"The Brutalist" is bad

The Oscar frontrunner is a lousy piece of filmmaking.

With Oscar voting opening this week, I’m going to post unpaywalled my review of what appears to now be the Best Picture frontrunner after the ridiculous-sounding Emilia Perez got cancelled because the tweets of its transgender ex-man lead “actress" turned out to be right wing, expressing irreverence about George Floyd and other sacred cows of Hollywood.

Emilia Perez got 13 Oscar nominations, while tied for second with nine nods were Wicked, an adequate fan service vehicle but not one expected to win too many of the glittering prizes, and The Brutalist.

So, the arthouse The Brutalist appears to now be the Oscar frontrunner, although it too had a scandal, involving its use of AI to make Adrien Brody’s Hungarian (as impoverished Jewish Bauhaus architect Lazlo Toth raped by a WASP capitalist named, cringefully, Harrison Lee Van Buren) sound more authentic.

The Brutalist is wildly popular with critics and fairly popular with the smallish number of people who have paid to see it:

It’s made $13 million in North America and $6 million overseas.

Back before Christmas I posted a long review on Substack showing, in the not-paywalled part, how it was horrible history (in truth, Bauhaus architects were wildly popular with American elites in the 1930s and few bothered to come over after 1945 because they had so many lucrative opportunities at home to rebuild their own blown-up continent). But I left my review of the movie qua movie behind the paywall.

So, as a public service, here’s my review:

OK, The Brutalist is bad history, but is it fine art? Is this a good movie? Or were the (heavily Jewish) executives whom [gentile writer-director Brady] Corbet hates justified in doubting his talent?

Much to my surprise, The Brutalist, despite it’s rave reviews, is bad. It’s probably not as bad as 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s own architect-as-stand-in-for-the-director film, Megalopolis.

But, then again, it might possibly be worse.

For example, why is The Brutalist movie so ungodly long?

Not because the movie is full of “novelistic detail,” as countless critics have enthused.

It’s not. Corbet doesn’t know or care that much about society.

So, not much actually happens other than every so often, something goes wrong with a project and then everybody gets unfairly angry at our hero. (For example, a train crashes, so the rich WASPs immediately fire the Jewish architect even though he didn’t have anything to do with the train.)

It’s like a 215 minute-long episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where everybody gets mad at Larry, except that Larry David works a lot harder on making his plots psychologically realistic. Also, The Brutalist is brutally unfunny (except for a few laughs that Guy Pearce earns with his Mid-Atlantic elocution school diction that sounds like Katharine Hepburn’s dad).

Instead, the film is so protracted because Corbet is the most self-indulgent self-editor since Peter Jackson.

In one scene, the rich man tells the poor man to stay in his guest house tonight and the maid will bring him fresh towels in the morning. Cut to the next morning and a shot of a maid carrying towels. After about two and a half seconds, I’m thinking to myself, “OK, I get it: the maid is bringing the towels. That’s been established. Cut to the next scene.”

Yet, on she walks.

And on and on.

And still she trudges ever onward. Does Corbet show you 20 seconds of the maid bringing linens? 30 seconds? 40 seconds?

I don’t know, but what I do know is the whole movie is like that. I could cut 90 minutes out of The Brutalist and keep 99% of what’s interesting in it.

Corbet only had a $10 million budget, but he wanted to make a movie that critics would call “monumental,” so he unconscionably dragged out each take.

Another problem is the main character’s thick Hungarian accent, which kept me from following about one quarter of his lines. I’d recommend that you skip seeing The Brutalist in a theatre and wait for it to come out on streaming so you could watch it on your TV with the subtitles on … except that the 3/4th of the lines that I could understand are banal.

In reality, modernist architects tended to be exceptionally articulate and outrageous salesmen, as has been pointed out repeatedly by 20th century conservative satirists, such as Wolfe and Stoppard. For example, here’s Evelyn Waugh 1928 parody of Gropius and/or Le Corbusier in Decline and Fall’s Professor Silenus:

‘The problem of architecture as I see it,’ he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro concrete and aluminum, ‘is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,’ he said gloomily; ‘please tell your readers. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.’

The journalist looked doubtful. 'Now, Professor,' he said, 'tell me this. About how much do you reckon to make out of this job, if you don't mind my asking?'

'Fuel,' said Professor Silenus. 'While the work is being done, the machine must be fed. After that let it stand idle or be set to other work. Why should I receive fuel when I am not working?'

'Peer's Sister's-in-Law Mansion Builder refuses fee,' thought the journalist happily. 'Will machines live in houses? Amazing forecast of Professor-Architect.'

But Corbet does not have interesting things to say about architecture.

In general, his script is kind of dumb. For example, the architect’s stroke of genius is to put a window into the roof of his exurban Philadelphia chapel that will project a cross onto the altar whenever the sun is directly overhead.

But, of course, Pennsylvania is not in the tropics, so the sun there is never 90 degrees straight up.

Much has been made about how Corbet filmed his movie in 70 millimeter Vista Vision, the first use of this 1950s technique since a Marlon Brando film in the early 1960s. The physical film weighs 300 pounds.

But, don’t expect it to look as good as Lawrence of Arabia. The Brutalist is filmed in 2005-era shaky-cam with excessive close-ups. It’s kind of fuzzy-looking.

It’s often compared to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, but that seems to be more related to Anderson’s failures as a screenwriter than his successes as a director. Imagine There Will Be Blood without Daniel Day-Lewis and on a small budget.

So, maybe the Jewish moguls who so outraged Corbet by doubting his genius were right after all?