The Brutalist (Jan 17)

At the time of this writing, The Brutalist is a frontrunner for Best Picture nominations which have been delayed by the Pacific Palisades fires in LA. All I really knew about this movie, besides the fact that it’s about architecture, is that it’s pretty fucking long and bucks trends by having an intermission, which Wicked did not. Slate ran a piece that claimed Guy Pearce’s performance was the greatest of his career, and Dana Stevens has some issues with the ending. I think I understand after having seen it why this movie has enamored so many critics. It’s a historical drama that doesn’t have nearly the pretension you might expect from its peers in years’ past, like Oppenheimer. The Brutalist at all times is charming and darkly funny, even when its dipping into serious themes.

The writer-director, boy wonder Brady Corbett (co-writing with Mona Fastvold), who also wrote Vox Lux and a few other Serious Films from the last decade, has found a way to make a fusty, potentially pedantic subject matter into a spicy little firecracker of a movie that never feels like’s it’s dragging, in part because you get a full fifteen minutes between acts to stretch your legs. I think I was expecting this to be a globe-trotting, life-spanning epic in the vein of a Robertson Davies novel like Fifth Business (something like the weirdly off-putting Del Toro collab with Silver Linings a few winters ago), but it actually felt a lot more like Phantom Thread in its aesthetics and sensibilities. And I’m fully aware that at this point, comparing this film to a PTA film and an obscure Del Toro experiment as well as a mid-century Canadian classic is going to really narrow the potential appeal of this film, but what I mean to say is that The Brutalist is weirdly accessible for a film about architectural style. Adrien Brody is catty and capable. People in the audience (YOUNG people) were laughing out loud throughout, like startling themselves with how funny lines were. And you’ll hate Guy Pearce and then love him and then hate him and love him alternately throughout. The film is sexy and kind of relentlessly so. And the ending is probably the sassiest little epilogue you have seen in a hot minute.

There are no architectural movies just good movies and bad ones.