As you’ll no doubt have heard by now, The Brutalist is either a modern masterpiece representing the great white hope of world cinema, or a morally reprehensible artistic travesty. As usual, it’s nothing like as exciting as all that, and lands fairly and squarely somewhere in the middle.
In the first of its two l o n g and meandering halves, we’re introduced to László Tóth, a renowned, Jewish architect, who arrives in America from Europe in the immediate aftermath of the II WW. His modernist ways and Jewish heritage mark him out as other, and his life as an outsider there proves to be ever more suffocating.
All of which is given genuine grandeur, and we’re presented with a visual and sonic splendour that sweeps us along. But it’s as we move into its second half that the film comes to slowly unravel in terms of its story.
At around the 3 hour mark, so fairly early in that second half – and yes, we’re taking about yet another near 4 hour film, made all the longer by its extravagant and wholly unnecessary 15 minute intermission), one of the three protagonists does something. And it’s that event that comes to define and determine the three of their lives.
There are two serious problems with this. First, none of the characters give any suggestion that the event in question is as life-changing as it turns out to have been. It’s literally not mentioned, by anyone, until the very last few minutes.
Second, and more damningly, what the character does comes completely out of the blue. Nothing up until that point, that is to say, for the last 15 years of their lives, gives any suggestion that that is in fact how he feels. On the contrary, everything we’ve seen clearly demonstrates the exact opposite.
It feels like you’re watching an adaptation of a really long novel where the scriptwriters were forced to delete three or four chapters from their screenplay, only to discover that those chapters are precisely the ones that reveal and explain the main characters’ motivations. And without which, the story makes no sense.
But it’s not an adaptation, it’s an original screenplay, and was written by the film maker duo of Brady Corbet and his wife, Mona Fastvold. And it’s fairly clear where the problem lies.
Given his and her previous two films as a director writer pair, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), they are both director writers, rather than writer directors. Which is, alas, a fairly common phenomenon in the film making world.
The scenes they write are first and foremost an opportunity for the director to flex his creative muscles, instead of existing for the primary function of propelling the story inexorably forward.
So an enormous amount of effort is invested in impressive casting, the brilliant use of carefully scouted locations, extensively researched costumes, impeccable art direction, pristinely choreographed cinematography and a monumental sound design. With, inevitably, very little time invested purely and solely in story.
The first half really is a spectacle to behold and hear. It feels like one of those sprawling, epic David Lean films of yore, where big if boldly delineated ideas are given an international backdrop – no wonder Hollywood has been so blindly smitten.
But unless they can wean themselves off of mere spectacle to focus on the emotional depth a properly told story can generate, all they’ll ever be is mere Hollywood film makers. They’ll have to leave art to the Europe where people like László Tóth arrived from.
Watch the trailer for The Brutalist here:
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