Split Decision: 'Tar,' Part 1

 In this experiment, we are pausing a movie roughly midway through so that we can review it just from that perspective. (It's so bad that we are confident it won't get better, or good enough to earn a recommendation.) We will then watch the rest of the movie and review it further, to see if anything has changed.

TAR (C-minus) - How can a movie annoy thee? Let me count the ways. "Tar" is the award-hungry mature art film that is such a spotlight for Cate Blanchett that you truly ache for her every time her tightly wound conductor twitches and tics or belts out pinpoint-perfect diatribe after diatribe. Oh, the Hollywood trope of the tortured artist. R.I.P., Kirk Douglas.

This film, by the occasional would-be auteur Todd Field ("In the Bedroom," "Little Children"), is perpetually maddening right out of the gate, when we are expected to (maybe?) be able to read a blurry text on a shaky cell phone. I took notes on the parade of irritations:

• The film starts out with an extended string of credits (in small type), minutes long, like you'd see at the end of a modern film. 
• The opening scene is about 8 minutes of a long interview with Lydia Tar (Blanchett) by real New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik that goes on and on, basically a way to recite her biography for the viewer and to tell us immediately that she is so full of herself that it's leaking out of her pores. We see her assistant in the wings doing that thing where a person mouths along to what is being said onstage because she wrote it.
• Her assistant -- who apparently is a well-regarded conductor in her own right but acts like a lowly servant -- is played at full mope by poor misused Noemie Merlant ("Portrait of a Lady on Fire," a movie that knows how to treat an artist).
• At the 17-minute mark I noted "nothing has happened so far."
• Then there's another interview with Tar.
• She is constantly name-dropping (because she is hyper-intellectual, vain and apparently insecure, you see), names like Max Bruch. (Who? Yeah, I turned it into a sober drinking game. Every time Tar mentioned a name I hooted out "Who?") Tar, of course, pronounces Bruch's name absolutely perfectly -- because she's perfect -- just like she pronounces Bach as "Bahhh," swallowing the C.
  
• At the 25-minute mark I noted "nothing has happened so far." There is no hint of a plot for at least the full hour.
• Did I mention that this thing is going to run 2 hours and 37 minutes? Strap in.
• So far, there has also been virtually no music (this is a movie about a conductor, mind you), except from some foreign-language vocals over those tedious credits). Wait, a few bars of something trickle in briefly at the 32-minute mark.
  
• "Marin Alsop."Who?! (NOT a fan of the movie, either.)
  
• No one talks the way Lydia Tar does. She comes across as someone speed-reading a script, which is actually what Blanchett is doing. She never hesitates or stammers or comes up with anything other than le mot juste.
  
• In fact, Tar, at least three times, criticizes another person as being "robotic." Ah, but you see, that might be a light case of projection ... because, in fact ... she's the robot!! Screenwriting 101, my friends.
  
• One full hour in, we finally see her actually being a conductor. At least we see Blanchett mimicking the moves of a conductor based on her exhaustive research into even the tiniest of flourishes of a real conductor.
• But there is very little conducting done in the movie, especially when compared with the amount of time she spends at lunches with old men.
  
• There are several languages spoken casually here (but of course, our brilliant heroine is polylingual), but all of a sudden, during an exchange in German, there are no subtitles anymore. Oh, well, I guess most of us won't know what was just said. Must not be crucial to the plot -- or whatever plot we assume will eventually pop up.
• There is a lot of mumbling and whispering and speed-talking, making some of the dialogue unintelligible. We rewound and rewatched one line three times and could barely make a word of it. We went back one more times and engaged the subtitles. The assistant, being comforted by Tar, is sniffling (and whispering) about a lost love, and a million guesses would have never cracked the code. The assistant says, "I can't stop thinking about our trip up the Ucayali." Who? Where?! (Bzzt! It's a river in Peru.)
• 70 minutes in, the plot begins. It has something to do with Tar -- an apparent womanizing lesbian -- having had been mean to a former student, driving the poor woman (we never see her face, of course) to desperation. Meantime, she seems to be grooming a new cellist, right under the nose of Tar's partner who sits a few chairs over with the violins.
• This is also one of those movies where characters -- even super-geniuses -- think they can just empty out their Sent email folder and no one will ever discover the nastygrams they fired off to destroy that former student's career. (I bet someone will find them! We'll just have to wait and see.)
  

So, Lydia Tar is a tightly wound genius who flashes a fairly dark mean streak occasionally, though she comes off as more autistic than diabolical. She dresses down an overly sensitive student of color in the class she teaches for refusing to dig Bach because the composer was a personally repulsive old white guy. Take that, Gen Z! Tar also goes onto the playground of her daughter's school to confront the daughter's bully. What a stone-cold meanie!

This emotionally retarded elitist in fitted suits is unpleasant to be around.  Blanchett is trying way too hard here. (No one else is really worth mentioning , because the star sucks the oxygen out of every scene she's in.) I wouldn't have stuck around nearly as long as I did with the film if (a) my partner wasn't somehow enjoying the movie, despite my exasperated critical hysterics throughout (talk about annoying), or (b) I hadn't come up with this little gimmick of having a go at the first half of a bad film before watching the rest of it. It made what would have been a Life Is Short plug pull somewhat bearable.

This supposedly has a decent ending. Stay tuned for Part 2.