The Brutalist, Nice Video Shame About the Song 

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.

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearse, both of whom are par­tic­u­lar­ly impressive.

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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