The Oscar Race Review: "The Brutalist"
With time at a premium until the Oscars, lets slow it down for a modern American epic
Listen, I gotta be quick with this one. There are less than 12 hours to go before the Academy Awards and I have to leave to catch a screening of I’m Still Here in twenty minutes. For the first time since the 1994 crop of Best Picture nominees, I’ll be able to say that I’ve completed the set of what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has deemed the best movies of the year.
Some of these films, like Emilia Perez and Conclave were easy to stream right at home. Others, like Nickel Boys and the film I’m dashing away to see after this, required some careful planning of movie showtimes due to limited availability nearby. Of all the movies nominated for Best Picture tonight, however, none intimidated me more than The Brutalist.
I mean, I’m a busy guy! Where on God’s green earth was I going to find 4 hours to dedicate to watching the reason Adrien Brody is probably going to win that second Oscar?
The Brutalist is a period drama starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, and Felicity Jones that’s directed by Brady Corbet. It follows László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who flees Europe for America after surviving the Holocaust. There, he seeks hope and opportunity in Pennsylvania, where a wealthy patron (Pearce) commissions an ambitious work and helps Tóth retrieve his wife Erzsébet (Jones), still stuck in Europe with their niece.
As the years go on, however, László learns the sad truth that everyone from America already knows: this is not a land of equal opportunity for everyone. If you’re a talented outsider, you are tolerated until you are no longer useful.
At three hours and thirty five minutes long (including a 15 minute intermission), the cinematic breadth of The Brutalist calls back to a more focused, thoughtful time in cinematic history. “You will sit down and sit through this prolonged drama,” Corbet says, “because the movie is just that good.”
It’s tempting to give a movie like this high marks on ambition alone. Armed with only $10 million (a tiny budget given the movie’s scope), Corbet and company have brought together an impressive cast, grand sets, and beautiful effects. The architecture put together by László in The Brutalist is so impressive you’d think the story were based on real events, but he’s not the one artistic visionary bringing beauty to the world of the film.
Corbet shot The Brutalist using VistaVision, an old school film stock that, from what I gather, was the precursor to modern IMAX resolutions. I’m still shaky on what all this tech means, but whatever VistaVision is, I need every movie moving forward to be filmed with it. The Brutalist is frankly one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. It’s use of color, shadow, and lighting is top of the line, creating a vision of mid century America that is simultaneously wonderful and terrifying.
Helping with this masterful presentation is an absolutely stirring score by English composer Daniel Blumberg. The strings, alternatively pulsing and sweeping, echoed deep into my body as I watched some of the most visually dazzling images I’ve ever seen on the big screen. The combined effect is so potent that one of the first scenes in the movie had me misty eyed from the sheer wonder of cinema I had beheld.
Brody takes László, a character that could be the protagonist of your somewhat standard immigrant success story, and presents him as something more human. A survivor of Buchenwald, his adult life is defined by trauma. He lashes out, wallows, gets addicted to heroin, and refuses to speak for himself or his art to the point of coming across as rudely narcissistic. Once his wife finally arrives in America, you think that she may act as a salve to his damaged psyche. Instead her presence only complicates an already fractured man.
I haven’t seen Felicity Jones in anything since Rogue One [3/5] and had no idea she had a performance like this in her. Erzsébet is desperate for her husband’s love and for stability in America. Neither comes easily, leading to heartbreak for both her and the audience. Osteoporosis weakens her and traps her in a wheelchair, a visual representation for how limited her options are as the foreign wife of a complicated artist.
Guy Pearce is mostly good as the wealthy Harrison Van Buren, but his performance felt just a bit stilted to me. It felt like he was doing an amazing job at reading words off of a piece of paper. The performance is still riveting, but his line deliveries never felt natural.
The last hour of The Brutalist starts to fall apart for me, due to some strange pacing and plotting. I won’t spoil anything, obviously, but the narrative payoff to many threads felt unrewarding and not worth the many, many minutes of buildup before them. I sense that this is the point; a character at the very end reminds us, the audience, that it is actually about the destination, not the journey. This feels almost insulting to put at the end of your gargantuan, sweeping epic, where the journey up to this point has been mostly breathtaking.
These plotting issues and, let’s face it, the runtime both drag The Brutalist down for me somewhat. On a technical level, it’s phenomenal, with lovely costuming and set design to match its beautiful cinematography. But besides two and a half excellent performances and a strong first half of setup, its storytelling felt strangely off for a project so clearly put together with a lot of care.
There is a scattered throughline of Jewish trauma following the Holocaust that feels abandoned for a large chunk of the film’s middle that, in my eyes, would have elevated the film significantly if fully capitalized on. Instead, it’s an interesting idea in a movie that is filled to bursting with them: The Brutalist is about religion, trauma, America, art, sex, drugs, race, classism, xenophobia, and more still. That hefty runtime meant that none of those themes were shallowly explored, but a more limited narrative scope may have brought the story up to the level of the film’s presentation.
The Brutalist is a movie we don’t get very often anymore. A long, mature, dark exploration of some very heavy, very American topics. In years past, it may have been hit with the “Oscar bait” label, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the clear frontrunner for Best Picture tonight. A more thematically cohesive story about American folly like Anora is the more likely choice. I can’t say I’d be mad if The Brutalist surprises us all, but I’m counting more on Brody winning that Best Actor award.
Okay, I have to catch a train. Catch you in a few hours.