The reviews for TAR coming out of Venice are kind spectacular. Without getting ahead of ourselves here, I think we’re looking at across the board nominations for this – Best Director, Best Actress, Best Picture at the very least.
Here is Owen Gleiberman:
But “Tár,” the first film he has made in 16 years, takes Todd Field to a new level. The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power. It’s set in the contemporary classical-music world, and if that sounds a bit high-toned (it is, in a good way), the movie leads us through that world in a manner that’s so rigorously precise and authentic and detailed that it generates the immersion of a thriller. The characters in “Tár” feel as real as life. (They’re acted to richly drawn perfection down to the smallest role.) You believe, at every moment, in the reality you’re seeing, and it’s extraordinary how that raises the stakes.
Blanchett, in a performance that’s destined to make her a major presence in this year’s awards season, plays Lydia Tár, one of the most celebrated conductors of her time. The film opens with an enigmatic shot of a text-message exchange, which will gradually pierce us as its meaning comes to light. It then goes into an extended sequence where Lydia is interviewed onstage by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker (playing himself), which allows us to discover who she is and to revel in the caginess of her cultivated stardom. Lydia, we learn, has been the conductor of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic (among other prestige posts), and for seven years she has led the Berlin Philharmonic. Her mentor was Leonard Bernstein, who pioneered the role of the American conductor as larger-than-life figure, and Lydia, like Lenny, possesses powers of articulation that rival her musical skills.
And here is Todd McCarthy for Variety:
At the very outset, some viewers might suspect that they’re being shown the film in the wrong order; in a possible first, the opening credits devote themselves to a lengthy scroll of all the tech personnel and international entities involved in the production. You have to stick around until the scroll’s very end to behold the names of the top-line participants. But this proves indicative of the film as a whole, which gets off to a rather overdrawn start but eventually clicks into high gear and stays there.
Indiewire’s David Ehlrich:
Todd Field’s thrilling, deceptively austere third film exalts in grabbing the electrified fence of digital-age discourse with both hands and daring us to hold onto it for 158 minutes in the hopes that we might ultimately start to feel like we’re shocking ourselves.
“TÁR” is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them. That sounds like a tough needle to thread for a film so micro-targeted that it opens with a long, long scene of its subject onstage for an expository conversation with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who needs no introduction.
Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson:
TÁR ultimately has no pity for Lydia’s trajectory, but it does perhaps quietly mourn for the art—bemoan the corruption of something good at the hands of ego and entitlement. Field’s film is enormous, contemplating the end of idolism in all its loss and revolution. TÁRbracingly responds to the dawning of a new era, and reintroduces the world to a filmmaker who seems only better for having taken some time, a very long time indeed, to listen and to learn.
AwardsDaily will be seeing this film in Telluride and we can’t wait.