Regular readers know that I declared The Brutalist to be the best picture of 2024 a few weeks back in my year-end wrap up.
Now that it is getting a wider release along with its 10 recently announced Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, let me count the ways in which I love this movie.
As you watch The Brutalist, you’ll realize you are seeing genius and historic filmmaking in progress—a sprawling, majestic, 3 1/2-hour epic in which every frame is well-played. Adrien Brody—in a year when Timothy Chalamet sang, learned guitar and played harmonica winningly as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown—deserves a second Oscar for this one.
Laszlo (Brody), a Holocaust survivor, makes his way to the United States after the war. He’s not necessarily looking to live the American dream; he’s just looking to live without hellish oppression. An architect by trade, he endures a series of growing tribulations as he tries to reunite with his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones, also Oscar-nominated), and survive New York City.
Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, also nominated)—Laszlo’s first major client, an incredibly moody man—becomes his boss, and Laszlo is tasked with building a large memorial on a beautiful parcel of land. Laszlo must fight to bring his European sensibilities (a unique, maverick design style that got him the gig) to the project as Harrison oscillates between sweet, pioneering/bohemian spirit and cost-cutting, raging asshole.
This is 2024’s best onscreen battle, far more engaging and terrifying than anything in Gladiator 2. It’s also heartbreaking, because there’s the tease of genuine admiration and friendship in Harrison, something Laszlo needs after all of his trauma. As Laszlo finds out through the course of many years, for him, trauma is routine.
Laszlo and Erzsebet persist, no matter what evil mind games and betrayals those surrounding them serve up, and as you’d expect, the film gets downbeat at times. Attila (the vastly undervalued Alessandro Nivola, delivering career-best work), a kindly relative, shelters Laszlo at first and gives him a place to practice his trade and live. What seems to be a core relationship that will drive the film progressively morphs into something more somber. The adversity Laszlo faces is brutal, indeed.
There’s much ballyhoo about this film’s budget being less than $10 million, and there should be. How director Brady Corbet managed to make a movie that looks like this—while procuring such an amazing cast and capturing such magical performances—on such a small budget by today’s standards is a modern-day moviemaking miracle.
There have been recent controversies regarding the use of AI software to sharpen some of the audio (specifically, moments when Brody and Jones are speaking Hungarian), leading some to diminish the accomplishment that is The Brutalist. This is total bullshit. Special effects have been used to embellish and strengthen visuals and audio since the beginning of the film art. Whatever they did to improve the sound and visuals works in a way that is seamless and provides no distraction from the power of the performances.
Now, this film a long one. You will get an intermission for a bathroom break, so locate the restroom before the movie starts, and have a plan. As with all long movies, if you are not vibing with the film, three hours and 34 minutes can be a slog. Be prepared.
Director Brady Corbet, Brody, Jones, Pearce and much of the crew deserve Oscars for the spectacle that is The Brutalist. I’m not predicting wins for them just yet—Oscar picks can get really screwy—but the nominations are much-deserved. This is one of the best films of the 21st century.
Nonsense. The Brutalist is a pseudointellectual effort to be deep, exploiting a victim of the Holocaust and his singular artistic vision to indict capitalism in favor of D’Anunzio’s fascistic fantasy that only the artist should lead the world. This film is jejeune at best, a minor mind’s attempt to link our romantic obsession with suffering fabulists as the end all and be all. Corbet’s storytelling is infantile, lacking any sense of urgency, real structure, character arcs, jumping about in time inorganically, and mistaking a one underdog’s life-sapping previous struggle for depth and meaning. He’s thrown in everything and the kitchen sink — some bullshit about osteoporosis, stereotypes of artists and their Brahmin patrons, a tad of heroin addiction, a smidge of repressed homosexuality, a dollop of gratuitous nudity to frame misunderstood desire and sex as tres meaningful — the whole fucking thing is pretentious bullshit by a phony who secretly thinks he can substitute sloppy thinking and beauty shots, all derived from other sloppy thinkers and beauty shots encompassed by the likes Ayn Rand and her ilk, for originality. This Corbet ain’t the painter of old, he’s the fraud of new. He’s young and apparently not well read. Maybe that’s an excuse. But those who buy this claptrap for art are simply the obverse of those who bought into Trump for competence. Like the poor, charlatans masquerading as deep thinkers will always be with us. But like all narcissists, these deceivers are incapable of understanding that the truths they propagate are lies. Why? Because they’re never truthful with themselves; they’re too scared of what they’ll find. So they fantasize and then bore us to death with their so-called visions as art. Heaviosity squared. These two writers aren’t writers at all; they’re wannabes. And the only ones they fool are pretentious dullards like themselves. But I’m not bitter, no sir, I just know a bullshitter when I see one. Or two. Sure, Adrian Brody is a great actor. The Pianist was brilliant. I suspect he drew his undying agony from that character. Because this architect he portrays is not of this world or any world that I’m familiar with. He is a hodgepodge of despairing heroes from Hollywood think pieces, and a shallow one at that. You may notice the genius building is never seen as a whole — because the director couldn’t envision it. It’s silly really, substituting crap gleaned from tv shows about ancient architecture and the summer solstice with some shortsighted Boyce-like childishness about the architect’s confinement in Buchenwald. What an insult to the six million who went up in smoke.