Ol’ UD will probably see it (on YouTube, months from now), but as she scans its scads of reviews, she’s reminded of the uses of authentic criticism.

Most of the responses have been emptily enthusiastic: godlike acting, provocative ideas, serious art about serious art … Only two reviews have both stirred her and given her a sense of something wrong with the film.

She found Richard Brody’s reaction, on first read, annoying; he presented himself as petulant and peeved throughout, and UD disliked this uncontrolled hostility. In itself it seemed at odds with the sort of ‘medium cool’ tone/content she’s come to expect from sophisticated art criticism — as in, by all means be enraged/contemptuous, but serve the thing cold.

And, coming from the New Yorker, the essay seemed a predictable attack from a culturally liberal position on a conservative film that Brody perceives, above all, as a manipulative, propagandistic, attack on identity politics. (The film amounts to little more than “relentlessly conservative button-pushing.”)

 It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies “as a bipoc pangender person,” and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. 

Yet isn’t anyone – much less a musician – who tells a roomful of people he’s Bach’s moral/artistic superior because he thinks maybe Bach was a big fat dead white fart (he’s not sure) instead of the way-woke person he himself is — isn’t he all too richly deserving of derision? The speaker is a very young student, so maybe the kinder route would have been patient correction or something; but, as described, one imagines oneself cheering Cate Blanchett as she unloads on the student.

Indeed the young actor who portrays the student seems to get it:

… Max really, really understands what Tár is saying. Max really understands Tár, but there’s just these principles and beliefs and things that Max just built up around them as part of their identity, and she just can’t accept it. At some point, it just breaks. It just becomes too much. [The student calls her a fucking bitch and flounces out.]

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The scene, then, isn’t so much derision as an actually rather paradigmatic educational moment, when a person disablingly committed to a narrow position begins to perceive a broader world. Think here of a scene from Tony Judt’s memoir, in which he recalls a professor who

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. That is teaching.

Judt’s professor indeed took the kind and patient route; but the same problem of rigid overconfidence, and the effort to unsettle it, is there in both scenarios.

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Anyway, I eased up on Brody a bit when I read this adorable review, which replaces Brody’s imperious irritability with humor and humility, but which lands more or less in the same place as the New Yorker critic:

[There’s] something inherently perplexing about the [Bach] scene; the feeling that Tár is meant to be a send-up of a world that doesn’t exist. Or of a milieu that’s already so minuscule and marginal that parody feels unnecessary. Are there really so many pansexual BIPOC aspiring composers out there being menaced by ruthless lesbian EGOT winners? What do we get out of imagining it? It’s a hat on a hat.

Hat on a hat. New one on me. Means taking an intrinsically okay point and overdoing until you kill it. Both critics agree, it seems, that the film looks to dramatize an inherently legitimate cultural problem: the flattening/distorting/cheapening effects of replacing self-transcended analysis/social engagement/aesthetic response with petty defensive egotism. (UD‘s favorite take on this is from the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.) Both also agree that scenes like this one implausibly stack the deck. Both critics, above all, agree that this film isn’t real, in the sense that it lacks plausibility; and – Brody goes on to argue – it therefore devolves into a propaganda vehicle.

UD wonders, though, if the real subject of this film is the auteur… rather than the, uh, conducteur. Doesn’t Lydia Tár’s absolute, twisted power to do whatever the hell she wants throughout the film (until her comeuppance) most interestingly stand for the director’s absolute power to successfully propagandize a wide audience through his brilliant amoral artistic freedom? Tár doesn’t get away with it, but apparently Todd Field does.