With one press conference canceled and another event hilariously reported to a full day early, my Friday afternoon slate freed itself up on Feb. 7th. Ergo: this crime reporter and lifestyle columnist hybrid of late could get back to doing what he has historically done best, and used to do damn-near exclusively: watching movies, and writing about them.
AMC Stony Brook 17’s 2:25 p.m. matinee screening of Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” starring Oscar nominees Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce that day let out at 6:15 p.m. You read that right. Clocking in at just over 3-and-a-half hours, Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” (2018) thereby left to hold its palpably-brewed pint, “The Brutalist” notably has a 15-minute intermission built into its 70mm film reel and viewing experience.
It’s the first American release to feature such since Quentin Tarantino’s roadshow tour of “The Hateful Eight” (2015), and only the second film I have seen in theaters that sports a pee-break and drink refill queue halftime component since the 50th-anniversary re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).
Cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike, do believe the hype: it is not as hyperbolic as you may think at first read that actor-turned-auteur Corbet’s bona fide breakout is scored to scan as epic-scaled as “2001,” and by far more digestible means.
The Brutalist” tells the tale of László Tóth (Brody, a Hungarian-Jewish visionary-grade architect who narrowly survives the Holocaust. That his initial optical intake of the Statue of Liberty upon his boat’s dock into America at the culmination of the film’s hot open sequence is shot upside-down is as blatantly fortuitous as the keen and naked eye could suspect.
Tóth and his family pursue “The American Dream,” only to get gobsmacked with the gruesome divide between what immigrants of this era were sold on paper versus what many were unfortunately subjected to when the dream would runneth awry. This includes horror stories where even those with the talent, intellect and drive to be hand-plucked from the mud under the charitable guise of generosity could be soon enough expected to do the supremely elite’s bidding in exponentially troublesome ways.
Though it literally took me four days to finish the $17.90, 2-lb. Bavarian cinnamon pretzel I ordered ahead of the most scintillating 4 hours of entertainment I experienced during a news-week cycle where an NFL team featuring the league-best quarterback and the love interest of the most famous person on the planet going for a Super Bowl three-peat, it took me less time to recognize the cinematic greatness being unleashed before my eyes.
Expanding upon conceits also at play within his front-loaded, but nevertheless slept upon “Vox Lux” (2018), wherein Natalie Portman plays a singer whose popstar was born the day she survived a school shooting, Corbet essentially modern melds his own approach to the “Robert Johnson at the Crossroads” legend.
Like Portman’s Celeste admits, László Tóth sells his soul to the Devil (Guy Pearce as Harrison Lee Van Buren, an industrialist both infatuated with and jealous of Toth’s creative boundlessness). Subsequently, he—and we, the audience—must face the wrath of the Devil’s clap-back.
To cope, Tóth surrenders to the drugscape not-so-hidden beneath the surface of the high-scope projects his most prolific client commissions him to design. He is ripped at the seams by his conflicting willingness to sacrifice himself for the sake of his family’s good living, but also stubbornly indebted to preserving the sanctity of his great and unparalleled creations, a la Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s classic, “The Fountainhead.”
"The Brutalist” also surpasses Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” (2024) in the consumability department, re: “Fountainhead”-indebted works. Whereas Coppola seeks to sci-fi grip with long-promised concepts galore, Corbet conducts a grounded drama with the loudest of batons, not in Nolan fashion but with a truly original confidence that mirrors his protagonist’s.
Just as Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” (2008) invites one to imagine said title applies to both its caped-crusader hero and his agent of total chaos foe, “The Brutalist” describes the type of architect Tóth is, and the personality of the hand that feeds—and feasts—upon him.
By this notion, “The Brutalist” also deeply resonates as a metaphor for the creative process itself. This cannot be coincidental, given Corbet’s set presence as a screen actor before the directorial chapter of his Hollywood life, which was surely wrought with countless “no, you can’t make this” deterrents before he made “The Brutalist.”
The somehow mere $10 million-budgeted effort epitomizes the high-art, commercial darling hybrid that green-lights anything a sudden one-man commodity wants to make next, hence how out there the “Mickey 17” trailer seems compared to Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-netting “Parasite” (2019); but hey, we’re not complaining.
Its low budget just may be the most shocking punch in a film packed with several. What Corbet achieved in defiance of the nine-figure slogs that define this, a potency-diluded era for the theatrical release—which Tarantino recently declared had actually died in 2019—should, and will be studied in film courses moving forward.
“The Brutalist” is an instant classic in every sense of the term, and will be a sure-fire Oscar winner at next month’s Academy Award ceremony, where late-night comic icon and showman extraordinaire Conan O’Brien is expected to display more reverence and less contempt for the cinematic arts than certain hosts of recent memory.
The only question remains: how many gold statuettes among their 10 nominations will “The Brutalist” take home?
COVID delays kicked Joel Edgerton out of the lead role, and brought Adrien Brody back to where he belongs. If all goes according to mass predictions, a mob mentality we proudly join, history will not remember him as the one-off winner for “The Pianist” (2002), as a Wes Anderson repertory player, or even as NBA Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley in HBO’s criminally canceled far too soon “Winning Time” (2022-2023) series.
The Academy could have easily made a special exception for its submission criteria to allow Brody to contend, because, let’s face it, his turn as “The Godfather of the Showtime Lakers” was as compelling as it gets.
The next big director on the block is Brady Corbet, who I first caught acting opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt in indie-adored Gregg Akari’s “Mysterious Skin” (2004).
That movie devastated me, and so did this.