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I have to tell you, I had such a wonderful time with this one.

Those are the words I started my review of The Fabelmans with. Tár on the other hand was more of a struggle. Both movies are up for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year but while each is clearly the work of a genius writer/director and neither compromises in its vision, Tár is a much harder watch. This of course does not mark it out for criticism if it is the film makers intention but personally, I’m not sure it always is.

Much has quite rightly been said about Cate Blanchett in the lead. I have read several reviews that have proclaimed it as unequivocally her best ever performance but I’m not sure this true. She is superb; there is no doubt about that. As fictional conductor, composer and EGOT winner Lydia Tár, she holds your attention with a vice-like yet subtle intensity and with no need for grandstanding. We’ve seen this from Blanchett before though in films like Carol, Blue Jasmine, Notes on a Scandal and Babel. The chatter around this is also stealing some of the attention from the rest of the cast. Sophie Kauer has got some good press for her turn as the new cellist who joins the orchestra but mostly because up until now she has been a cellist and not an actor. She is good but so are Portrait of a Woman On Fire’s Noémie Merlant as Lydia’s personal assistant and Nina Hoss as her wife. This obfuscation is not director Todd Field’s fault of course and Blanchett’s portrayal of a woman who is not a nice person, apparently corrupted by power and success, but still able to always keep you with her on her journey, is very much down to him too. I’m not sure that for me all of his other creative decisions landed as well though.

The film is certainly too long for a start. There are parts that set the scene and gain significance later but almost the whole of the first hour could be cut with little impact. Field goes to pains to explain who Tár is and what she does but he could have done this with greater narrative efficiency. The film opens with writer and essayist Adam Copnick, as himself, presenting Tár on stage but this goes on way longer than any introduction of this type ever would and ambles right into being convenient exposition. Tár herself is guilty of indulgent monologues at a few points in these early stages too.

The movie picks up when things start breaking down for the protagonist. The depiction of artistic obsession as she prepares for the concert that will be the pinnacle of her celebrated career is compelling and this competes for screen time against a plot thread around a Weinsteinesque scandal that is brewing against her, in a way that I think works. The first of these elements is reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and like in that (better) film, reality soon starts to mix with fantasy for the troubled performer. Where the story closes feels like it jars with the rest of the movie though and might even be a little clumsy in the way it uses events as narrative shorthand to wrap things up. In fact this denouement best works if you do read it as all being in Tár’s imagination, where she is envisioning her worst nightmare rather than actually living it, but I’m not sure the film earns this ambiguity.

There a few time leaps in the story that Field could have done more to embed as well. I am all for unconventional film making and bold and confident choices (this is why I want Everything Everywhere All At Once to actually be the one to win the Oscar) but I don’t think this movie quite has the hold on this that it needed. There is no denying that there is brilliance here but I don’t think Tár is as good as it could have been. It should have been virtuoso but it’s more like second violin; working hard but not quite leading the pack.

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The Ripley Factor

Women are the ones in control in this film, for good and for bad, and it also has a clear MeToo theme with someone losing their power and status because of their alleged abuse of young females. I do wonder if this whole element was needed at all, but I can see that having a woman as the perpetrator here is highlighting an area of this that is not getting the same recognition as crimes committed by men. Statically it is less of an issue but it is no less of an issue for the victims.

I do worry that in doing this the film plays into the evil lesbian trope a little bit, but in the end you have women standing in solidarity with women and fighting against abuse which can only inspire others in any comparable situation.