It's not until an hour into "Tár" that we see the title character — a classical conductor known the world over as Lydia Tár and played by an unimprovable Cate Blanchett — do what she was born to do. It's an astonishing performance nestled inside another: In one shot, Lydia towers like a colossus over the podium and the camera, her arms spread wide as if she were embracing or perhaps possessing the world.
Classical music buffs, who will have a particular field day with this movie, will also have sharper observations than mine on the merits of Blanchett's baton technique. But this actor doesn't even need to lift a baton, or approach a podium, to make us feel we're in the presence of a singularly gifted musical body and mind.
A lesser movie — and one of the weird pleasures of "Tár" is that you can't stop imagining the lesser movie it so easily might have been — would have introduced Lydia in full-blown maestro mode, so as to convince us of her genius at the outset.
