07a: THE BRUTALIST

 

STARRING: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankole, Alessandro Nivola. Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Directed by Brady Corbet. Budget $9 million. Running time 215 minutes. Or THREE HOURS AND 58 MINUTES. There's also a 15 minute intermission, I don't know it that's part of the running time or extra. Either way, it four minutes shorter than Cleopatra and doesn't even include the fabulous entry into Rome. 

PRETENTIOUSNESS thy name is THE BRUTALIST, a 215 minute style over content film of such turgid tedium that even the inclusion of some vintage black and white hardcore p*rn shoe-horned in for some inexplicable reason can't save it from being an exercise in self-indulgent of such epic proportions that it boarders on the most astonishing piece of cinematic onanism ever committed to film. 

The film is split into three sections called: Overture, Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival, Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty, and finished off with Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale.

The film starts promisingly enough in 1947, as Jewish Hungarian H*l*caust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody), arrives in New York to see the Statue of Liberty upside down and celebrates his arrival and freedom by getting a bl*wjob off a prostitute before bussing off to Philadelphia to live in the backroom of a furniture showroom run by his cousin, Attila and his wife. There he befriends a Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé) a young man and single parent in a poverty food line. Later László and Attila are hired to renovate the library of the Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a fantastically wealthy industrialist and cultural snob. Discovering his wonderful Art Deco library has been converted into a Brutalist atrocity, he refuses to pay and László gets thrown out by his cousin and ends up living in a charity work house with Gordon and his son. It's there we discover László is addicted to heroin. However Van Buren tracks László down and tells him that he had no idea he was an internationally acclaimed architect and asks him to build a gigantic monument to his dead mum in the Brutalist style and László says 'yeah, why not, I've got nothing else on.' and so begins the main story.

From then on it's a 'so slow, it's barely moving' journey of ennui, I mean think of a slug in a race with a snail kinda slow, as a serious of banal events happen to hamper the building of the world's ugliest building in the history of building.

Meanwhile László beloved wife Erzsébet Tóth (Felicity Jones) and Zsófia, László's orphaned teenage niece, who has been struck mute by her Dachau experiences are still trapped in Soviet controlled Europe and Buren offers to get them repatriated to the US. Then more stuff sort of happens, there's a train wreck, some drug taking, lots of waffle and we're reminded that the core message of this film is "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” that counts and you begin to suspect you've been duped. In this case, the journey is 215 minutes of slow tedium, which you hope is going to lead you somewhere and it just doesn't. 'Maybe', you think, 'just around this corner something is going to happen, something profound and powerful', but then another corner has been rounded, and another, and still nothing beyond what is on display has been revealed. Late into the second half, and after the 15 minute intermission, a drunken László is raped by Van Buren in an act of domination, while they're scouting for Italian marble. This too is just sort of just noted, and despite the fact László becomes more driven, more belligerent and more angry nothing more is said, until his wife brings it up at a dinner party and Van Buren has her thrown out.

Then the film sort of ends with a pointless epilogue set in Venice in the 1980s  for the first Architecture Biennale where everyone is dead except for, guest of honour, László, who now sits in a wheelchair with stupid old man make up on.

Add to that all a strange choice of ambient music that pervades every goddam second, with whisper level random music from the era intercut with radio, popular music of the day, it's non-stop and fucking annoying. 

Actually of the two parts, the second is a lot more 'drama packed', drug overdoses and some shouting sort of drama. But nothing really happens, The gigantic, hideously ugly multiple blocks of poorly poured concrete sits atop of the hill like a humongous blocky dog shit and we discover that tunnels László built beneath it  symbolise the spiritual link between László and Erzsébet while they survived the death camps of the N*zis, and its tall blocky towers represent the chimneys at the Death Camps. Very noble and very button pushing. Oh, we can't criticise this film cos it deals with serious issues like the H*l*caust. 

Well, 215 minutes of this is enough for anyone and frankly I couldn't care less about any of the characters, for a profound film about the absolute horrors of the N*zis and Auschwitz I'd say watch Zone of Interest, which staggered me to the core and left me profoundly moved and shaken. But this, it's all so ponderous and arrogant, "look everybody! We're all a bunch of serious actors and film makers striving to make something worthy enough to win loads of Oscars and shit."

Well, shit off.

5/10