In this experiment, we paused a movie roughly midway through and reviewed it just from that perspective. (It was so bad that we were confident it wouldn't get better, or good enough to earn a recommendation.) Here is that first review. We have now watched the rest of the movie and review it further, to see if anything has changed.
TAR (C) - So we made it to the end and bumped the grade up half a notch. It's still a failed spectacle.
We paused at an interesting moment, around the 95-minute mark (with still another hour-plus to go), because "Tar" is certainly a very different film in its last hour. (And it needn't have spent a full hour and a half creaking along with a weak set-up.) As chickens start to come home to roost for the rapacious Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett), director Todd Field turns this into a low-rent horror film, with her grotesque gothic Berlin apartment building standing in for the Dakota Building in "Rosemary's Baby."
Whereas in the first half, Tar had insomnia, the final hour is full of her waking from disturbing dreams. She loses her grip on reality at times, including a bizarre sequence where she wanders into the basement of a dilapidated apartment complex and runs off frightened, leading to a nasty fall. (This essay, which includes a lot of spoilers, goes even further and makes the case that maybe most of the final hour takes place in Tar's head. I wouldn't go that far, but the author makes some good points.)
In the spirit of Part 1 of this review, let us pause to relate some more annoyances, in bullet form:
- Tar is often called "maestra" to her face, as if this were a bad episode of "Seinfeld."
- It seems like we get the same shot of a sleepless Tar, in bed with eyes open, nearly a half-dozen times.
- Would it surprise you to learn that this pampered diva comes from humble roots? Ben Affleck and Matt Damon would have a lighter touch than Field shows with his clunky reveal.
- Like a bad episode of "The Good Wife," a lawsuit apparently gets filed (unclear if Tar is a defendant) and a deposition gets immediately scheduled, which never happens so quickly in the real world.
Richard Brody, my nemesis from the New Yorker (we don't agree on movies very often), nails a lot of the problems with "Tar," which he deems a regressive film, considering it mocking, sneering and derisive. In his review, he notes how director Field tries to have it both ways -- the famed conductor is accused of misdeeds, but Field presents the film from her point of view and keeps the details so vague that we will be tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt. We agree that the film is "utterly unilluminating" about her work as a conductor and composer. He chastises Field for daring to equate -- or, at the very least, hint at an equivalence between -- the so-called cancellation of Tar with the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II. (This involves a bizarre and unnecessary conversation she has with yet another old white man.)
Brody concludes: "The careful ambiguities of 'Tar' offer a sort of plausible deniability to its relentlessly conservative button-pushing, and its aesthetic is no less regressive, conservative, and narrow."
In the final hour of the film, we finally get some action (thus the bump in grade), but too much of the plot development feels rushed, especially coming after an hour and a half of plodding table-setting. Field continues to offer excuses for his misbehaving star, including letting her fabricate a physical attack in order to engender sympathy for this predator.
In our 2022 year-end review, we lamented the over-indulgence of mid-career auteurs, and this is a prime example of a pampered filmmakers given every opportunity to just run rampant with flabby storytelling. It does, though, have a pretty good ending.
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