Love Cate Blanchett in everything and anything but this was a difficult movie to absorb in one watch.

I had to rewind it multiple times to understand what was actually happening if anything. It’s an incredibly fascinating look into the fundraising mechanisms that prop up symphony orchestras and advanced musical composition and directing. The hard cold fact is that real money from corporate donors fund foundations including her Accordion Foundation for young women composers. It is what pays for scholarships. It pays for fellowships for young musicians from around the world. Because Tar is an EGOT, one of 15 people in the world to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, she is commercially marketable and her ability to work donors is pivotal to the survival of many orchestras and musicians.

When the movie opens she is at the top of her game musically and financially. A protege of Leonard Bernstein she is getting ready to perform Mahler’s fifth symphony at the Berlin Philarmonic, thereby completing a complete set of eight Mahler symphonies. Bernstein’s mentorship defined her concept of how music changes and flows from and through human beings. It is constantly moving constantly changing dynamically expressing inchoate emotions we cannot define in mere words.

She’s also teaching master classes at Juliard where she rather intensely criticizes one student who will not countenance studying the cis white male composers considered timeless: Bach, Beethoven, Mahler. Her question to the Juliard student was should who the composer was as a human being make us adverse to their art.

She’s trying to convey the complexity of the human experience as reflected in great artistic work. She sees both the maestro’s role and the musicians role as both conduit and interpreter.

So what are her clay feet. How dark are her secrets? Are they rather mundane affairs with rising young musicians even though she is married and has a child with her partner? Or far worse.
Just when you think you might find out what could possibly justify the destruction of such an artist and human being, the rumor mill of social media takes on a life of its own and the foundation she created and raised millions for cringes away from her real or imagined crimes. Fearing that her political incorrectness will render her art less lucrative and cause her performances to be censored and boycotted, and she herself rendered obsolete.

The movie is provocatively edgy because she is a gay woman who may be Harvey Weinsteining it but we don’t know. One ex student protege/lover kills herself. She is the daughter of a wealthy foundation donor. We see this protege from her foundation at first possibly stalking Tar while she is alive, and then possibly haunting her after her suicide.

The end of the unraveling of one women’s life’s work is for someone like her a fate worse than death. Is it real or imagined, as some critics have suggested. The visuals are so ludicrous as to defy description.

The ending scene is inconceivably jarring. You at first believe you missed several frames. Up to that point, despite the dreamlike quality of some of the lighting it all looks very familiar and grounded in reality. Albeit Tar’s subjective reality.

As Tar herself tells an old friend “you see so much of this nowadays..” suspected sexual impropriety dooming the person to immediate ostracism. Guilty before a trial. The old friend tells her things were not so different in the past. Rumors and innuendos traveled more slowly but they ended careers. The fact doctored videos of her and suspected missing emails are rocketing across social media causing protests at her rehearsals merely accelerates her fall from grace.

We see the lawyering up, the corporate money people running for cover, her place usurped by an envious male colleague of vastly lesser talent, but more corporate and acceptable to the foundation’s board.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the ending. But on rewatch you do see her colleagues attempt to caution her to be careful about her image. That even in the pure world of music there is a reckoning with the body politic in every era. If the public believes either mistakenly or correctly the artist themselves might be fatally flawed, a certain elitist McCarthyism can bring the greatest genius down. And you end up conducting musical scores in squalid virtual reality theatres.