Marin Alsop drops the baton on Oscar contender 'Tár' | John Moore

(Note: This column contains some spoilers.)

You know it hasn’t been a great year for the movies when the best film of the year is one that no one wants to see. Not even the people it’s about.

And you know it hasn’t been a great year for the movies when the two presumed frontrunners for Best Picture are Steven Spielberg’s most ordinary film (“The Fablemans”) and Martin McDonagh’s latest and laziest display of Irish barbarism – “The Banshees of Inisherin.” (I love my McDonagh, but this slight story isn’t much more than a 10-minute, finger-licking campfire story.)

“Tár,” Todd Field’s first film in 16 years, is the most significant movie about classical music since “Amadeus.” But because it is so hyper-specifically exposes the seedy inner workings of the modern classical musical world, its audience is inherently limited. Then there’s the fact that no one who works in the field likes it. Which is why, after nearly four months, “Tár” has grossed only $7.4 million in worldwide box office. It cost $35 million to make.

And yet, “Tár” has now earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and I have it on good authority that the Best Actress statue already has been engraved with Cate Blanchett’s name. It’s playing at the Sie FilmCenter through Feb. 2.

“Tár” is not an easy film to watch. It’s cold, cruel, hyper-intellectual and meanders into unnecessary dream worlds. But there is a reason they call it Best Picture and not Audience Favorite. “Tár” is a brilliantly original, antagonizing, confrontational film that somehow speaks to the larger world we are all slogging our way through right now better than just about anything else that’s tried.

As symphonies go, “Tár” is a magnum opus. It's easily the Best Picture of 2022 – and it doesn’t stand a chance of winning against the mundane schmaltz of “The Fablemans,” a memoir that retells the early years of an unremarkable family, that, frankly, no one would have thought warranted telling if the family weren’t named Spielberg. 

“Tár” traces the spectacular, Shakespearean downfall of a fictional conductor named Lydia Tár, who is the first female director of the Berlin Philharmonic and widely considered to be one of the greatest living composers. But while the film is as “Insider Baseball” as one can get, it’s not ultimately a film about classical music. Not really. It’s an examination of the corrupting nature of power, both individual and institutional. How one gets it, and how one wields it. 

And yes, it’s about Harvey Weinstein. Only here, Weinstein is a brilliant, megalomaniacal gay woman who is accused of manipulating and abusing multiple young women, even of driving one to suicide. And that’s what has everyone who works in any field where gender bias is a very real problem legitimately up in arms.

Why not make Lydia Tár a man who could recognizably represent a field that has been ruled by patriarchal misogyny for centuries? (Check out the stories behind Bach and Beethoven, the unsavory, carnal bad boys of classical music.) This is a world where, before Marin Alsop in 2007, no woman had ever led a major American orchestra.

Field has said that by deliberately making his all-powerful protagonist anything other than a white, cis, straight, patriarchal male, he’s forcing audiences to look past the headlines and focus instead on the corrupting influence of power itself.

In this film, Tár and her predecessor – a gay man – both gained power by gaming the system, then used it for their personal pleasure. By inferring that Weinstein could be anyone, and that anyone could be Weinstein, Field is attempting to completely undermine the concept of American exceptionalism. Tár is a genius, to be sure, but her greatness is eventually revealed to be an almost entirely constructed myth.

Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about the inner workings of the classical music world. And yet I recognized every note of this story as it played out to its devastating coda. Because there are Társ, and there are Weinsteins, at every level of business everywhere.

After I saw “Tár” last week at the Sie Film Center, I just had to know what the baton-holders at the Colorado Symphony think of the film. Turns out, Principal Conductor Peter Oundjian hasn’t seen it. Neither has Resident Conductor Christopher Dragon. Or so they told me.

Now, this completely befuddled me. There aren’t all that many serious films about journalism, so you can be sure that when one comes out, I am usually among the first in line to see it. When I heard that a major film was being released about two of the journalists who exposed Weinstein, I found a way to see “She Said” three weeks before it was released to the general public. (Thank you, Denver Film Festival.)

Now here comes a major film about the symphony world, and our top two leaders haven’t seen it – even though it’s available for free in their living rooms (on Peacock and Amazon Prime.) Really? “Tár”  is the “Black Swan” of the classical music world. It ain’t pretty – but I’m guessing just about everyone in the ballet world saw it.

I’m speculating here, but maybe if I’m Oundjian or Dragon, and a reporter asks to talk to me about a movie that implies that their profession is rife with abuse, an awfully polite way to get out of it might be to just say that you haven’t seen it.

But you know who has seen it? Alsop, who was first principal conductor and then music director of the Colorado Symphony, where she is still affiliated as Conductor Laureate.

Alsop pulled zero punches about the film in an interview with the Sunday Times of London. She said “Tár” offended her “as a woman … as a conductor … as a lesbian.”

The film hit Alsop close to home, and for good reason, given the parallels between her and the fictional Tár. Both are Leonard Bernstein protegees, both are lesbians, both are married to orchestral musicians with whom they have children and both were, until recently, the only women to lead a major orchestra. Alsop, however, has never been accused of sexual misconduct or abuse of power.

“To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking,” Alsop told the Times. “I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it’s not really about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society. People ask, ‘Can we trust them? Can they function in that role?’ It’s the same questions whether it’s about a CEO or an NBA coach or the head of a police department.

“There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels anti-woman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy or insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.”

In an interview with “The Big Picture” podcast, Field acknowledges that bad behavior has been going on in the arts for an awfully long time, and those abuses have been perpetrated almost exclusively by men. Because of that, he said, “I think it is probably a pretty quick thing to have an opinion about, so it seemed important to me that this character not be a male so that we might have an opportunity to wonder how we are supposed to feel about the same sort of behavior.”

On the flip side, cellist  Yo Yo Ma called “ Tár” both provocative and moving. “Cate Blanchett’s Lydia demands that we wrestle with two of art’s most difficult questions: what gives art its power and what role does power play in art?” he told IndieWire. 

The scene that has everyone (who has seen the film) talking addresses the hypocritical role of social media in holding the powerful accountable. It's set in a class at the The Juilliard School, where a trembling student who identifies as a BIPOC pangender person tells Tár he’s just not into cis white male composers like Bach, who is now known to have been into bullying, sadism and gang warfare. Tár turns the question back on the student by asking whether bad behavior by the composer negates (OK, cancels) the brilliance of his music.

While Lydia is guilty of many atrocities (wait till you see the scene at her daughter's school playground), the thing that ultimately brings her crashing down is a surreptitiously recorded and crudely edited video of Lydia’s exchange with her student that intentionally manipulates the manipulator into looking like (on top of everything else), a blatant bigot. To Field (and many others), we now live in a world where being accused on social media is the same as being guilty. It’s this exasperating, brilliant scene that prompted Dana Stevens of Slate to write: “This Oscars season has its ‘cancel culture’ movie. And it’s thrilling.”

“Tár” won’t go down easy no matter your political leanings. But if art is meant to challenge, to provoke and ask uncomfortable questions, this is by far your best place to squirm. And it has the most spot-on ending you will ever see in a film. Another reason “Tár” is the Best Picture of the year.

Like it or not.