[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THE BRUTALIST’ REVIEW: AMBITIONS UNBOUND  
[[link removed]]


 

Manohla Dargis
December 19, 2024
The New York Times
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Adrien Brody stars as a talented architect who flees postwar Europe
to meet his match in America, a power-hungry industrialist played by
Guy Pearce. _

Poster - The Brutalist, Reddit

 

“The Brutalist” is a bursting-at-the-seams saga of bold men and
their equally outsized visions. Set across several decades in the
aftermath of World War II, it is a grave, serious, visually sumptuous
movie that puts a great many ideas into play, starting with the
tension between art and commerce. It largely focuses on one man in one
place, but its concerns are more expansive and touch on everything
from utopia to barbarism, desire, death, form, content, immigration,
assimilation and the promise and perils of modernity. Many movies
offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that
its title invokes, this one offers a slab.

The movie is built on a series of vivid contradictions, including
those embodied by its protagonist, László Tóth (a haunting Adrien
Brody). A Jewish-Hungarian architect and survivor of the Holocaust, he
arrives on Ellis Island as a refugee and, in short order, travels to
Philadelphia, where he finds complicated shelter amid the ghosts of
America’s colonial past. There, László experiences the feverish
exuberance of postwar America but also multiple, crushing defeats.
He’s lonely and forlorn, becomes homeless and an addict. He’s also
ambitious and finds towering success. László repeatedly suffers and
rebounds; mostly, he endures.

How ‘The Brutalist’ Conjures Up a Grand Building That Doesn’t
Exist
[[link removed]]

Directed by Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist” is a period drama with
the ambitions of a historical reckoning. For László, who arrives
destitute in the States, history is a wasteland. Given the Nazi
destruction of European Jewry (the formation of Israel becomes a
winding story thread), it’s hard to know where else he would go; in
America, he at least has family. Once in Philadelphia, he reunites
with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who lives with his pretty
Catholic wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), and runs a furniture business that
carries his new name, Miller & Sons. “The folks here,” Attila
explains, “like a family business.” They apparently don’t like
Jews, because Attila also says he’s now Catholic.

Soon after László arrives — Attila puts him up in a small room off
the showroom, like the hired help — he begins designing new
furniture for Miller & Sons to replace its heavy, Colonial
Revival-style
[[link removed]] pieces.
His first piece, a cantilever chair with a frame made of tubular
metal, looks like something that the Hungarian-born designer and
architect Marcel Breuer
[[link removed]] would
have designed. Breuer apparently said that he was inspired by a
bicycle to make his first such chair, an association that Audrey
echoes when she says László’s chair looks like a tricycle. She’s
skeptical of László and his creations, maybe even suspicious.

Corbet, who wrote the script with Mona Fastvold, doesn’t explain
Audrey’s attitude outright. He folds a great deal into “The
Brutalist,” slipping ideas and meaning into reminiscences and
privately whispered confessions, but he also lets his larger themes
surface in actions and in hard, cold gazes. If Audrey never openly
says why she doesn’t like László, she doesn’t have to. He’s
family, so she’s polite. But he’s a stranger, a foreigner and a
reminder of her husband’s heritage. When she looks at László,
it’s as if she were examining a strange, somewhat distasteful
creature. Soon after they first meet, she says that she knows a doctor
who can fix his nose, which seems broken; she all but asks him to fix
his identity.

It’s a quick, pointed scene in a movie that grabs onto you
immediately and builds steadily with measured, insistent force. Corbet
can be subtle, though that’s not his usual preference (his earlier
movies include “Vox Lux
[[link removed]]”),
but he’s going for monumentality here. He likes big, bold moments
and grand, metaphorically resonant images that he often pushes to the
near-breaking point. One of the first images in “The Brutalist” is
an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty, a disorienting,
topsy-turvy angle that conveys László’s literal point of view as
he emerges from the darkened depths of the ship that has carried him
to America. The statue is already heavily freighted with complex,
contradictory meaning that László embodies and is a harbinger of his
destabilized story. It’s also an emblem of Corbet’s ambitions.

These extend to the movie’s presentation. “The Brutalist” runs
three hours and 20 minutes, not including a 15-minute break that
counts down on onscreen. (The movie never drags, but the intermission
is welcome; more long movies should have them!) Releases like these
were known as roadshows, and they signaled a movie’s importance or
at least its scale and scope; in the 1950s, when much of “The
Brutalist” takes place, roadshows also indicated to audiences that
these films could only be seen in theaters. Much as Corbet does
throughout, with beauty and soaring camerawork, the presentation of
“The Brutalist” states his intent: I imagine that he’s
announcing that “The Brutalist” isn’t made for distraction. It
isn’t on Netflix.

Just as László’s tenure at the furniture store proves brief, his
dealings with Audrey turn out to be an easy run-up to the far more
complicated relationship he forms with a wealthy patron, the amusingly
named Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (a tremendous Guy Pearce). Corbet
spends time on László’s other attachments, especially when his
wife, Erzsébet (a strong Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey
Cassidy), are at last allowed to enter the United States. László
also makes his only real friend early when he meets another outsider,
Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), at a soup kitchen. Yet even after
Erzsébet and Zsófia move in with László, these relationships —
and finally the movie itself — are overshadowed by Harrison.

Harrison bursts into the story in a lathering rage, shouting and
storming, and immediately jolts “The Brutalist” into a more
heightened, excited register. He’s an industrialist — he made his
fortune during the war — with a sprawling estate, a gloomy mansion
and two spoiled, vaguely debauched adult children, Harry (Joe Alwyn)
and Maggie (Stacy Martin). They’ve hired László to redo their
father’s study as a surprise. Harrison rejects the results, but when
Look magazine publishes a glowing story on the study (“A Millionaire
Amid His Moderns”), he hires László to build a huge center where
the surrounding community can gather, reflect and learn. “Something
boundless,” as Harrison grandly describes it, “something new.”

Having been lauded by Look as “forward-thinking,” Harrison sets
out to play the role of the modern man with a vengeance. Audrey may
not like László’s slight, open and simplified furniture, which,
like his accent, hunger and deep melancholy, sets him apart from her
settled middle-class life with Attila. But László is an avatar of an
ideal that she can’t begin to understand, a conceit that the story
underlines when, early on, he tells Attila that his store’s
furniture isn’t “very beautiful.” László isn’t simply
criticizing the pieces or making a casual judgment but instead
expressing an aesthetic sensibility, a philosophy, a worldview.
Harrison doesn’t understand, much less share, that worldview, but
being a successful capitalist, he knows László’s value to him as a
means to an end. He pays László, buying his time, buying him.

Throughout “The Brutalist,” Corbet gestures, openly and obliquely,
toward ideas and history, and the movie’s intellectual scaffolding.
László studied at the Bauhaus, the German art school where form
followed function, and which drew artists and architects like Breuer,
Kandinsky and Mies van der Rohe. In 1933, the Nazis pressured the
school to close. The rest is history, although, as László’s story
makes clear from the moment he lands in the United States — in a
journey that takes him from the old world to the new, from fascism to
capitalism, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the smiling,
totalizing embrace of the American century and all it entails — it
is a history that feels very present. Is it any surprise that this
movie belongs to its villain?

THE BRUTALIST
Not rated. Running time: 3 hours 35 minutes. In theaters.

 

 

* Film
[[link removed]]
* Film Review
[[link removed]]
* The Brutalist
[[link removed]]
* Golden Globe Winner
[[link removed]]
* Adrian Brody
[[link removed]]
* Brady Corbet
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]