Many movies are boring, others are annoying, but it’s rare that a movie is both as boring and annoying as The Brutalist, which opens throughout Israel on Thursday.
The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet, which is nominated for 10 Oscars and is a front-runner in several categories, has been hailed by many as a masterpiece. I don’t know whether polygraphs really work but if they do, I would bet many people who claim to have enjoyed this movie would fail such a test.
It’s a shame because The Brutalist has an interesting premise: It’s the story of a fictional Bauhaus-trained Hungarian-Jewish architect, a Holocaust survivor, who emigrates to America and pioneers the Brutalist style there. He gets entangled with a bombastic millionaire who both supports and exploits him. And to make it sound even better, it stars Adrien Brody, the Oscar winner from The Pianist, who is always interesting and endearing on screen.
Given the plot and Brody’s presence, I was looking forward to seeing it but then I noticed the running time: three hours and 34 minutes. That gave me a hint that it was going to be the kind of pretentious and self-important movie that wins Oscars but isn’t great to sit through. Last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, clocked in at three hours, and this is definitely a trend.
I admit it’s unfair to judge a movie simply by its running time. Gone with the Wind is almost half an hour longer than The Brutalist, but Scarlett had to get married twice before she wed Rhett, and Atlanta had to burn down.
Perhaps if László Tóth, the hero of The Brutalist, were a real person who had an eventful life, there would be some justification for the absurd length but given that he’s fictional, there’s no excuse. And here’s another contrast: Citizen Kane told the story of its fictional hero’s life from childhood to death in a snappy two hours.
I mention Citizen Kane because it’s about a hero modeled on a real American businessman, William Randolph Hearst, painting a fascinating portrait of a brilliant, self-destructive man, as well as highlighting the dark side of the American dream. The Brutalist tries to do something similar and fails miserably.
THE BEST moments in The Brutalist come early on, in a scene where it’s dark and noisy and you can’t figure out what’s going on. It turns out that László is in the hold of a ship sailing into New York harbor. He comes out and sees the Statue of Liberty upside down, a cool effect and one that you will instantly realize is meant to show how twisted American society is.
In case you didn’t get it, the movie’s prologue has a quote from Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves free.”
Clearly, while it might seem understandable that László, a Buchenwald survivor, might feel joy at being out of the concentration camp and arriving in the New World, the message is that he is actually “hopelessly enslaved.”
This hopeless enslavement begins when he is taken in by his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a furniture store in Pennsylvania called Miller & Sons, passing himself off to customers as American. Atilla has a pretty, gentile wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), and is happy to use László’s design talent. László obliges by creating furniture in the style he knows from Europe. It seems strange to Atilla and Audrey, who are dismissive of his efforts, which they don’t think will sell.
Due to his enslavement to capitalism, he tries to play along but is disgruntled. Or, in other words, to quote Brian Tallerico, writing on RogerEbert.com, “This is a film that experiments with form while also being narratively about how people exploit artistry and value function over expression.” Many of those who see this as a masterpiece write sentences like that to explain why it is.
The plot gets going when Atilla puts László in contact with Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn, who was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend for a couple of years), a young rich guy who commissions László to design a study for his book-loving father. The study that László creates is really interesting looking and is the single real example of the Brutalist style we see in the entire movie.
But when Harry’s father, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), a blowhard reminiscent of the Daniel Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood – and obviously also a stand-in for the current US president – sees his remodeled study, he is furious and refuses to pay. More enslavement.
Atilla kicks out László, who starts abusing opioids with a saintly African-American widower and veteran Gordon (Isaach de Bankole), who is caring for an adorable son.
But Harrison has a change of heart. He embraces modernism and confides in László about his upbringing: He was poor and was humiliated by cruel relatives. He brings László into his social circle and helps bring his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe. Erzsebet is now confined to a wheelchair due to malnutrition during the war, while Zsófia has become mute as a result of trauma.
The bulk of the movie is about László’s contentious relationship with Harrison, who tasks him with creating a highly symbolic megaproject that includes a church and huge community center, to be made in concrete, in the Brutalist style. There’s also a trip to Europe and a bizarre rape sequence, as well as endless problems with the construction of the dream project.
Zsófia begins to speak one day, inexplicably, and expresses her devotion to her fiancé and her determination to move with him to Israel, a plot turn that has earned the film some detractors. Erzsébet follows her to Israel as László becomes more irritable and isolated.
Finally arriving at the epilogue
WHEN THE film eventually arrives at its epilogue, there is a real-looking sequence set at the Venice Biennale in 1980, where Zsófia gives a talk about her uncle’s accomplishments. She says he always told her, “It’s not the journey, it’s the destination,” and that architecture is not about anything, and then reveals that it was Buchenwald that inspired László’s creations.
In that case, isn’t his architecture about Buchenwald? Meanwhile, László is slumped in his wheelchair, as you will likely be slumped in your seat if you make it to this point.
Many historians and architects have criticized the film, saying that successful European architects were celebrated in the US after the war. But that’s only one of the problems.
During the many hours I sat watching it, I kept wondering: Why did the director want to tell this particular fictional story? The more that Harrison reminded me of Donald Trump, the more I thought the movie was a parable of American philistinism and greed. That’s a valid premise for a movie but perhaps the point could be made just as well in a movie that was about 90 minutes shorter.
Brody is good but may be robbed of his Best Actor Oscar, the one award this movie deserves to win, because of a controversy over whether the director used AI to make his Hungarian accent sound better.
While I wouldn’t say that the rapturous critical reception of this movie is a sign of the world’s intellectual decay – because that would be going a little too far – I do find it a great mystery why so many claim to have enjoyed this pretentious mess.
If anyone is hopelessly enslaved these days, it’s movie audiences in search of a decent, serious movie they can see without suffering.