The Brutalist: A Review - American Dreams and Nightmares

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.  A dramatically uneven, cinematically stellar, ambitious movie about ambition that is not a great film but a film that wants to be great.

The Brutalist, written and directed by Brady Corbet, stars Adrien Brody as Laszlo Toth, a talented Jewish Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America to start a new life.

The film, which has garnered 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, is favored to dominate this year’s Oscars.

I have many thoughts on the philosophy and ideology expressed in The Brutalist, but will save that discussion for a second, more in-depth “analysis and commentary” article I will publish at a later date. For now, I will simply review the film.

The Brutalist is a film so cinematically ambitious as to be audacious. It is a film that asks a lot of big questions, and tackles a lot of big issues, and does so all on a miniscule $9 million budget, and a monumental three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute run time.

The film is exquisitely photographed using VistaVision, and has been released in both 35 mm and 70 mm. I watched it, twice, on a SAG screener in my house and was astonished at the cinematography by Lol Crawley – who is, in my mind, the undeniable star of the film.

Crawley’s camera movement, lighting and most of all his framing, are sublime. This is a small budget, arthouse film that looks and feels expansively epic, in both scope and scale, thanks to Crawley’s work.

The film is designed to question America and the American dream, and to give voice to not just the immigrant experience but the Jewish immigrant experience in particular. It deftly uses stock footage, newsreels and radio reports to set the stage and strengthen the not-so-subtle sub-text.

Writer/director/producer Brady Corbet has also spoken about the film being a metaphor for the filmmaking experience itself…which is plain to see. Filmmakers are, at least in some cases, artists who must navigate a cold and cruel capitalist system just to be able to make their art. Filmmakers aren’t painters who can buy a canvas and some paint and go to work. No, filmmakers need money to make their movie and therefore must get into bed with those that have it (in some cases…literally).

The same is true for architects like Laszlo Toth. An architect must have a benefactor…someone who has the desire to make a great building, the means to do so, but not the artistic vision and expertise to bring it to life.

The Brutalist as metaphor for the filmmaker’s plight is certainly insightful, if not a bit self-aggrandizing, and considering the film’s politics (which will be discussed in length in my second article) egregiously hypocritical.

Regardless of that, there can be no doubt that Brady Corbet had a big idea and was able to translate it onto the big screen. Kudos to him.

Not so good for him is that the film, which boasts a first half as good as any seen this year, stumbles badly in its heavy-handed second half. The film, which again, runs for three and a half hours, actually has an intermission…and it is after the intermission when it loses its grip on its narrative and its storytelling.

The biggest problem with The Brutalist is that it tries to do so much that it ends up doing not quite enough of anything.

For example, it is an immigrant story, an American capitalism story, a Jewish story, a Holocaust story, a love story, a sex story, an artist’s story and a drug addict’s story. The drug addict angle in particular is superfluous to the point of frivolous, as is the sex story, which does nothing to enhance the narrative but only confuse it.

A major problem for the film is the character of Erzsebet Toth, Laszlo’s wife who follows him to America. Erzsebet is played by the woefully miscast Felicity Jones, an actress I usually like quite a bit. Erzsebet’s arrival on the scene signals the end of the film’s tight grip on its drama, and the beginning of a rudderless wandering into the wasteland of dramatic doldrums.

The character of Erzsebet would have been better served never being seen, but rather as a sort of dream from Lazslo’s past never to be regained.

The rest of the cast are hit and miss.

Adrien Brody, who is nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his work as Laszlo – a fictional character by the way, is good in the film. He has a lot to do and he definitely does it. I didn’t think his performance was transcendent, but I thought he did an admirable job. Considering the last-time I saw Brody act was when I recently watched the series Peaky Blinders, where he played an Italian gangster from New York in the 1920s…and it was one of the worst, most embarrassingly awful pieces of acting I’ve ever witnessed, and now he is probably going to win his second Best Actor Oscar, speaks to how insane Hollywood can be.

Guy Pearce is very good as Harrison Van Buren, the rich American who becomes enamored with Laszlo’s talent and hires him to build his dream project. Pearce really sinks his teeth into the role and never relinquishes his steely grip, devouring every scene he inhabits.

Other performances, like that of Alessandro Nivola as Laszlo’s friend Attila, and Joe Alwyn as Harry Van Buren Jr, seem to disappear the moment they wander onto screen. They are so weightless as to be non-existent.

There’s one final performance that is worth mentioning…and that is of Raffey Cassidy as Zsofia, Laszlo’s niece. What struck me about Cassidy’s performance is that she looks remarkably like Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter. So much so that I literally was wondering if Daniel Radcliffe was playing Zsofia in drag in some sort of arthouse tomfoolery – amusingly I wrestled with this question for quite a while as I watched. What is even weirder is that Raffey Cassidy, in real life and even as Zsofia, is a truly beautiful woman…which left me very, very confused. The bottom line though is that Raffey Cassidy is NOT Daniel Radcliffe, and Daniel Radcliffe is NOT Zsofia. Mystery solved.

The Brutalist intentionally calls to mind other ambitious films that, ironically enough, are about ambition, like Godfather II and There Will Be Blood. Unfortunately, The Brutalist shrinks exponentially in comparison to such cinematic greatness as Godfather II and There Will Be Blood.

The Brutalist’s biggest flaw, besides its over-abundant narrative, is that it gets so heavy-handed with its not-so-subtle symbolism in the second half of the film that it loses a great deal of its credibility, coherence and artistic good will.

The bottom line is that I am glad The Brutalist exists, and I’m glad Brady Corbet is so ambitious as to make it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a great film.

I do not think The Brutalist is a great film, but I do believe it wants to be great, and is a great attempt to make a great film, and that makes it much more worthwhile than 99% of the garbage made nowadays.

If The Brutalist wins Best Picture at the Oscars I won’t be dismayed, even though I don’t think it’s the Best Picture I’ve seen this year. I will celebrate its win because hopefully it will allow for other filmmakers to take equally big swings when they get their turn at bat.

Brady Corbet took a big swing with The Brutalist and he flied out to right field just short of the warning track. No shame in that. Maybe the next guy, or maybe Brady Corbet the next time he gets up, will hit it out of the park, or off the wall, or into the gap for a double. Hell, at this point in cinema history I’d take a bloop single, a walk, or a hit by pitch over the strikes out that keep piling up.

Make no mistake…The Brutalist is infinitely better, and more worthwhile than recent Best Picture winners Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the god-awful CODA.

As for recommending this movie…I do recommend people give it a shot and watch it with an open mind. It will be, simply said, a bridge too far for most normal people. It’s expansive run time, challenging themes and numerous dramatic narratives, will be too much for normies to digest, especially since the film is not a cinematic classic like Godfather II or There Will Be Blood.

But just because I think most people won’t love it, or even like it, doesn’t mean I think people shouldn’t give it a shot. I didn’t love the film, but I admire its ambition, and I watched it twice.

So, if you have three and a half hours and want to wallow in lukewarm arthouse waters contained in a gloriously crafted, artisan bathtub, then give The Brutalist your attention. At the very least it will trigger discussions about both its quality and its philosophy/ideology…which are decidedly meaty topics for debate…and in my eyes a movie that triggers debate is definitely a movie worth watching.

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