Brady Corbet's grave period piece The Brutalist (2024) is for me the most disappointing film of the year because it squanders its rather remarkable technical ability and sense of gravitas with a sophomoric and resentful vision of history. But it didn't start that way.
What begins as a hopeful odyssey into the land of liberty complicated by the clashing identities of the new world ends as a bad episode of Euphoria dressed up in mid-century epic fetishism, striving to be the worst kind of self-conscious "classic."
Two images illustrate the utter decline in the quality of symbolism throughout the film. First, the statue of liberty shown triumphantly but inverted. Second, a millionaire WASP raping an immigrant in a cave after uttering some ethnic slurs in the previous scene. Both images are criticisms of the American dream, but only one is worth developing to film.
What begins as a complicated personal journey reduces itself to a heavy-handed, contrived, and unthinking statement of liberal pieties. The opening sequence of Adrien Brody ascending from the dark bowels of the steerage — marred by the murderous pogroms of Europe — into the light of Ellis Island to the atmosphere of Daniel Blumberg's wondrous horns is one audiovisual experience I will remember for a long time. Adrien Brody's Laszlo Toth arrives in the land of opportunity, triumphant and hopeful, but soon learns its a mixed bag and a dog-eat-dog world.
Like the match cut in Lawrence of Arabia, the viewer feels they are in the hands of a director with a vision of the world, a director who will show us new possibilities on the horizon.
Yet Corbet is uncomfortable with nuance and with the power of his technics to uplift viewers. He has to tear it all down. Slipping into the second and third acts as we meet the Van Burens, one feels a resentful hyper-modern fixation on righting wrongs bubble up into the story. To Corbet, the heritage American is a suited crook who bullies others into changing their ethnic last names and who abuses his children because he's a captain of industry. The evil rich son and the sexually domineering WASP dad of the Van Burens are more cartoons than characters. They fall into the painfully current trend of Trad villains of history who are not only stupid, evil, and sexually cruel but who also even lack the virtues we were led to believe they had to begin with.
In this case, the picturesque heart of bootstrapping family life in America is actually — get this! — rotten to its core, and the patriarch Van Buren is an evil rapist. Very brave and subversive! Similar to Don't Worry Darling (2022) (which I criticized for similar reasons), its villain is a collection of politicized cliché's perfect for the "Current Thing" to get across to the viewer. Corbet then has Felicity Jones' character, Erzebet Toth, confront the rapist at his house in another scene which felt not only ahistorical but entirely affected. Toth barges in on a cabal of cigar-swirling heritage Americans and is dragged out of the room on her back so the evil meanies can get back to more plotting and raping. When The Brutalist drops its highly stylized mask, all that's left is a very sophomoric revisionist take on the "immigrant" story told in a knee-jerk petulant manner.
But let's set the historicity and content aside for a moment and just look at the form. After all, we can all have differing views on how the American epic should be reinterpreted in modern times. Let's talk about "white elephant art." This is Manny Farber's term for movies which, as he says, "treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity." That is, movies which are grandiose and self-consciously artistic and which prioritize prestigious elements over spontaneous hardscrabble creation.
The Brutalist employs a kind of cinematic fetishism, throwing the VistaVision logo and the horizontal credit sequence on 70mm grain in our faces to say "Look! Cinema! Remember this?" Farber's 1962 essay resonates perhaps more strongly today. He says that white elephant art (like The Brutalist I would argue) arises from "the need of the director and writer to over-familiarize the audience with the picture it's watching: to blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion."
Here's the funny thing: this ploy Corbet uses — as a technics whizkid to lull us into believing we are witnessing absolute cinema — would've worked had he kept some restraint. In the first half, the commentary was more subtle and even when it began to rear its ugly head I didn't mind because I was enthralled by the style and presentation of this personal journey. But then Corbet's sleight of hand slipped in the second half and I saw the film for what it was: a pretentious hollow shell.
I wish The Brutalist had ended at the intermission; it would've been one of my favorite movies of the year. But if you disagree, write to me: milesvstephenson@gmail.com
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