The Current Cinema - Sydney supercinephile Barrie Pattison begs to seriously disagree about THE BRUTALIST (Brady Corbet, USA, 2024)

 

(Editor's note: SPOILER ALERT - Plot and story is revealed passim)

I’d have to go back decades to find a film I loathed as much as The Brutalist. Tony Ginnane was a category killer there for a bit...  maybe Lawrence Tierney in The Hoodlum. This one has pretensions that they never mustered.

For the first couple of hours (there are three plus of them - prologue, part one, interval, part two and epilogue) it looks like it may be edging us towards a serious assessment of Twentieth Century Values. It’s 1947 and Hungarian Jewish refugee, the ever-oppressed  Adrien Brody struggles to the deck of his crowded migrant transport ship to see the Statue of Liberty - a scene we’ve watched in fact and fiction films hundreds of times, except this time  Lol Crawley’s camera is positioned so that Lady Liberty is upside down. We don’t know it but this is a dim way of delivering the mission statement.

To the music of Spike Jones and Bob Hope, Brody is welcomed by cousin from the old country, Alessandro Nivola, who has put a bed in the storage room of his Miller & Sons strip mall furniture shop. There never was a Miller or any sons but that goes down well with the U.S. customers. He even provides a weekend meal.  Soon Brody has constructed the nice tubular steel desk set in the display window. Nivola’s sexy blonde wife Emma Laird says it looks like a tricycle. She’s gonna be trouble and Brody will end depending on the nuns for shelter.

Yes,  trouble is already on the way.  Customer Joe Alwyn wants to surprise his absent dad by making-over their library and Nivola puts forward his workman.   Brody was a respected architect before the war. The Library, as it turns out, is in the massive country estate with the covered timber bridge. Brody surveys the job, doubles the estimate and brings in his bread line black friend Isaach De Bankolé to do the heavy lifting. However before they are finished Magnate with Mummy issues Guy Pearce storms back, indignant at finding strangers in his home, and sends them off without paying.

However, shortly later, Pearce is chauffeured to the yard where Brody is laboring and,  in his lunch break meets him at a diner,  producing both the copy of Look Magazine with a spread on his library and the research he’s done unearthing Brody’s work in the old country. “What is one of the most brilliant architects in Europe doing shoveling coal in Pennsylvania?”  Brody asks if he can keep the Europe photos? He leaves Look.

Now we are getting to it - a commission to construct a massive monument to Pearce’s dead mum, overlooking the mining town and a show-case of Brody’s genius. There are clues planted none too subtly. Brody proposes including a swimming pool and is vetoed because Pearce was never a swimmer and the haven for all faiths is going to have a massive cross on the roof. Jewish Brody receives this news in his screen-filling mid shot, without reacting.

In with all this, they learn that Brody’s wife Felicity Jones is not dead but living in poverty in Hungary with their niece, withdrawn Raffey Cassidy.  Her letters are voice over on vintage industrial films about the wonders of Pennsylvania steel. Though she’s not classified suitable refugee material, Pearce’s Jewish fellow magnate Peter Polycapou is up to speed on the Displaced Persons’ Act. There are strings to pull.

About now there’s a quarter hour break with single on screen wedding photo graphic and countdown. I’m still pondering the complexities of what we are being presented.

The obnoxious Alwyn expresses interest in Cassidy.  Jones is added into the mix, as is Pearce’s regular dim wit architect (someone say Sydney Opera house) and a train wreck. Despite a thin thirty million budget, the Hungarian-based shooting includes a trip to an Italian Carrara marble quarry. Writer-director Bradley Vox Lux Corbet’s years acting for Michael Haeneke  and Lars Von Trier have tilted him towards the Euro-art movie He spares us nothing.  Cast is good but Brody’s doped-up tantrums make him lose him any audience sympathy.

 The movie embraces its core statement - that US crassness is dollar weighted to overcome European good taste. Well now, there’s a fresh thought! After the much better Anora that makes two big new movies about cashed up vulgarians overriding American law and values, surfacing in the Trump Mark 2 era. I can’t help noticing  that Sidney Lumet covered this more precisely in Just Tell Me What You Want, one of his lesser films at that.  Here Jones spells it out “This whole country is rotten.” We are told how much more worthy the new state of Israel is.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there totting up the movie references.  Jones first glimpsed as an isolated inset,  like Maggie Chen in Ashes of Time, gold lit sex excess (Babylon),  the guests in evening dress straggling across the hill at night (Dolce Vita) a final montage of the (made up) architectural triumphs in the best Ken Russel tradition,  They even run to an authentic-looking porno to go with their academy frame documentary footage with the resurrection of fifties VistaVision (and logo) though what they show is totally unlike the overlit, all sharp images of the wide film process’ first outings.

I felt that rather than watching drama, I was working through a shopping list  - wonders of industrialisation and the blessings of culture, ugly Americans,  antisemitism, handicapped sex,  male rape.  By the time they’d filled their work quota, I was thinking how much better I’d have spent my time watching Anora again.

And to round things out, we get to the reviews, most of which mention the other films the writers know. Megalopolis, Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood, Son of Saul  are repeaters. However I have yet to find a single one that makes the bleeding obvious comparison -  Gary Cooper doing Ayn Rand’s contractually unalterable architect script The Fountainhead  for King Vidor and Warners . Does that tell you something about current Film Studies?