The Brutalist has, in the last few weeks, become the film to see from 2024. This is not only because it's an Oscar movie, but because it's one that's actually supposed to be good. It's also over three and a half hours long, which means it at least thinks it's up to something important.
It is a cacophonous film, featuring overlapping dialogue and voiceovers, diegetic needledrops that cross edits and a nondiegetic score that builds to staggering foghorns. It has multiple aspect ratios, slow-motion footage, time-lapse footage, montages, documentary reels, dizzying camera angles, disorienting close-up oners, and, obviously, grand reveals of monumental structures.
The film has two main parts, titled "Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival" and "Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty," with an "overture" and an epilogue. Part 1 expresses a whiggishness, mainly about America but also about the rest of the world. It feels pleasantly old-fashioned, as long as you don't find it offensive. Part 2 is the obligatory complication and messiness. But the turnabout is not complete: early on, László says his buildings are designed to endure the temporary frenzies people get into. Part 2's final sequence shows us people in disarray, and next to one of László's buildings, they look tiny, ridiculous. The edifice is beyond monumental, it's condescending. The American Dream is defunct, gutted by WASPism; but a deeper dream, embodied in László's architecture, lives on.
There you have your "Best Picture." Most critics liked this, and were happy it was shot in VistaVision. Armond White and Richard Brody predictably, did not. The showy techniques achieve their intended effects, the settings are beautiful, the actors are persuasive, and the epilogue gives you a few cues to question what you just saw in case it seemed overly sure of itself--but not too many, in case you liked what you saw. I watched it impassively, feeling like I had Farber's "Postwar Films" device on my head.
I am not attacking the film. It's a good film in the following sense: if we lived in a dystopian world where all cinema had been blasted out of existence, and I found out I could watch The Brutalist, I'd be pretty happy about that. If it was Jurassic World, I wouldn't even go see it. But I find there isn't much I want to say about it that doesn't sound a little mean.
There were two scenes I especially liked. First, there is a scene when László and his rich patron van Buren travel to Italy to obtain marble for László's masterpiece. László introduces van Buren to Orazio, his anarchist friend who fought Mussolini's forces from the inside of a marble quarry. Orazio picks out a stone for them and pours water on it. Van Buren is struck by its beauty. We see a shot with him examining the marble up close, feeling it with his hands and face. The marble takes up half the screen and the background is hazy white, as if the world contained nothing but van Buren and the stone. I can respect what the filmmakers were trying to do with some of the more ostentatious scenes, but I did not have a strong reaction to them. But this was the one scene where I got the sense that the filmmakers had found something out in the world that transfixed them, and they incorporated it into the film to try to share that feeling with the audience.
After this, there is a scene where László is driving home with his wife Erzsébet. They have an argument, disillusioned with their experience of America as immigrants. During this, we see a shot of the road. This is a shot we have seen before in the film: this road, between Philadelphia and van Buren's house, the camera in forward motion, as if it were fixed to the front of their car. Before, we see it during daylight, and it feels bold, optimistic, like we're moving into the future. In this scene though, at night, I only hoped László was watching the road. It was a good twist on a visual motif.
The ironic elements of the film are a little extreme for the goals the director has claimed in interviews. Brady Corbet apparently feels the ending is ambiguous, but insists that there really is some deep personal and artistic concern at stake in László's project. László is also a sympathetic character, someone who has suffered profoundly and not really done anything wrong. It's a little much, then, for him to be named "László Toth," after a delusional perfectionist art vandal.
The film took years to make, and Corbet insists that he fought--successfully--for the final product to be just what he wanted, with no interference from his patrons. This is good, though using this opportunity for a film that so obviously resembles other attempts at the "Great American film" somewhat surprises me. It sometimes feels like rearranging pieces from other films than a groundbreaking statement. A film doesn't have to be a groundbreaking statement, but one so grandiose, cerebral, and long is obviously playing on some expectation of that.
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