When director Todd Field sat down and wrote his film “Tár,” there was only one option to play the title character. As he described to IndieWire in an interview, the film wouldn’t have been made if Cate Blanchett hadn’t agreed to take the part of lauded conductor Lydia Tár. “I had no backup plan,” he told IndieWire.
“I’d met Cate 10 years ago and I knew coming out of that meeting that I had just been in conversation with somebody that had one of the great brains I ever met. And it was someone that I was really, really desperate to be able to collaborate with.” It might seem silly to hinge your entire film on the participation of a single actor; the Australian Blanchett doesn’t share any notable biographical details with the fictional American conductor that makes her casting meaningful in a meta sense.
Once you see her extraordinary performance , you understand exactly why Field felt that only Blanchett could play his character. The actress is one of a very small number of performers in her generation who has the ability to feel as titanic as the character study makes her, fully inhabiting all of the pomp and falsities that go into the construction of Lydia Tár’s public image. At the same time, Blanchett can drop all of that gloss and bring a raw edge to the role, one that the #MeToo drama desperately needs for its downfall narrative to work.
That might be the key to what makes her such a brilliant actor: She’s familiar and likable, but with the m.