This review essay discusses plot points throughout Tár and responds to reviews that do the same, so if you wish to watch without being spoiled please stop reading now.
Todd Field’s Tár is less a movie about “cancel culture,” as some critics have suggested, than it is a movie obsessed with power dynamics.
In the film’s opening moments—a montage of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) being fitted for a suit before taking part in a discussion on the nature of conducting with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik—Field establishes her expertise. She not only explains to the layman like myself how composers operate and what they bring to the table (it’s not just keeping time, but it’s not not that either), she does so in classically appointed tire. She sounds the part; she looks the part;...
