Films at the Fox: The Brutalist is a movie we get once in a generation
Local student Brady Burkett shares his reviews of movies that have recently been shown, or will be shown, at the Fox Theatre on Queen Street East in the Beach.
By BRADY BURKETT
Very shortly after Brady Corbet’s new film The Brutalist opens, we are introduced to our protagonist Lázló Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect making his way to America after the end of the Second World War. He’s inside of a dark, crowded ship, and the camera frantically and shakily follows him as he pushes his way through the throng. At times, especially initially, it’s difficult for the audience to discern what’s going on.
The score builds and builds, until at last the doors leading to the ship’s deck burst open and the music bursts into glorious, triumphant brass. Lázló and his friend embrace as they look up and see the Statue of Liberty, which descends to greet the camera upside-down as the music climaxes into an instantly iconic “BUM-BA-DUM-BUM!”, a motif which features heavily in the film’s marketing. By all accounts, the audience is in store for the bombastic American epic the film has promised to be.
That section of the score, that “BUM-BA-DUM-BUM!”, is never heard in the film again.
By all accounts, The Brutalist appears to be harkening back to a bygone era of cinematic grandeur and spectacle, epic stories of the mythic American dream which end in either triumph or tragedy.
It’s shot in gorgeous and grand Vistavision, includes a brief overture and a 15-minute intermission, and (the subject of much discussion surrounding the film), runs approximately three hours and 40 minutes long, including the aforementioned intermission. However, it takes these signifiers that audiences recognize as meaning a Great American Film and uses them not to become one itself, but rather as a disguise to conceal something far more challenging, unique, and interesting.
I am admittedly getting ahead of myself, however, and I acknowledge that little of this is relevant as to how The Brutalist functions as a piece of entertainment, which is why a majority of people read reviews. It functions magnificently, for the most part.
The story follows Tóth as he struggles to make a name for himself in the new country, eventually being commissioned by wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren to build a community centre in honor of Van Buren’s late mother. The bulk of the movie is about Lázló’s attempts to build it, and how his relationships with Van Buren and his wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet develop overtime.
The film’s first half is as propulsive and engaging as cinema gets, tightly constructed and plotted as the energy builds throughout. The entire theatre entered intermission abuzz with excitement and activity. Even as the second half becomes messier, headier, slower, and more sprawling, it is never for one second boring. Fear not the admittedly daunting runtime; it absolutely flies by.
From a purely technical perspective, I can hardly find a fault. The cinematography is beautiful and grandiose without feeling cheap or overly flashy, and the score is one of the year’s very best, melding both recognizable and utterly unique sounds to create, combined with the cinematography, an entirely distinctive audiovisual language.
The supporting cast are all solid, with Joe Alwyn as Van Buren’s slimy son being the standout in that department, but our three leads are where the film’s true magic lies. Felicity Jones does very respectable work as Erzsébet, particularly in one scene towards the end that will without a doubt be played as her Oscar clip; however, Guy Pierce as Van Buren and Adrien Brody as Tóth are the easy standouts.
Brody turns in predictably excellent work, but this is a career-best performance even by his high standards. He’s on-screen for almost the entirety of the very lengthy runtime, but he never falters for a single moment, and even as Lázló radically changes and develops over the course of the movie, he feels entirely authentic in every second. Pierce is an absolute scene-stealer, managing to provide his character with necessary depth whilst remaining delightfully over-the-top in his blatant evil.
I somewhat alluded to this earlier, but an opinion that I’ve seen frequently parrotted online is that the film has an essentially perfect first half before it jumps the shark, so to speak, in the second, making increasingly strange decisions leading up to a weak and underwhelming epilogue. And while I can understand where this opinion is coming from, I couldn’t disagree with it more.
Yes, the film’s second half fails to live up to the delirious, goosebump-inducing highs of the first half, and yes, the ending lacks dramatic catharsis – that’s the point.
The Brutalist is a deconstruction of the American dream down to its core, so it makes complete sense that after building itself up as a classical cinematic epic, it would proceed to ultimately pull the rug out from under us and reveal the depressing realities under the surface. The ending deliberately obfuscates the film’s true meaning in an utterly fascinating way and leaves me with so much more to think about than a traditional unambiguous happy/sad ending ever could.
I wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t mean to imply that it’s more boring than the first half, either; it’s equally engaging and still provides us with plenty of the flashy monologues and set pieces audiences come to these movies for, just in a much darker and deliberately challenging way.
To call The Brutalist a new American masterpiece would be accurate but misleading. The film intentionally presents itself in that tradition in order to confront the audience with far more questions and ambiguities than films of that ilk almost ever do. It’s an overwhelming movie, but one that’s never for one minute boring or uninteresting, and its themes and ideas have left me thinking about it for days after. From a technical perspective, it’s always impressive, with top-notch performances and assured direction.
From one Brady ___et to another, you did an amazing job, Corbet. I implore everyone reading this to go see it. This is the type of movie we get once in a generation.
I give it a ranking of 10 out of 10.
The Fox Theatre is located at 2236 Queen St. E. The Brutalist is now on screen at the Fox. Showtime is Thursday, Feb. 6, at 4:30 p.m. For more information on upcoming films playing at the Fox, please visit https://www.foxtheatre.ca
EDITOR’S NOTE: Brady Burkett is a local resident and student. The opinions in the reviews are his, and the reviews are not sponsored or vetted by the Fox Theatre.
