“‘The Brutalist’ review: Brady Corbet’s masterpiece of a great American epic”

“‘The Brutalist’ review: Brady Corbet’s masterpiece of a great American epic”

About five centuries ago, the artist Michelangelo spent months procuring 100 tons of marble from the Carrara quarry, only to find that his patron, Pope Julius II, refused to reimburse him for the cost. Enraged, Michelangelo fled Rome without completing the Pope’s future tomb, causing the angry and panicked Pope to send men to drag him back. Even after this turn of events, Michelangelo agreed to work with him again on a new commission: the Sistine Chapel, where he painted the Pope’s face on a portrait of the prophet Zechariah. If you look at the cherub over Zechariah’s shoulder, his fingertips touch in that unmistakable Italian gesture that means: Eff you.

Art touches the soul. But underneath the transcendence there is also money, ego and fear. I would advise you to keep this in mind when watching The Brutalist, but director Brady Corbet makes this clear. Co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, this killer film chronicles the plight of a fictional Hungarian architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who shares Michelangelo’s best and worst qualities: genius, perfectionism, stubbornness, grumpiness, anger, and a punishing commitment to one’s own Brilliance. There’s even a humiliating scene in the real Carrara, where the mighty modern excavators look as ridiculous as Hot Wheels on the basement stairs against the harsh splendor of the quarry. (And as a final connecting point, in 1972, a real Hungarian named Laszlo Toth used a hammer to deface Michelangelo’s Pietà – or, technically, deface the nose.)

However, this Tóth is a Hungarian Jew who survived a concentration camp and a Nazi regime that viewed his creations as having a “non-Germanic character.” Tóth’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) also endured it, but they don’t arrive until the second half of the three hour and 35 minute film. (Please, more films should have intermissions – they’re wonderful.) Corbet and his cinematographer Lol Crawley introduce us to Tóth in the confines of a mysterious, hectic and dirty place, as the camera jostles to keep up with Brody’s back. and then – democracy ho! – They reveal that we are on a boat that has just entered New York Harbor. Most immigrant stories tend to portray the Statue of Liberty with grandeur. Here she is filmed upside down against a bright white sky, while the old girl rocks on an unsteady axle. The result is seasickness.

“The Brutalist” is set in Pennsylvania in the 1950s and presents the papal opponent as an American idol: a very rich man. The tycoon, played with constipated entitlement by Guy Pearce, goes by the pastiche name of Harrison Lee Van Buren. (Was Warbucks on the nose too?) Van Buren’s immature failson Harry (Joe Alwyn) is, in a roundabout way, responsible for his father giving Tóth the contract to build a huge building, and occasionally Harry poses as if he’s in charge . Pennsylvania, a film strip says, is the land of decisions. Nevertheless, the project falls into misunderstandings and contradictions as it transforms from a cultural center into a combination of competing interests. Tóth strangely insists on building a skylight in which a sunlit cross shines. I suspect he’s trying to fend off these energy vampires.

Two men in suits watch the action.

Guy Pearce (left) and Joe Alwyn in the film “The Brutalist”.

(A24)

Corbet is also an artist with ambition. That’s something I’ve admired about him since his first two films, Childhood of a Leader and his wonderful flop Vox Lux. You can feel his brain whirring in every shot of The Brutalist, zooming in as quickly as his subject from POV shots of a speeding bus, train and gondola. He’s packed the film with so many ideas that you appreciate its length, despite the drumbeat of newsreels and radio shows that jump in to make sure we’re aware that Israel was founded and heroin is bad. (You break into a rousing chant: “Steel! Steel! Steel!”) There’s also an experimental score by Daniel Blumberg, which consists of bangs and piano hits, as well as what sound like a dozen screaming balloons. It’s great.

Like “Tár” and “There Will Be Blood,” this is a cultural psychoanalysis presented as a fake biopic. Anyone who’s ever had a head-scratching boss or been on the losing side of a dogfight between taste and money will identify with Brody’s kinetic martyr, a character so scrutinized that you can count his pubic hair in a close-up can. The film announces itself as a modern epic and deserves this golden frame. They are absolutely certain that at some point someone must have come up with the idea that this is Citizen Kane from the perspective of the interior designer of Xanadu.

One of the ironies is that Tóth finds the New World retrograde. Back in the old world, before the war, he studied at the Bauhaus and devoted himself to a structural purity that makes Manhattan’s most beautiful skyscrapers appear fussy. The war robbed him of everything – papers, luggage, family, career – and left him with physical and emotional scars and a drug addiction that surprises us. It’s tempting to see Tóth’s blunt sketches as a metaphor for being stripped down to the essentials. But Corbet rejects this kind of narrative convention and waits until the last five minutes of the film to give us a full overview of Tóth’s life story and the actual significance of his buildings.

Tóth is who he is; his taste is deeply rooted in his being. In contrast, his American-based cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has learned to blend in with the WASPs and kowtow to the rich, making him a moderately successful middle-class salesman and, in the eyes of this film, a failure . My favorite scenes are the ones where the Van Burens and their goofball friends are confused that Tóth and his family aren’t more grateful, especially after Jones leaves her usual long-suffering wife behind and her character becomes really interesting. These immigrants make the Van Burens feel small – nothing special, just rich. Beethoven is said to have sharply said to his patron, the Austrian royal family Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky: “Prince, what you are, you are because of circumstances and birth.” What I am, I am through myself.”

Corbet’s desire to do it to the man dominates the final section of the film, which is also the sparsest. Suddenly, the film claims that sticking to one’s principles – something Tóth does repeatedly with painful consequences – will ultimately lead to great art, even though it gives us no reason for this optimism. Perhaps Corbet was generous. His own producers agreed to finance a film that feels entirely like him, which is wonderful, even considering a few mistakes that could have used an outside voice. Aren’t there too many glamor shots of blonde actresses whose characters never deserve the devotion? Shouldn’t the starving refugees have a reaction to sitting at a banquet table full of cake?

The film’s only utter flaw is that it suddenly goes from emotional abuse to literal assault, which unintentionally comes across as a queasy, tasteless joke about how artists get screwed over. I can sympathetically imagine that Corbet saw this as an undercurrent of tension between his characters. But the scene is so abrupt and disjointed, given all the drama we’ve immersed ourselves in, and so unsupported by the three hours we’ve already seen, that this pivotal moment seems like cheap psychology the script can only offer I can’t afford it.

Nevertheless, there would be no “Sonata Pathétique” without Prince Lichnowsky’s wallet, no Sistine Chapel without Pope Julius II, no brave young talents like Corbet, who create their worthy major works without anyone paying for them. “The Brutalist” argues and proves by its very existence that the madness of great works of art is that they require invention And resources And Cooperation. These are also the building blocks of a society, a shaky foundation that forces the idealistic Tóth to flee one rotten land to another. But it leaves a trail of brilliance in its wake – and this film, despite its flaws, is one of them.

“The Brutalist”

In English, Italian and Polish, with English subtitles

Rated: R, for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use and some language

Duration: 3 hours, 35 minutes

Play: Limited edition on Friday December 20th

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