The film lauded mostly for Cate Blanchett’s commanding performance is something of a critique of our banal, identity-ridden cancel culture. It seems no one can be truly great in a world that fears and despises greatness.
One of this year’s Oscar darlings, Tár, also turns out to be the only major movie since #metoo to mount an attack on cancel culture. This is paradoxical, of course, as we see from the three nominations—Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Original Screenplay—received by the artist behind the movie, Todd Field. His success is in one sense a surprise, since he hasn’t directed a movie in 16 years. In another sense, it’s par for the course. His two other movies, In The Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006), were also Oscar darlings, complex psychological studies of liberal society that received eight nominations in total, three for Field himself.
The movie’s star, the lovely Cate Blanchett, has also received her eighth Oscar nomination, which might lead to her third Oscar, for a similarly paradoxical performance. She plays Lydia Tár, a trendy, elite lesbian, the most celebrated conductor in America, perhaps the world—but of working-class origins and entirely reactionary views about music, artistic greatness, and culture. Her story is almost a tragedy, a fall from greatness, and reveals the contradiction at the core of the liberal elite in our times: a claim to superiority over the uneducated and an endless cultivation of envy and resentment that requires prestigious victims to satisfy an abstract egalitarianism.
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