TELLURIDE, Colo. — When Cate Blanchett took the stage Saturday evening for her Telluride Film Festival tribute, right after a screening of her astonishing new movie, "Tar," the audience must have enjoyed a bit of a chuckle. Most audiences that get a post-screening Q&A with Blanchett — and there will probably be a few in the months to come — will find themselves in a similar position. In "Tar," Blanchett plays a world-renowned classical conductor named Lydia Tar, and one of her first scenes is a long, riveting and revealing conversation with the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself), held in front of a live audience.
It's an instantly captivating sequence, fearless in its musical and intellectual rigor, that hard-wires us into the workings of Lydia's formidable mind. We drink in her black-suited elegance and sense her initial guardedness, though any anxiety soon melts way as Lydia, as assured a speaker as she is a conductor, begins holding forth about her art, her love for Mahler and Bernstein, and her experiences studying, playing and conducting music all over the world. Her synapses fire like mad and her hands spring to inventive life as she describes her role in not just keeping but creating time, molding and sculpting it with a level of imagination that the audience will detect only as a sublime piece of music.
"Tar," the third and finest feature directed by Todd Field ("In the Bedroom," "Little Children"), keeps its own time beautifully. The movie runs a mesmerizing two hours and 38 minutes; I didn't want it to end. It's the story of a magnificent monster and her very public downfall, but what makes that downfall so persuasive is that it happens so gradually, and springs forth from some such quietly intimate roots. The story proceeds in carefully orchestrated movements, as it were, and each one of those movements draws us a little deeper into Lydia's highly influential and rigidly hierarchical corner of the music world.
