Cate Blanchett — Arty, Histrionic, and Snobbish — in Tár

Todd Field, the Eyes Wide Shut actor turned director, specializes in movies you never want to see again — In the Bedroom, Little Children — where characters go through ugly high drama redolent of contemporary social anxiety but never so specific as to be fully recognizable. It’s usually just some hammy, broken-family psychosis. So when Cate Blanchett, the phoniest actress since Meryl Steep, teams up with Field in his latest film, Tár, the result is a histrionic wingding.

Tár cannot be taken seriously, yet Field tells his story solemnly. That acute accent over the letter a in the film’s title denotes European sophistication for Blanchett’s character, Lydia Tár, an American-born internationally sought-after classical-music conductor who is also a snobby lesbian (she insults others as “robots”) verging on paranoid schizophrenia.

Field’s conceit ought to be a hoot, chasing the melodramatic hysteria of The Red Shoes, The Turning Point, and, especially, Notes on a Scandal, in which Blanchett’s sparring with Judi Dench amounted to an Oscar marathon of each thespian spinning in her own separate delirium. But Tár isn’t quite in that camp-classic mode, thanks to Field’s quasi-sociological bent. He sketches important issues from gender identity, to institutional sexism, to public character persecution. When a young protégé commits suicide, Lydia is accused of racial prejudice and sexual harassment. “These days, to be accused is the same as being guilty,” Lydia huffs. And Field, who did his research, brings up the forced denazification of the conductor and composer Wilhelm Furtwängler, though Furtwängler had never been a Nazi and had publicly opposed Hitler’s regime. Fields gives short shrift to the Metropolitan Opera’s former director James Levine, though, despite his travails during the recent #MeToo purge.

Is Lydia a psycho or a victim? Field seems torn between endowing her with class advantages and almost vilifying her. She inhabits an NPR world of Millennial privilege — teaching at Juilliard, conducting in Berlin, where she keeps a private abode and lives with violinist-companion Sharon (Nina Hoss) and her school-age daughter. Lydia ruthlessly administers a world-famous orchestra, emulating the high-minded dictates that Anton Walbrook performed with Diaghilev-like aplomb in The Red Shoes.

Blanchett’s characterization goes full bore in two scenes: an ego-feeding interview with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and a music class where she berates a BIPOC student whose PC prejudices (against Johann Sebastian Bach!) are no match for Lydia’s domineering elitism. (She calls him “an epicenic dissident.”) The show-offy sophistication in these monologues is difficult to register given the swashbuckling of Field and Blanchett. The name-dropping, theorizing, lecturing, and verbal pretense (“Read the tea leaves of Mahler’s intentions”) go beyond garrulous and into the realm of self-parody for both the director and the actress. Lydia comes off like an Altman loon who is soon to be exposed.

In a flirtation with a female reporter, Lydia declares, “We’re all capable of murder. Fantastic handbag by the way!” Flamboyance is Blanchett’s worst trait — and Field’s, too. Lydia’s personal life and career, her hair-flinging and arm-waving at the podium, are contrasted with scenes of paranoid social interactions, non-collegial intimidation, neurotic boxing exercises, and jogging through derelict Berlin slums. Field adds gnomic nightmares of eerie neighbors and visions of a bed on fire in a jungle lake, all ripped off from Polanski and Weerasethakul. Then Blanchett competes, making lost-in-musical-rapture faces or angry tirades.

Less would be more had Field and Blanchett concentrated on the work of musicianship rather than distracting elitist conjecture. Tár gets interesting only when Lydia is tempted by a sexy Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer). The woman-to-woman age and gender drama (triangulated by Hoss’s dark-browed–Tuesday Weld caution) seems genuine, if brief. Lydia mocks herself as “a U-Haul lesbian,” then Field ruins it with a blue-collar family revelation. It’s Field’s snobbery and pretense that prevent Tár from achieving a balance of All About Eve and the superb, unappreciated Vox Lux.

Field’s self-conscious artiness comes out in Lydia’s snooty jokes about Visconti interpreting Mahler in Death in Venice, and film composer Jerry Goldsmith channeling Edgar Varèse’s jazz commentary in Planet of the Apes (coincidentally repeating an aperçu from Raymond & Ray). As an American Eccentric director, Field can be schematic like Todd Haynes (Carol) and narcissistic like Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), but he lacks Brady Corbet’s commanding visual panache; instead he imitates Kubrick’s empty spaces. That means Tár’s exposé of modern artistic arrogance is arrogance itself.