Script Analysis: “Tár” — Part 3: Characters

A week-long analysis of the screenplay for the award-winning drama. Download. Read. Discuss.

Reading scripts. Absolutely critical to learn the craft of screenwriting. The focus of this bi-weekly series is a deep structural and thematic analysis of each script we read. Our daily schedule:

Monday: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown
Tuesday: Plot
Wednesday: Characters
Thursday: Themes
Friday: Dialogue
Saturday: Takeaways

Today: Characters.

Characters are the players in our stories. They participate in scenes, move the plot forward through action and dialogue, influence each other, evolve and change. Each has their own distinct backstory, personality, world view, and voice. When a writer does their best, digging deep into their characters, tapping into their souls, the players in our stories magically lift up off the printed page and come to life in a reader’s imagination.

But there’s this: In a screenplay, characters exist for a reason. Hence my principle: Character = Function. Writers can shade and shape a story’s character in limitless ways. But if you dig down deep enough, you can find each character’s narrative function, and that can become a lens through which you develop the players in your stories.

Same thing with script and movie analysis: Look at each character and think about why they exist and what their function is.

Today, we discuss the characters in the script for Tár (2022). You may download the script here.

A list of the key players:

Lydia

Francesca

Sharon

Petra

Olga

Eliot Kaplan

Andris

Knut

Britta

Cory Berg

Max

Written by Todd Field

Plot summary: Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director of a major German orchestra.

Major kudos to Karen Liu for doing this week’s scene-by-scene breakdown. Many thanks, Karen!

To download a PDF of the breakdown, go here.

For Part 1, to read the Scene-By-Scene Breakdown discussion, go here.

For Part 2, to read the Plot discussion, go here.

To access over 100 analyses of previous movie scripts we have read and discussed at Go Into The Story, go here.