What was that all about???? That was the legit response from my wife when the credits for Tár started to roll. I have to start by saying that I can see why so many people love this movie and were captivated by it. I do think this is a movie that keeps your attention and Cate Blanchett (check her out as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator or as Lady Marian in the 2010 Robin Hood), amazing as she always is, but this movie was just a tad too pretentious for me.
How to Download Tár
You can download or stream the film from a digital platform. Click on the Download button at the end of this review.
The Movie Review
The movie is brought to us by Todd Field who wrote and directed the movie. Cate Blanchet plays Lydia Tár one of the greatest classical music composers of her time and the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She seems to be at the top of the world!
She is about to release her memoirs, but what is really driving her at the moment is a special live recording of Mahler’s 5th Symphony that is sure to be the diamond top of her already amazing career. Now, on the outside, she looks like a powerful woman that has it all, but her life is an absolute mess.
Lydia has a mess of a personal life. She has a strained relationship with her wife and she is a full-on bully and manipulative abusive psycho when it comes to the way that she runs things. Eventually, the way that she has treated people over the years catches up with her and her world starts to fall apart, justifiably so in my opinion.
I do not want to go into too many details, but Lydia has a thing for young women, and those who are closest to her and who are basically the glue that keeps her life together want out. This is where things really start to unravel and get crazy and we see just how much of a mess of a person she is.
Now a “descent into madness” kind of movie is probably what I would say Tár is best described as. However, this is one very weird movie, there are parts that are fantastic, especially the performance of Blanchett. It has a very pretentious and artsy-fartsy kind of thing going on that can be a real turn-off for some people.
It also has some very weird scenes that I think were supposed to show her losing her grip on reality. However, I felt like this part of the movie came off as just flat-out weird and like there could have been some supernatural element going on. Granted, I may just be a moron and missed the point, but at the end of the day, that was the way the movie made me feel.
Then we have the ending. Ok, no spoilers here, but what the heck was the ending all about? I legit cannot say anything because it would be a massive spoiler, but the ending the more I think about it, the more I just do not get what they were going for. How they got the approval to do this just blows my mind.
I am sure there will be many people out there that say Tár is a 10/10 movie and in some ways, I can see why it could click for some people. For me, this was kind of hard to sit through and while I loved Cate Blanchett, the story was just too “artsy” for me to really get into. I might give this a watch again when it comes to streaming to see if I enjoy it more the second time around.
