The Brutalist (2024)

The-Brutalist-(2024)
The Brutalist (2024)

There comes a time when one sits down to write a film review and suddenly strikes gold. Let’s say that an imaginary film historian rummaging through a basement in Burbank or a box in Butte, Montana, does come upon a handful of dusty film canisters in a corner of one of the rooms. Placed inside these kinds of tins are rolls of some unfinished projects from film greats like Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, or Bernardo Bertolucci due to the wooden signs of American-style epics these three worthy directors made during their time. That decade’s Method actors, and chameleons, including Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Cazale, and Meryl Streep, appear to be the actors. A version of ink is missing in action; otherwise, the meticulous details, including time frames, are all consistent with the style of ’Prince of Darkness Gordon Willis.’ If there ever was a time capsule in the history of American filmmakers, this is indeed it. It’s hard to pinpoint which part of it is more mesmerizing.

That’s the feeling you get when watching The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s story of a Hungarian architect who flees to America at the twilight of WWII only to end up asphyxiated by the American Dream. Running for approximately three and a half hours, which includes an overture and an intermission, and featuring the scale, extravagance, and totality of vision seen in the ambitious, shoot-the-moon-style projects of New Hollywood mavericks, this is a remake of the nostalgic era when giants walked the planet and monopolized the planet single screens, its like divine intervention. The actor-writer-director sweated over this bastard child of The Fountainhead, The Conformist, and The Godfather movies for seven years, and it deserves nothing less than the greatest respect. They don’t make movies like this anymore, yes, it is true, it is not that they do not make these sorts of movies anymore, the point is no one tends to tell these ever-sprawling narratives with such levels of storytelling, chops, nerve,e and verve. If it is not a new Great American Masterpiece™, which leverages what this medium offers, then it is probably as close as we can be in 2024.

Our intention is not to damn this film with faint praise, although the kind of work that one comes to love, which includes the jury of this year’s Venice Film Festival that awarded the Best Director prize to Corbet, and A24 that announced this morning that it already picked up the film for U.S. distribution before its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th. Nor do we wish to suggest that this is yet another popular appropriation of a particular vintage aesthetic, sophisticated as it is, even if we accept that the camera work of Lol Crawley along with the production design of Judy Becker are meant to evoke the more bruised and melancholic visual reinterpretations of America’s post war landscapes of the Me Decade. (That it was filmed with 35mm, and it will be presented at the New York Film Festival in the fall in 70mm, only fuels the fire of comparison).

The interest of The Brutalist lies in the fact that Corbet & co. are not merely trying to recreate a particular appearance but a whole sub-genre. Personal epics, excessive and idealized are the subgenre that Corbet & co. are striving to achieve

His prior work as a director, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018) indicated a filmmaker who loved dark and depressing arthouse films but was incapable of bringing anything additional that might enhance the genre. Thriller was a major level up from his previous work, a lot less imitation and more attempting to emulate the greats in cinema. Corbet and his co-scriptwriter Mona Fastvold worked for this film for seven years. Their every second is visible on the screen.

Yet even the more seasoned grandmasters would be courageous enough to reveal their lead by considerable internal of the protagonist tumbling through the dark ears of the ship’s moving corridors gradually shifting towards the deck to get a look of the statue of Liberty optimizing the camera to focus the edges around the central point of this fascinating object. That madman is Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). László Tóth was a well-known Hungarian architect who attended the Bauhaus College in the pre-war years. Post-war, Tóth was just one of the many Jewish refugees who made it out of the camps and sought shelter in America. A cousin, Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), and his spouse (Emma Laird) take him in. They own a ‘Miller & Sons’ furniture company based in PA. Atilla’s last name has been modified to make it less Eastern European and more “Catholic”. The sons are not real: ‘Family businesses find favor here’. The accent is hard to almost impossible to pick. Welcome to the American dream, in the American way.

Atilla’s new task was given to him by his rich client, Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) who is an heir, and now owns the house of the noted industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The assignment is about a library in the building that should be a surprise for the older man – the son’s present for his father. For this, Lázsló is required. The house constructed by two architects was very interesting, very progressive, and very modern for its time. Unfortunately, Harrison did not like the end result and lost his temper, in many idols: “I do not pay to be insulted”, so he had them tossed out of his house. After a long time, however, the same businessman finds Tóth, gives him the picture of Look magazine, devoted entirely to his room, and apologizes. He aims to do much more than this. A permanent relationship between Tóth and Van Buren is envisaged. This includes an architect designing something stupendous that would thrive in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. This would mean Tóth would finally realize his dream to bring his family from Hungary and all would settle in America, without putting the architect’s marriage at stake. On the other hand, it would render Toth as Harrison’s slave, financially, and spiritually and this would sooner or later mess with the genius’s head.

One might expect a movie with the title The Brutalist to focus on such structural feminism, yet there is so much modern leftist ortho-architectural here that they would quite simply drown themselves in the plans, buildings, and such cement-and-marble monstrosities that the movie pictures as art pieces. This is, however, the only thing that is minimalist in this film. The moment you start watching the movie, it is clear that the director is attempting to recreate some particular essence of twentieth-century America. America, the culture of jazz, drugs, wealthy and savage lifestyles, the immigrant experience, the Holocaust and its fallout – he tries to stitch it together with grandiose movements and a VistaVision-sized frame.

You can perceive some fragments of Louis Kahn’s and Marcel Breuer’s lives and work in the DNA of Lázsló Tóth or rather Brody, who after The Pianist hasn’t done such thorough work and such deep disturbing emotional intensity, this time, about the distinct psychological features or components of this shattered man as the Cylinders is coloring in the picture himself. Sometimes one gets a feeling that the movie actor is able to reassess his entire filmography. There are no unusually weak links in the ensemble, though it is difficult not to mention Isaach de Bankole who played Toth’s aide for years and Guy Pearce whose industrialist avatar is a true beast. I think one of the oddest pieces about Van Buren is, among many self-tributes, the school degree of DANIEL PLAIWIEG’S RAGE HELL that must be laying somewhere on his elaborately crafted mantle.

Definitely, there is going to be blood, amply, there will be violence, transgressions, impoverishment of self and on the close scope, and a sociological tragedy; all of which are inevitable: In a way, the conclusion implies that the masterpieces are never lost—only time will tell when the world sees these jewels and the contribution made by getting such pieces is worth more than a man’s or two lives. Concerning The Brutalist, let us just speculate about the agony Corbet, Brody, and all their partners had while working on making the dream possible. But even now it is easy to treat it as brave art and sweeping and visionary and powerful.

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