The Brutalist
The Brutalist, directed by 36 year old Brady Corbet is a LONG movie. It is 210 minutes of screen time and with 15 minutes of previews and a 15 minute intermission, you are looking at 4 hours or the equivalent of a full 18 holes of golf. It makes Scorese’s Killer of the Flower Moon a “short.” I often lament the congenital cases of Attention Deficit Disorder plaguing American society, but I do sympathise with those who shy away from committing their personal time to these very lengthy productions. My instinct is to wonder if the unwieldy final cinematic product is just a lack of directorial discipline or whether the editors simply got lost in traffic. The length of the movie here is a negative for me- it not only IS long, it feels long as you experience it in the theatre. However, if you do choose to watch The Brutalist, I do recommend you see it on the big screen. It will lose visual impact on the small screen, but will feel just as long.
The film is arresting from a cinematography angle. The film was shot in Vista Vision, a widescreen format that was used in Hollywood for big time epic productions through the 1960’s. Think Spartacus and Ben Hur! The Brutalist is extremely ambitious, openly aspiring to be a monumental and great movie. It is not humble or self effacing. So kudos to Mr Corbet for thinking big and bringing an arthouse type creativity to an old fashioned blockbuster. He only had a 10 million budget, but the end result, production wise, is first rate. He supposedly employed Artificial Intelligence tools to buttress some scenes and images, but identifying when and how he did that is beyond my pay grade.
Now, to the movie itself. Amalia, my trusty movie watching companion, aggressively disliked the move from beginning to end. She found the primary characters dark and disturbing and the screenplay narrative disjointed and uneven. My views are more complicated. As noted above, I love the ambition of the Director in choosing to tell this story. From a big picture perspective, there is a compelling tale to be told. Additionally, the lead actor is Adrian Brody, previous Academy Award winner for Best Actor in The Pianist and he does a capable and nuanced portrayal of a complex character here. Well done! Guy Pearce also has fine moments as a wealthy and privileged American who interacts and partners with the Brody character in a myriad of ways. There are things to admire here, BUT I left the theatre with a hollow feeling- definitely disappointed. It was not an emotionally satisfying cinematic experience. The tone is “cold” and if you are a “Rom Com” aficiando, The Brutalist is not for you.
A quick synopsis of the story for context. Mr Brody’s character is Lazlo Toth, an intense and tightly wound survivor of the Buchenwald death camp. Prior to WWII, he had been a hot Bauhaus architect in Budapest. He was married but had been separated from his wife during the war. He successfully emigrates to the United States and we see the Statute of Liberty from very unusual perspectives on his arrival. The narrative takes some rapid leaps as he attempts to adjust to America. He visits a brothel and watches some porn films. He lives with his cousin, an assimilated Jew who is now married to a blonde Catholic American woman. The cousin gives Toth a job and allows him to bunk in the office storeroom. There are odd and uncomfortable interactions with the wife which leads to Lazlo departing the scene and moving to a boarding house. There are awkward newsreels of Pennsylvania which are periodically flashed on the screen. Artsy, but it doesn’t work. Toth and the cousin are hired to redesign the study of Harrison Van Buren, a rich industrialist with an enormous home in the country. After a disastrous first encounter, Mr Van Buren (played by Mr Pearce) discovers Mr Toth’s prewar reputation as a brilliant architect and impetuously hires him to design and build a multipurpose community center (with chapel, gym, librarian theatre) on vacant property adjacent to his mansion. The balance of the movie is driven by that partnership.
Mr Van Buren give Mr Toth carte blanche to execute his Bauhaus and Brutalist vision. He also has the family lawyer track down Toth’s wife and niece in Europe and pulls strings to get them admitted into the United States. Complications arise which delay and derail the project. Financial concerns, disagreements with the contractors and architects, Mr Van Buren’s interfering and callow son lead to Mr Toth being discharged and working in an office as drafting assistant. But insurance money flows in and the project is resurrected. Corbet introduces tons of issues- white privilege, anti semitism, zionism, marital challenges, the wife’s disability, WASP pathologies and finally sexual abuse. As I said, he was certainly ambitious in his vision.
Corbet is a newcomer to big time moviemaking- essentially an unknown. He had two prior movies to his credit, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, neither which I had seen or even heard of. Many critics love this movie and it has done well on the Awards circuit and is nominated for major Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. Ultimately, I believe the movie is over-rated in these august cinema circles. Toth is complicated- a talented and driven architect with a heroin addiction and relationship issues. The Van Burens are strange and the old line WASP contingent that used to run the country need a new marketing team. Rich white guys with shallow sons don’t present well in most Hollywood blockbusters. Toth’s wife is played by Felicity Jones. Her Austro- Hungarian accent is dreadful and she never generates the empathy you would think would come naturally to a concentration camp survivor. The "silent” and damaged niece marries a Zionist and heads off to Israel to save Jewry, but disappears from the movie until an odd closing scene. The finale has no obvious relationship with what we have witnessed for for the first 200 minutes of the movie. The multiple story lines do not mesh with each other. There is no theme unless we accept this is another version of a tough emigre story. There is a brutal sex scene which is gratuitous and one of the participants rides off into the sunset with no explanation.
If you, like me, sometimes watch a movie on Friday evening with a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino- be warned you will need a Magnum. The movie is exhausting. Good luck at the Oscars.
