On 'Tár' and Its Reception

Before the release of his latest film, Todd Field appeared to have become a marginal figure in Hollywood. Having won critical acclaim for his dark family dramas In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2005), the auteur subsequently set his sights on ‘material that was probably very tough to get made’, as he put it: an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a political thriller co-written with Joan Didion, a series adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. None of these projects was completed, and a fifteen-year-long hiatus ensued. Yet Field has now assured his lasting notoriety with Tár: the story of a star classical music conductor – Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – who is working on a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic until she is felled by a spectacular MeToo scandal. Accused of sexually abusing younger female musicians, and ultimately driving one of them to suicide, she is subjected to the crowd justice of social media, ousted from her position and exiled to an anonymous East Asian megacity.