"The Brutalist" 4K Review

 There is an immediate feeling after watching a nearly 3-1/2 hour-long movie packed with top-tier performances and strong imagery to feel like you've seen something of heft and substance. That's how I felt after watching The Brutalist - nominated for 10 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, and Original Score - but after some time to reflect on the experience, it turns out to be much sound and fury signifying little, but elevated on the back of Adrien Brody's performance.

Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who arrives in America in 1947. After a graphic visit to a prostitute to have his knob polished, he migrates to a small town in Pennsylvania where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has started a custom furniture business with his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). Attila has anglicized his name and converted to Catholicism, assimilating to American life. He gives László a bed in a store room and a job.

 One day the son of a wealthy area tycoon, Harry (Joe Alwyn, best known as Taylor Swift's last ex-boyfriend) hires the store to revamp his father's study, building bookshelves, etc. as a surprise birthday gift from him and his twin sister X (Stacy Martin).  László creates a stark modern space with shelves hidden behind swinging doors and having a sole lounge chair made of bent chrome tubing with straps for support - an arty lawn chair - as the centerpiece.

Daddy Harrison (Guy Pearce) comes home to find the workers in his home and blows a gasket, tossing them out and refusing to pay for the work or materials. Annoyed by Lászlo, Audrey suggests he find somewhere else to live and Attila accuses him of making a pass at his wife, which hadn't happened, so off László goes.

A few years later, he's working as a coal loader at a shipyard when Harrison appears to take him to lunch. The library he exploded over has become the subject of magazine profiles making him look like a bold patron of design. He looked into Lászlo's background and found he was a heralded architect back in his native Hungary and hires him to design a community center in honor of his mother with a budget of $850,000 ($11.2 million in today's debased currency).

Lászlo's concept is radical and inventive, but work begins and moves along until a train wreck bringing materials causes Harrison to explode again and shut down the project. Lászlo goes to New York City with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a journalist who Harrison pulled strings to get her and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe, to work as a draftsman at an architectural firm. Due to famine, she is wheelchair-bound from osteoarthritis. After several years, a representative hunts Lászlo down to inform him the project is a go again and he is needed back.

The mercurial nature of Harrison's behavior is a constant source of tension which explodes in an out-of-nowhere moment which knocks the film off-kilter and raises questions of what overall points director/co-writer Brady Corbet is trying to make with his epic film? Is it that evil American rich people exploit immigrants while loathing them? Then why does Harrison seek out Lászlo to build this monument? Is it that America is rotten with anti-Semitism and Jews need to go to Israel. Considering the current politics & deep anti-Zionist (read: anti-Semitic) views of much of Hollyweird, that's some bad timing? Other than the vague sense of being an industrialist, we never really know where Harrison gets his wealth from.

The epilogue set in 1980 at a retrospective of  Lászlo's career also explains the design of the center and what it represented to him and it smacks of telling, not showing, after 3-1/2 hours when there would've been plenty of opportunities to reveal these details.

But these are the questions that surface after watching The Brutalist. During the ride, it's stunning to realize that Corbet and company have made this 3h 35m period movie set between 1947-1958, filmed in VistaVision, a format which provides a big negative area and was last used for an American production in 1961(!), for a budget of under $10 million by filming in Hungary to represent Pennsylvania. It really shows that half of Hollyweird's financial woes are due to blowing massive sums of money on their projects rather than working lean. 

The performances are solid & worthy of nomination across the board. As the missus says, Brody does suffering well. With his big eyes and awkward features, he is almost certain to win the same way he did nearly a quarter-century ago with The Pianist. Somehow Pearce has never been nominated before despite three decades in this business, and he would've had a good shot to win if not for Kieran Culkin's lead performance in A Real Pain being jammed into Supporting Actor. Jones is fine, though she's stuck with the Stoic Suffering Wife of the Tormented Genius role.

While I found my copy of the film on the high seas, the 4K 1.66:1 aspect image still retains the filmic grain look of the VistaVision source. Lol Crawley's nominated cinematography has a good shot in a tough field, especially with Conclave shamefully excluded in order to nominate Emilia Perez for everything. I'm sure the inevitable Criterion Collection release will look great, perhaps broken over two discs to match the two acts with intermission structure.

Corbet's previous film was the Natalie Portman-starring Vox Lux which I didn't write a review for, but logged it as a 3/10 Skip It score so while I can't remember what was bad about it, it was bad. He's definitely come up in the world, though according to this takedown - Why The Brutalist Is Brutal To Watch - which rakes it for getting pretty much everything wrong about the architecture and motivations of designers. While it's an easy path to call the runtime brutal, the cause of The Brutalist's woes started with the blueprints.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.