And so the day has arrived.he Oscars are happening, and we will have an article covering off the winners up shortly. Until then here is Mhatt again with the final instalment in his most excellent mission to watch this stuff so you don’t have to. This time – The Brutalist.
The Brutalist
Directed by Brady Corbet. Written by: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold. Starring: Adrian Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola and Raffey Cassidy.
A Hungarian architect arrives on the shores of America after World War Two and tries to assimilate into the emerging empire while honouring his past as he strives to build his legacy.
The movie is an amalgamation of several real-life characters, afflictions and events.
László Toth (Brody) arrives in New York City to live with his cousin Attila (Nivola) and his wife, who run a furniture store. Toth shows off his interesting design skills and gets commissioned to remodel the library of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce).
Both men gain status and Van Burn commissions Toth for a church/hall/gymnasium/auditorium, an ambitious project to solidify their reputation in the rapidly mutating reality of post-war America.
Using his new-found favour with the political class, Toth uses these connections to locate his wife Erzsébet (Jones) and their niece Zsófia (Cassidy), who were thought lost during the war.
As Toth’s vision comes closer to realization, he begins to clash with his backers, work crews, colleagues and families as he battles his ego, his demons and the ultimate challenge of finding his home in a culture that takes great pride in what their talent produces but doesn’t love having to deal with those who possess it.
Overall, “The Brutalist” is a frustrating movie because it has all the aspects of a prestige film yet undercuts itself with a vague and clunky message about prejudice.
I’ll start with the good; the title sequences and cinematography were inventive and engaging and helped immerse the viewer in the cold, harsh world of industrial capitalism.
Corbet is a fine director and Brody and Jones do an effective job of portraying their respective characters. The film’s aesthetic is fine if a bit dark and the music and costumes are successfully evocative of an era when poverty and wealth weirdly merged.
The bad: the screenplay, which, while not being bad or poorly written, is polluted with moments that are neither earned nor serve the story and seem only to exist to push an agenda.
To avoid spoilers, I won’t go into detail, but Toth and his family are kind of assholes who view any perceived, yet deserved, slights as prejudice against Jews and/or immigrants.
After being welcomed into the upper classes, they still consider America to be an unfair place. It feels lazy and manipulative for a film that didn’t ever lean into xenophobia except when needed to communicate why a character was struggling emotionally or to justify making dumb and often selfish decisions.
We never see Toth grow as a character despite the steady time jumps which skips ahead to the recent past where he is being celebrated for his contributions the movie spends very little time on.
Despite its three-and-a-half-hour running time, the movie doesn’t really drag because it seems like it is building toward something epic, then just sort of peters out with a half-baked whimper. I had high hopes for this one and was disappointed and feel like it suffered from some high-level periphrastic fuckery.
What You Should Or Shouldn’t Watch For:
Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor – Adrian Brody (nothing special), Best Supporting Actress – Felicity Jones (Shows off legit chops), Best Supporting Actor – Guy Pearce (caricature of an American Industrial yet also the nicest character), Best Editing, Best Music and Best Production Design.
Only recommended viewing for… crap, I honestly don’t know, award awareness I guess, anyone interested in what Pennsylvania was like in the 1950’s or all those people who were begging to see Adrian Brody’s dong; your wait is over.