Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

I’ve never been a fan of Brutalist architecture. I get the theory. I understand the aesthetics and the reaction against ornamentation that led to it. I just find it too brutal for my tastes. That said, I am a fan of the new film The Brutalist produced and directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody. It is a brutally ambitious piece of filmmaking and story telling. I’m finding myself attracted to very complex and complicated films and streaming series these days, even if they are flawed. That is certainly opposite of the minimalist and often stark aesthetic of Brutalist architecture where everything must have its functional point. Make no mistake, The Brutalist is functionally a complex and complicated film that I’m sure some will find a brutal time watching. And that’s not just because the run time is three hours and thirty-five minutes with a fifteen minute intermission. I’m sure that length will scare some off. It certainly made me think long and hard about waiting to see it at home, instead of seeing it in the theatre. As an older guy with a bladder that prefers having a pause button nearby I decided to take the risk. I’m glad I did. During that intermission the conversation in the men’s lavatory was all about how thankful everyone was for the pause. Talk about a sharing a communal experience the way art is supposed to do. Let’s just say I’m glad there was an intermission and I can think of a number of recent longer films that would have been well served to have added one. But the intermission speaks not just to relief, but ironically it speaks back to a grander, perhaps more audacious age of cinema, when movies had things like overtures and intermissions, and were shown in ornately decorated movie palaces, instead of gray boxes stuffed next to other gray boxes. It certainly adds weight and import to the epic scale of this ambitious movie about ambitious aims. At its core The Brutalist is an immigrant story. A Jewish immigrant story in America after the horrors of World War II. It feels all the more resonant in this time and place. Watching the protagonist survive, struggle, and try to succeed might, in and of itself, feel like a typical American Dream story, but it plumbs the depth of American nightmare moments as well. We’ve seen these epic immigrant stories before. We’ve also seen the epic stories of artists struggling against all odds, shedding and hurting those who love them as they pursue their passion, while suppressing and harming parts of themselves to serve at the pleasure of rich philistines who use and abuse them as extensions of their own outsized egos. This epic story works on all of those levels, but it works because of the art of the filmmaking, more specifically the men behind the cameras. Corbet may be telling the tale of a Brutalist architect pushing for his dream, but there is nothing minimalistic or spare about how he and his cinematographer and composer uses cameras and sound to tell it. The cinematographer Lol Crawley and his camera is everywhere and anywhere, often in odd places from odder angles,  especially in the first half, using visuals that disorient as much as they reveal. The sound design and the music by Daniel Blumberg in collaboration with the director is equally surprising, and at times wonderfully disconcerting and deliciously uncomfortable. Corbet sets us up for this by shattering expectations with the overture and the credits. Instead of credits scrolling vertically, or fading in, or overlayed on the action, they scroll horizontally from right to left. It feels wrong to western eyes and is matched by the camera work in the opening section. Literally bouncing in and out of point of view, light and dark, the cameras follow the characters stumbling from the bowels to the deck of their ship, finally landing upright on Ellis Island. We are thrown into the chaos of the scramble with as much desperate anticipation and confusion as the characters. If you’re not uncomfortably ready for something different after these first few minutes then you are not ready to surrender to what the rest of this film has to offer. The story is divided into two parts by that intermission and unfolds with many such surprises. Part I is cinematically more intriguing than Part 2, which lags at times. There the camera and editing slow down to capture longer, quieter, yet equally intense moments and that makes sense. That’s never more apparent than the scene when a husband comforts his wife’s physical pain, knowing his solution is as wrong as it will be relieving and welcome. It’s an injection of pure agony, painfully, yet beautifully acted, filmed, and scored. But that’s a setup for when the pace picks back up to its Part 1 tempos, propelling us to the conclusion. It’s almost too much of a shock, and that’s the intent. We’re finally delivered to an epilogue, which to me feels unnecessary and almost tacked on even as it completes the epic arc of the story. But it does allow you to sober up a bit before leaving the theatre. Overall the cast is generally quite good with Brody standing out as the architect László Tóth. You can almost breathe his pain its so present. Felicity Jones almost matches him once she enters the story in Part 2, only failing when the script fails her. But when she’s the focus, she captivates. Guy Pearce, who I generally don’t like, does the best work I’ve seen from him, and often threatens to take the story away as the central antagonist. All in all the story isn’t unfamiliar, but it’s told with a rawness and complexity that propels us and it forward into something larger than itself, even larger than the ambitions of its characters and those of it’s storyteller.  It won’t be a film for everybody, but it is more monumental than anything I’ve seen in a while. You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.