max, like so many characters in the film, is pure schema, standing in clumsily for an idea with which Field aims to slug us over the head.) Tár strides to the piano and offers color commentary as she tosses off the first prelude from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Klavier:

[arpeggiated chord] “...it’s a question!” 
[arpeggiated chord] “...and then an answer!” 
[arpeggiated chord] “...and another question!” 
[arpeggiated chord] “...and another answer!” 

I’m pretty sure this musical analysis could have been achieved by a bright third-grader, but no matter! Lydia goes on to rebut Max’s identity-based rejection of Bach’s oeuvre by asking if Max would like others to reduce him to his identity, at which point he calls her a “fucking bitch” and storms out of the room.

But if Tár is a proponent of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” theory, what, then, do we make of her assertion, during her conversation with Adam Gopnik at the faux New Yorker Festival, that in order to understand Mahler’s 5th Symphony, one must mine the composer’s marriage to Alma? Woof. Are we to glean that Lydia is a hypocrite, content to consider the life of the composer only when it suits her predetermined conclusions? Or is Field playing some kind of three-dimensional chess, setting up Max and Lydia as two sides of the same coin? Maybe? But I don’t think grokking Mahler’s marriage leads to a deeper reading of the “Adagietto” any more than knowing that Bach sired twenty kids demystifies or disqualifies his musical output.

All of this might be excusable were Field in possession of something new to say about our moment, i.e., The Era of Power Being Held (Sometimes) To Account. But by leaning into ambiguity regarding the nature or existence of Tar’s transgressions, Field betrays a misunderstanding of where the ethical murk actually lies. Where are the blurred lines of consent? Where is our window into Lydia’s lack of self-awareness around the power differential between herself and her students or orchestral colleagues? What is the correct and proportionate punishment for an alleged abuse of this nature? Do we, as a society, believe in forgiveness? How do we square the emerging culture of restorative justice with a seemingly contradictory culture of vindictive retribution? And what do we do with the (tainted) art?

So bemused was I by the film that I sought out interviews Field had given in order to better understand what he’d hoped to achieve. (Not a good sign!) In various outlets, he articulated his desire to explore the mechanics of power, and the pyramid of power atop which figures like Tár sit. But if that’s the case, we get vanishingly little insight. There’s a brief scene in which Lydia’s team discusses a strategy in response to a NY Post article about the young woman who committed suicide, but nothing approaching the institutional looking-the-other-way that’s occurred in real life with, say, recent scandals at Juilliard, or with the Metropolitan Opera and James Levine.

Speaking of Levine: here was a figure who was both an unquestionable musical titan and a serial sexual predator. To my mind, it is much more interesting to examine the ethical lapses of the institutions that protected him for so many years, and to wrestle with the question of how to engage his artistic legacy given the trauma he caused to so many young men, than it is to engineer a deliberately ambiguous tale, such as Tár, in which the viewer is left to wonder whether abuse has actually occurred. (My answer, when it comes to Levine, is pretty simple: if you can separate the abuser from the art, then by all means, continue to engage the art. And if you can’t, don’t.)

Even after reading several interviews, I still couldn’t grasp why Field had made the film. But here’s a theory. One of the film’s supporting characters is Eliot Kaplan, based loosely on the real-life businessman and amateur conductor Gilbert Kaplan, whose obsession with Mahler’s 2nd Symphony led him to perform the work more than 100 times with more than fifty orchestras. (He also recorded the work twice.) For all of his dedication to the piece, he is said to have been a lousy conductor who had to rely on the orchestra to keep performances from falling off the rails.

In an early scene, the fictional Kaplan hounds Lydia to let him examine her score for Mahler’s Third Symphony; she demurs, suggesting that he come up with his own ideas. Tár is a film chockablock with often contradictory classical music clichés, the stuff of late-night conservatory dorm room chitchat, or the cocktail party repertoire of an Upper East Side dilettante. In this sense, the character of Kaplan feels like a cipher for Field himself: a passionate fan without anything to say.

The single moment in the film that felt truly alive to me occurs in a late scene that finds the disgraced Lydia returning to her childhood home on Staten Island. Riffling through a closet, she finds an old VHS tape of one of Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” with the New York Philharmonic. On a small grainy television, we see the fabled maestro at work: when Bernstein conducts, and when he speaks, we are at last in the presence of a real artist, painting the world, effortlessly, with sound.