This review originally ran Sept. 1, 2022, for the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere.
If for nothing else, Todd Field’s “Tár” – a razor-sharp, post-post-MeToo character study that premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival – should be heralded for offering a neat corollary to Chekhov’s Gun, a theatrical theory that states that if you introduce a gun in Act 1, you’d better fire it by Act 3.
Call this version Gopnik’s Speech. Because no film could open, as “Tár” does, with such a long and portentous introduction to the main character (She’s at the top of her game! She’s on a nickname basis with Leonard Bernstein! She’s a bloody EGOT!), delivered by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik playing himself, without clearly signaling its intent: for the two-and-a-half hours that follow, our poor protagonist will have nowhere to go but down.