Spoilers below.
Tyler: As goes 2025 Oscar buzz, Norman, this is a big one.
The Brutalist. Heralded for months, finally released wide in recent weeks. Truly an epic, 3.5 hours with an intermission, something built for awe and carried by creative bombast. This movie is dying to win some Academy Awards.
I’ve been antsy for you to see this one, my friend. I caught it a few Fridays ago and have since been considering my opinions, given my emotional and psychological reactions to what I experienced. I’ve had time to think about it. I still have things to say.
Let’s establish the usual cinemagoing scenario for the both of us: going in as clueless as possible about the film at hand. I knew just about nothing about Brutalist heading in—Adrien Brody? Architecture? America?—and thus was…well, at turns surprised.
This one’s a beast.
Norman: I went in knowing about as much as you. But I also carried one assumption. I thought it was a biopic of a real person! When the movie finished, I whipped out my phone to figure out who this Laszlo guy was and where maybe I could find this insane project of his in the middle of Pennsylvania. I was…sorely disappointed at the results of my search query.
Tyler: Oh man.
Norman: It was [Ahem] brutal.
But knowing he was not real changed my perception of the movie in some positive ways, so a win in the end!
Tyler: Were you familiar at all with prior work from Brady Corbet, the director and co-writer?
Norman: No. I looked at his filmography and it’s pretty scant. I am, in all honesty, shocked that he was given the chance to make such a seemingly expensive, audacious project with fine actors and almost zero chance of financial success.
Tyler: He’s new to me, too.
Norman: Hat tip to him, though. The guy has a bright future.
Tyler: Hm.
Norman: I mean that this man is getting the green light for more projects.
Tyler: He’s gonna be making his Magnolia next. It might be seven hours long.
So, like, yes. There is technical achievement, stunning weighty achievement, in The Brutalist. It’s a whopper.
I still don’t like it.
I viscerally don’t like it. It stuck with me, but not in the sense of witnessing something great. Rather, I felt bowled over by a relentless, unsettled resentment for the filmmakers. Well, maybe “resentment” is too harsh.
Actually, I don’t know that it is. The pivotal moment in The Brutalist is a horrific misplay, and its theme, said aloud in the final scene, is bullshit.
Norman: Let’s start with what is good.
Visually, this movie is astounding. I wish I’d been able to see it on 70mm IMAX or whatever. Even projected on a regular screen, it was at times overwhelming in scale and power.
Tyler: I usually sit very close when on my own, as I was for this one. Not always perfect, but I like the idea of being enveloped by the picture. That inclination worked for The Brutalist.
Norman: In particular, seeing Brutalist architecture at scale was helpful. Architecture is meant to be inhabited, a space that you feel around you. To the degree that you can approximate architectural space in a movie, I think Corbet did a great job.
Tyler: Yeah, fair. The climactic sequence, a desperate search through the concrete hellscape Laszlo has created, leaves the characters effectively lost. Huzzah, Corbet. Well done.
Brody is terrific, I should note. The acting across the board is on-point. Acting nominations are suitable.
Norman: The acting was on point throughout. I especially loved Guy Pearce. He plays the kind of smart, kind of idiotic, ultra-impulsive rich guy beautifully.
Tyler: Pearce is a revelation. I shuddered to hear that AI was used on the accents, because I was impressed as hell by Guy’s flat stately patois.
Norman: It’s hard to go wrong with actors like these, though.
Tyler: They elevate the script.
Norman: Yes. I think that’s the first takeaway we need to get out in this conversation: The Brutalist really is saved by good acting and fantastic visuals. Those are, of course, important elements in every movie, but it’s safe to say that they compensate for a thin, perhaps absurd script.
Tyler: You left out “miserable.” Thin, perhaps absurd, miserable script. This work, however technically admirable, is joyless.
We’ve got a movie about art and an artist that offers none of the ecstacy that experiencing created beauty can inspire.
Norman: The first half made for a fine immigrant story. The second half felt like an unfunny sendup of local government, philanthropy, and bad taste.
Tyler: To what end, though, the immigrant story? What about The Brutalist beyond grandiosity offers something fresh about the immigrant experience? No, Adrien Brody’s penis doesn’t count.
I guess they shot the Statue of Liberty upside down. I’m sighing and rolling my eyes as I type.
The second half, too, truly muddies the waters of the immigrant experience. Laszlo and his wife opt to return to Israel, as America does not want them. I don’t blame them or anything, but they’re the main characters in a movie about immigration. Is Corbet saying that the answer is a departure from these shores?
After all, in that subtly-intoned theme, THE DESTINATION IS THE POINT.
Norman: I enjoyed the interplay of postwar European exile set against the more crass elements of America commercialism and taste that permeates the first half. They don’t play it quite perfectly – Laszlo is this immense talent who apparently doesn’t know who he is and neither does anyone else? But along the way he suddenly becomes a titan of artistic purity while making a weird gym/church/library thing in the middle of nowhere? It doesn’t make sense. But I still like the thematic tensions.
Re: Brody’s penis. Was that real? Good grief. A scene really loses its power when you’re entertaining those kinds of questions.
Tyler: But, hey, y’know, it’s a serious movie about the Holocaust.
Or is it about the Holocaust? Laszlo’s niece, as she does, reveals Laszlo’s experience at Buchenwald, a den of unspeakable horror that he attempted to translate into the project Pearce commissions. Isn’t that just chatter, though? Are we once again facing a gravely-composed movie that uses appalling genocide as plot convenience? Maybe I’m sensitive to such bald manipulation, having recently endured the excruciating A Real Pain, and perhaps Corbet is saying something worthwhile here.
I doubt it.
I mean, man, they play Laszlo’s experience in that camp as a big reveal.
Norman: I wondered if Corbet was trying a little meditation on the relationship between the War and Brutalism. But if so, he’s fudging with history, since Brutalism doesn’t really come along until the 1950s and Laszlo is depicted as a Brutalist even before the War.
I guess I don’t mind it when people play with history, but I’m not sure what the advantage is here. The Pennsylvania slab is not real, so the reveal felt tacked on to me.
Tyler: I don’t abide it. Not the Holocaust material, and not the crass employment of sexual assault—three times!!—as a plot development.
“Crass” doesn’t even scrape it. It’s ugly.
Norman: It was a mess for me. I really was able to ride the wave of acting and visuals, but I can’t imagine wanting to watch it again, especially at home on a regular TV.
Tyler: I don’t have time to convince myself that this house of cards has merit. I would have to be paid, amply, to reexperience The Brutalist.
Make that the big pull-quote.
Norman: The big model of the monstrosity project was cool!
Tyler: Per the poster—there’s that upside-down Lady Liberty again!—the big catch-all used by the critics is “monumental.” No.
This movie bothered me. In discussing it, I find myself only further disturbed by what it heftily brings to the table. It’s manipulative, it’s coarse, it utilizes unthinkable terrors as bold-faced “character development,” and it includes a scene where Pearce’s mogul rapes an intoxicated Brody, Pearce whispering “You’re a lady of the night.”
This in a movie that’s already “implied”—overtly said—that the niece has been assaulted by Pearce’s single-note villainous son.
Oh, and we haven’t noted how that son drags Laszlo’s handicapped wife across a floor. Damn, The Brutalist is unpleasant.
Norman: My conclusion is: America bad.
I mean, maybe that’s true, and maybe that’s the message of this movie, but it’s about as nuanced as a sledgehammer.
Tyler: “The destination is the point.” Yeah, okay. Break off some more philosophy for me on my way to the door.
Writers' Loom 