Brutalist gay
I didn’t find Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist (A24, 12.20) distancing or vaguely off-putting or dislikable. Well, I did but it was worse than that. The cold, hard truth is that I hated, hated, HATED it. I was seething with disdain, convulsed with loathing. I create it slow, soul-draining and dull as dishwater.
I began to disengage less than 15 minutes in. I deeply hated Lol Crawley‘s dreary, murky-ass VistaVision cinematography. The dialogue sounded pliable, whispery and often muddy-murky, and my son Dylan had the same aural experience so don’t narrate me it’s my aging ears.
Daniel Blumberg‘s overture lasts for…what, 30 or 35 seconds, if that? The only overture that’s shorter is heard during the opening seconds of Pearl Harbor, written by Hans Zimmer, and it’s a much catchier composition.
Set in a glum, late 1940s and ‘50s gulag of suburban Pennsylvania and Modern Jersey, The Brutalist is an unwelcome envelopment…the 215-minute running time is a direct result of Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s screenplay yielding zero narrative urgency.
The film feels like a head cold, vaguely suffocating and narcotized…somberly, pretentiously affe
Let's Be Honest, 'The Brutalist' Didn’t Need Its Most Devastating Scene
Considering its lengthy runtime, The Brutalist doesn’t indulge in overt and lengthy exposition. Instead, it acts as an unfiltered portrayal of László Toth’s (Adrien Brody) life and encourages the audience to decipher the subtext. This format allows the feature to serve as a metaphor for hidden discrimination and how people’s efforts and motivations don’t always align. This is certainly the case for Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), the eccentric business tycoon who takes László in and funds his architecture. On the surface, Van Buren appears as pleasant and welcoming, but small microaggressions flood the pair’s dynamic, suggesting his motivations center around rule. Their relationship is uncomfortable to watch, yet there is one particularly devastating scene that sees Harrison rape an intoxicated László. The impact of the scene only serves to reiterate what the production has already portrayed but does so in an extremely horrific moment that simply feels tonally displaced from the rest of the movie.
Guy Pearce Shows the Underlying Threat of Politeness
The I am struggling to recall a film that made me as angry as The Brutalist did. The top-tier contender for Academy Awards Top Picture directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody as the pretend modernist architect László Tóth, who survives the Holocaust, comes to America after the war, toils in undeserved obscurity until creature plucked therefrom by a wealthy industrialist who commissions him to build a complex that will produce his name enraged me in a way that is entirely out of proportion to the ultimate significance of the film—or, arguably, of any film. After all, I’ve seen plenty of movies lately that irritated me or that I thought weren’t any good. I wrote in Modern Age about a number of such disappointments from 2023, including Napoleon, Ferrari, Priscilla, Maestro, and Killers of the Flower Moon (along with one film that did not disappoint me, Oppenheimer). At the 2024 New York Film Festival (which I wrote about here), I was profoundly disappointed in Paul Schrader’s film, Oh, Canada, to the point where I was downright annoyed that it had been programmed. I remember how irritated I was in 2018 that films like Three Billb 10.08.24 | film | ∞ The more movies I watch, the greater my appreciation for films that reach a pinnacle of what the medium can achieve, even with clear weaknesses. These flawed masterpieces are a rare phenomenon, so count me surprised to see two examples – Queer and The Brutalist – a evening apart from each other at TIFF this year. The films have widely other aims. Queer is a languorous, trippy chamber piece drama centered on one lonely person. The Brutalist is an epic, propulsive immigrant story tackling various American thematic elements, from capitalism to art, racism to xenophobia. However, each movie has parallel strengths and weaknesses. Both films have extraordinary acting and technical underpinnings, underscored by visionary directors. Yet each film’s ambition bumps into unsatisfying final acts that wrap up their stories on a sour note. Queer generates a sense of place that’s unlike any other movie I’ve seen, effectively Edward Hopper on acid. Most of the story takes place in 1950s Mexico City, but the setting has a slippery, hard to pin down aesthetic that .
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