Review of TÁR (2022) by Pmoney666 — 09 Dec 2022

Tar: Whiplash 2.

If you are a musician you will find this movie hilarious. Imagine there is a conductor somehow SO great, as if it worked that way, that he/she starts their career conducting the five biggest Orchestra's in the United States IN A ROW and then settles as the principal conductor for Berlin. That's Tar. Looking into the directors/writer's background, he did Jazz band in high school/college and felt that he could competently write a script on the classical music world. I'm not a movie person, but I like to think I can follow a story and themes pretty well and even that aspect of the movie felt shallow. Maybe the lighting or shot composition is interesting to someone, I don't know, but I don't think non-artists should be brow-beated by name drops (DUDAMEL, BERNSTEIN, ELGAR etc.) and jargon. That doesn't convey actual knowledge on a subject and is a cheap way to earn points with a low-knowledge audience. It's so bad that the plot doesn't begin until the first fourty minutes of the movie are over, until that point it's just pretentious name dropping.

Someone else stated also mentioned the aspect of queer-baiting, which is very true of this movie. We have real life incidents of MALE conductor's being sex pest, even recently, but instead they make a movie about a sex pest who is actually the world's greatest lesbian. Why was it even necessary? There's a Julliard student in one of the scenes explaining that they don't listen to Bach because he was a straight white male, as if that person could possibly exist in Julliard, with the most heavy-handed and stupid dialogue.