Brutalist has been receiving rave reviews since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. That praise is by no means undeserved, especially as Adrien Brody gives a flawless performance as a brilliant Hungarian architect—a genius artist—struggling to make his mark on the American landscape in the years after World War II.
Perhaps even more important is the revelation that 36-year-old director Brady Corbet is the kind of filmmaker most adored, author. (Put it this way: Who’s more famous, Philip Johnson or Quentin Tarantino?)
Corbet’s 3 hour 35 minute epic, which comes with an intermission, is a challenging, daringly ambitious look at 20th century history and clearly built on a foundation that has nothing to do with franchises or superheroes. The film is its own rare, complete thing, spacious and raw. Don’t expect Brutalist II or a prequel, Monsieur Belle Epoque.
However, it is Brutalist a masterpiece, as it is almost routinely described? Is it on par with Martin Scorsese’s 3 hours and 26 minutes (and no intermission) The Flower Moon Killers? No, not really. In fact, you can call Jesse Eisenberg compact, modest Real pain a masterpiece, although in size his film and Corbet’s are as different as a castle and a tool shed.
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But the interior should also be examined. Real pain is a surprisingly and expansively dark, buddy comedy that reveals itself to be about the American-Jewish legacy of the Holocaust—a theme that is integral to Brutalist also.
To Corbet’s credit, his castle is imposing – intimidating – as you approach it. To cross the moat and enter its vast chambers, overshadowed by the seriousness of purpose, is to experience a kind of awe, or at least the deepest respect for him who built and owns this stronghold.
But eventually you get lost on the way inside, as the dark rooms and corridors multiply. You might even start thinking about finding an exit sign. Which, as you know, is a futile endeavor in the castle.
But enough of this analogy. Brutalist’The first half, in any case, is flawless. Absolutely flawless.
László Tóth (Brody), an excellent Hungarian architect trained in the uncompromising aesthetics of the German Bauhaus movement and now devoted to an even more forbidden school that would become known as Brutalism, escapes from a death camp (he is Jewish) and arrives in America, where he is welcomed by his cousin Attila ( Alessandro Nivola), and a furniture manufacturer who owns a store in Philadelphia.
Attila, who has the smiling joker of a salesman without much talent, encourages László to design and oversee a quick, easy commission. He will install a reading room/library in the mansion of a wealthy businessman, Harrison Lee Van Buren.
The results, beautifully austere, sunlit but somehow cold, infuriate Van Buren, played with manly swagger by Guy Pearce, who sounds like his idea of a Breakfast Champion was a ground-glass bowl drenched in whole milk.
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Van Buren is not interested in László’s commanding appearance of intellectual supremacy and authority – until the article in Look the magazine flatters him as a millionaire with a taste for modernity. Now he embraces László, telling him to build a huge concrete community center that will incongruously house both a gym and a church. What, no petting zoo?
This opening section is delivered with great, brisk energy and a clearly defined story that races with the ease of a car on a freshly paved road (an image of confident American dynamism that recurs throughout the film).
But Brody, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama this year, is truly remarkable. His performance may outshine his work Pianist. His face has both a tragic, suffering sensitivity and an exalted artistic inspiration. It looks like his mother insisted he play Franz Liszt’s heroically difficult piano sonatas from the age of 2. (Actually, with a long wig, he might resemble Liszt.) As he did in pianist, he manages to represent an entire era.
In the film’s most moving scenes, you are tempted to cry with him – possibly for him – while tearfully discussing the principles of architecture and his passion for them.
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Brody with Felicity Jones.
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However, after the break, the story becomes more complicated and confusing with the arrival of László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a furiously insightful woman who can no longer walk due to war injuries, and his niece Zsófie (Raffey Cassidy), who is practically silenced by the trauma of her experiences.
Both are intriguing, novelistic characters, full of fine detail and offering subtle, intelligent observations, but they distract from the central drama of László’s endless frustrations with his massive construction project and Van Buren, who is both anti-Semitic and sadistic.
If László had written the script, these women would have been considered decoration, decoration and probably removed. Instead, their presence directs the narrative into something more melodramatic and conventional, with heated showdowns and a climax of moral retribution worthy of Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge.
if anything, Brutalist should be more like Herman Melville’s mighty group of Captain Ahab, Sailor Ishmail and Moby-Dick. Come to think of it, László’s model is very reminiscent of a great white whale that accidentally swallowed a church.
Instead, the film ends with a beautiful epilogue (this film has it all, including a short “overture”!) that reveals the fascinating private meanings that László built into his design for Van Buren. But this looks more like a footnote than a real codex. Why couldn’t the information fit into the frame of the film? Not that the script couldn’t take an extra scene or two. Or six. or 16
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In the end, in any case, the film lost the sense that in László we met a supreme artist whose work — and whose willpower — would transcend the cruelty and persecution of both war-torn Europe and the United States in their imperial prime. Or, conversely, a true artist who will be unfairly crushed by these forces.
The film includes a quote from Goethe — “No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” — suggesting that director Corbet wants a big, defining statement about the blind spots of republicanism, capitalism, and many others —come out. But that statement never really crystallizes.
Meanwhile, the connection between man and his vision, so richly present in Brody’s performance, is threatened, damaged, perhaps lost. Imagine There will be blood without oil, Oppenheimer without a bomb, or even Tar without Mahler.
You leave, rather, feeling it Brutalist is an allegory about a brilliant director’s battle to complete his visionary epic without Hollywood interfering and spoiling the whole thing with its money-grabbing mitts. That puts Brutalist in a league with the extravagant Francis Ford Coppola Megalopolis.
Where is all this leading us? With the thought that Corbet is indeed a significant new talent and that we can expect something truly mega from him in the future.
Brutalist it’s in select theaters now.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education