BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
WHEN CATE BLANCHETT WAS AROUND 5, she wrote a miniessay—saved for years by her mother and unearthed serendipitously during a recent move—envisioning her possible future as an adult: “When I grow up, I would like to be a man. I would still love my family. But I could light a fire and go to work. And when I’m bored being a man, I think I’ll just be me.”
Blanchett tells this story over tea in Los Angeles, amused by the kid logic behind it. Yet all those half-fanciful, half-practical dreams have come true for her, at least figuratively. She has played a man—more than one, in fact—in movies like Julian Rosefeldt’s dazzling 2015 Manifesto and (as the puckish troubadour Bob Dylan) in Todd Haynes’ 2007 I’m Not There. Though she seems to take on projects without a lull, in conversation it’s evident that even when traveling—she lives with her family in England—her thoughts stay close to home. A teenage son who’s looking at universities, a husband, Andrew Upton, with whom she runs the production company Dirty Films: family is her inner orbit, maybe even the sturdy gravitational pull that makes her work possible. And if you think she can’t light a fire—well, just look at her.
For her role in Todd Field’s Tár as a top-class composer and conductor who negotiates the world on her own terms, Blanchett has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress (her seventh nomination, and if she wins, her third Oscar). Blanchett’s Lydia Tár isn’t for you if you believe fictional characters, particularly women, ought to be role models. She’s gay, but that doesn’t make her nice. She achieves her overscale ambitions, but not without running roughshod over the women around her. Still, she’s magnificent.
Blanchett, 53, is drawn to multishaded characters who don’t court our approval—an all-time favorite is Ibsen’s compulsive manipulator Hedda Gabler, whom she’s played onstage—but Lydia Tár, in all her self-destructive glory and compelling unlikability, is like no one else we’ve ever seen onscreen. “We’re all imperfect creatures. And sometimes we don’t want to look at the unthinking, unintentional, inexplicable, ambiguous sides of being female,” Blanchett says. “We are brave, we are noble, we are generous, we are collaborative. But we are also the dark side of that, because women are complex beings.” You can’t hide from the truth of yourself, and that’s the very human side of Lydia Tár: “We know more about her than she knows about herself.�
