The Brutalist review: Aesthetic beauty and thematic ambition aren’t enough for Oscar frontrunner
Macclesfield-based film critic James Burgess shares his review of Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist, which arrives at Cinemac this Friday.
From 36-year-old actor turned subversive directorial auteur, Brady Corbet, the critical notices for this film's perpetual publicity machine; a campaign as vast as the film; constantly tell us how 'monumental' and 'stunning' it all is. Agreed, it's executed on a colossal scale, all 214 mins of it, shot in original VistaVision format on 70mm stock film, and set over 35 years.
There's even a traditional style intermission, half-way through, baked in at script stage, to break up the gargantuan task of audiences not having long enough no-screentime attention spans to sit through its entirety in one go.
To contextualise the over-hype, it's currently the hot favourite to win Best Picture at March's Academy Awards, having just been nominated for 10 Oscars, and secured three of the biggest Golden Globe wins last month: Best Drama Picture, Best Director and Best Leading Drama Actor, for Adrien Brody.
Brody plays Lazlo Toth, a Jewish-Hungarian Holocaust survivor, as we chronicle his desperate struggle for acceptance in post-World War II America. His profession is visionary architecture, and he and his osteoporosis-stricken wife (Felicity Jones) are soon approached by an elusive, extremely wealthy benefactor, and are subconsciously ingratiated into their 'new money' home, wealth and decaying social circle.
Curiously, despite Toth being a fictional character, Corbet's film oddly positions him and his achievements as if they're factual. What should've and could've been a grippingly adversarial story of survival, jeopardy and consequence, instead all feels very worthy, slow, narratively unclear and strangely flat. I kept waiting for another major piece of plotting, and by extension, emotional pathos, which never occurs.
As with his last film, 2018's far superior and underrated Vox Lux, Corbet, along with his panoramic cinematographer Lol Crawley (deservedly nominated here), often distance the camera enough to instil its intentionally cold palette, with a constant sense of dread and tension; almost all of the time and often off-puttingly, inconsequentially or frustratingly so; as if we're almost the Lynchian or Kubrickian-esque observers within his isolation; knowing that we should stop Lazlo's association with these parasitic familial figures, but we're unable to.
I was trying to recollect an equivalent I could liken this to – my closest was Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme 95 film Festen (1998), where, without spoiling any revelations, a family's dinner party celebration is broken by a shocking discovery of horrific, secretive violence…
Guy Pearce succeeds in creating one of the scariest, most repellent villains on screen in recent years. Along within his son (a brilliant performance from Joe Alwyn), where the film is strongest is alluding to what we almost see but don't actually see – leading us to question many loose ends ourselves. The problem is, there are too many. Character's fates are left unresolved, found footage is included for no reason, as are prolonged scenes of strange sexual encounters. Daniel Blumberg's unconventionally thrumming score also has the effect of distancing the audience, rather than gripping or engaging them; a sonic allegory for the overall effect of the film itself.
Even with a clutch of very good performances, led by Brody – it's very beautiful, chillingly prescient (given how little has changed on the vehemently unsympathetic political stance on immigration in the last 80 years), very dark and personal – but aesthetic beauty and thematic ambition aren't enough.
RATING: * *
Macclesfield resident James Burgess is an actor and film critic with a master's degree in Film Studies.
Follow him on X - @Jamesfilmcritic
Tickets for The Brutalist at Cinemac are available from www.cinemac.org.uk.
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