The Brutalist (2024)
Oscar winning historical drama starring Adrian Brody, playing Laszlo Thoth, a jewish Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor in the early 50's who, after some complications, is contracted to oversee the construction of a multi purpose community center for an old money Pennsylvania businessman while trying to reunite with his wife and niece who were held at a different concentration camp
The Brutalist is a movie that's quite close to being the platonic definition of what I imagine oscar bait to be. Aging leading man playing a tragic figure? Check. A supporting cast of mostly recognizable actors in snazzy period costumes doing funny accents? Check. A story vaguely revolving around the myth of the American dream, historical trauma and the relationship between art, power and trauma? Check. Portentous score? Won an Oscar for it. Prestige cinematography? Baby, this was shot on 30mm film using a process called VistaVision that hasn't been utilized since the early 60's. The movie has an overture, an intermission and an epilogue. Hardly have I ever seen a movie as convinced that it's a classic as The Brutalist and hardly ever have I seen a movie so far off the mark about it.
Generally, I don't believe that "Fake it till you make it" isn't an approach that can eventually lead to genuine greatness but I also think that that requires a certain understanding of what you're trying to fake that I simply don't see in Brutalist. As much as Brutalist is trying to recapture the splendor of various classics from, mostly, the 70's and 60's, it's clear that while it can capture the aesthetics of these classics, it plainly doesn't have the heart or conviction to warrant being counted anywhere among them. Brutalist tries to milk profoundity from subjects it knows other works have found it in and beauty from a place with no sincerity. Bradley Corbet is 5 year older than me and was born in Arizona. The fuck does he know about the Holocaust? Hell, the fuck does he know about the experience of being a jewish immigrant in 50's Pennsylvania?
It's hard to watch Brutalist and not think of its setting and backstory as mostly superficial conveniences, chosen because they have proven to be popular with the critical establishment, painting over that old, Randian chestnut of the struggle of an artist trying to maintain ownership and agency over his own work against the institutionalized forces trying to take it away from them. Which is quite an interesting subject in itself. Rand's Fountainhead, for all its faults, maintains a certain universal resonance because it deals with exactly that contradiction of what it means to maintain ownership of your work. What gives Fountainhead something like an enduring resonance where Atlas Shrugged is difficult to read as anything other than self righteous, elitist waffling is the fact that somewhere, it hits on an anxiety held by talented and industrious people throughout all social strata. In some ways, it was trying to package ideas not terribly far removed from Marxism in an anti-marxist way by substituting the worker for the visionary and the industrialist exploiting them for a nebulous notion of public, institutionalized mediocrity that is such a nonspecific boogeyman that anyone can project just about anything onto it.
So, what does writer and director Brady Corbet do to frame the struggle of its Roarkian hero to bring some degree of depth to Rand's simplistic morality? Make him an emaciated eastern european immigrant? Make his exploiter who takes advantage of his work and, not to take anything away, ends up taking advantage of him, sexually, an East Coast blue blood? It's not that Brutalists themes and messages are confused. They really aren't. The way America is built on ensnaring, exploiting and spitting out anyone desperate enough to buy into the dream it offers is one of the oldest in American cinema. The movies cold, cynical and rather fatalist tone that it uses to convey its well worn idea of the old immigrant story feels more than anything like an affectation meant to convince the viewer of the depth of its tragedy but on any closer inspection, I just don't think it's there.
What is there behind Laszlo Thoth, behind the heroin addiction and the troubled relationship to his wife and niece and the sad eyes and the AI enhanced Count Dracula accent, other than a tired metaphor for the false promises of an absolution from Europe's sins and cruelties in America that, honestly, no one has sincerely believed in for the past 60 years? What is there behind the trite, surface level commentary on class relations? Not to put too fine a point on it, what is there behind the rather uncomfortable fascination with the Zionist project in Israel that it continously stops just short of presenting as the preferable alternative to America's hypocrisy? An aspect of the movie that's certainly well cushioned by innumerable layers of awkward pussyfooting but that on imagines will probably get some attention, if one day it'll be analyzed within its historical context.
The Brutalist is a deeply contradictory project, if one very much of its time. Perhaps the quintessential creation to encapsulate modern America. Obsessed with recreating some mythical golden age that it doesn't remember, doesn't understand and doesn't even really believe in. A collection of ideas it thinks signify high brow film making and grandeur. And, coincidentally, the exact rason why I categorically reject the distinction between high brow and low brow in art. It's elitist, pompous, dour and most of all, hollow. By almost entirely rejecting anything that could be perceived as populist it rejects anything that I could possibly find affecting or engaging or thought provoking. Scorsese, Coppola, Leone hell, the Coens, they all convey the historical dialectics and human follies in a way that's lively and humanistic. Something like The Brutalist is to a Godfather or Once upon a Time in America as a fur coat is to a fox. It's all texture, no life. The sort of thing I get more annoyed about the more I think about it.
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