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| A24 image -- Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in The Brutalisst |
By Dominique Paul Noth
Expanding the Oscar “best” list to 10 nominated films has changed forever the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its nearly 10,000 voting members.
Oscar – now scheduled March 2 -- is trying to make sure that list now incorporates box office values along with the industry view of top meaningful pictures – which means that this year Oscar announced a range of genre films as well as independent features, including some not yet seen in Milwaukee.
In this environment, there seems to be growing admiration for The Brutalist, which clearly has the desire of Oscars’ past – that sense of a sweeping epic. It is a gripping compilation of acting values and cinematic techniques, only available for now in movie theaters.
You will hear a lot about the intense naturalism and subtle reactions of Adren Brody (a leading nominee for best actor Oscar) but the acting scenes are rapidly interwoven with purposeful sequences where the visual and audio expertise take over:
Cameras speeding down roads and train tracks much as new arrivals in this country experienced; immigrants packed into ships seeing the Statue of Liberty upside down; male newcomers after World War II relieving themselves at brothels and street corners; blocks upon blocks of landscapes put together in rapid editing as the film moves from Pennsylvania to Italian quarries; travelogs in the style of old Hollywood short subjects; examples of Brutalism architecture exposed as interwoven wires (imagine a LEGO display without wood or plastic) -- and a brilliant sound background.
Here composer Daniel Blumberg’s lush European orchestral eye-openers and pounding chords alternate with vintage tracks (Dinah Shore singing “Buttons and Bows,” a JFK interview in a whispering background) for events centered 1947 to 1961, plus an epilog in 1980.
The soundscape serves a dynamic role as envisioned by director Brady Corbet, also co-author and producer, and one of my favorite nominees for best director. (This year is notable for best directors who are Oscar choices for the first time.)
Corbet, 36, is new to most filmgoers but is truly a Hollywood baby, having started as a child actor and voice-over actor before moving into TV and film acting roles and then into producing-directing. The result is an astonishing and intellectual command of the cinematic universe, plus inventing a story that is based on history but is pure imagination.
The lead character is not a historic person but is based on many Brutalist architects put together and by many immigrant experiences.
In promotional material – including pretending there is a Laszlos Toth-designed Margaret Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity -- Corbet has provided a compelling cover ethic (including postcards) to make the story feel real. Brutalism in architect was a serious movement associated with post-war society if you count both world wars. Corbet largely invents the pretense that Toth’s Brutalist designs – heavy on concrete building blocks and geometric exactitude -- were inspired by German concentration camps.
There are handouts to the audience (at least in the 70-millimeter showings, blown up from the 35 mm the film was shot in, plus a deliberate 1950s VistaVision screen size to further deepen Corbet’s idea).
Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a celebrated architect from the Bauhaus movement who survives a Buchenwald concentration camp, leaving his wife behind. An incessant smoker and drug addict (partly for physical pain), he is one of the flood of refugees after WWII forced to work as a laborer or draftsman.
He relies on relatives who know his stature and take advantage of it – relatives who have Americanized their names and cheapened their Jewish past to fit in. So they are quick to renounce him and his hooked nose when a volatile rich American (the cleverly named Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.) accuses him of fraud.
Brody’s performance is compellingly natural – an intellectually stubborn, sarcastic and believable modernist who stands up for his training yet is also drawn to the power of money despite his fury and disappointment. He doesn’t regard visiting prostitutes as negating his love of family. Brody’s performance, seen often in facial closeups even during sexual activity, is serious and believable. (Need I point out there are adult themes, even sexually disturbing ones.)
At the story unfolds, the same rich American who scorned him re-emerges contrite and eager for Toth to build a shrine to his late mother. Van Buren is a dominant control freak attempting to talk to Toth as an intellectual equal, recognizing he will get great press by commissioning serious architecture.
This villain role has won a best supporting actor nomination for Guy Pearce, who is not bad though I confess I longed to see what the original acting name chosen, Mark Rylance, would have done with the part.
The story depends on our understanding that Van Buren is the ultimate ugly American, whose violent male rape of Toth triggers much of the finale (by this point we understand the moral implications and hardly need the rape to deepen our understanding, though it is nice that the film lets Van Buren disappear off screen as anger rings around him).
Felicity Jones emerges halfway through the film as Toth’s wife, crippled by years of famine. It is fine performance – also Oscar nominated -- relying on intellectual depth as well as humane support of her husband. The conclusion is something we understand in its moral meaning while we may not buy all the events and techniques in its unfolding.
But this is a brilliant film despite my reservations, even though divided into somewhat fancy sounding chapters: Overture, The Enigma of Arrival, The Hard Core of Beauty and Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale.
You may be daunted hearing of its three-hour 45-minute length plus a 20-minute intermission (with a time clock on the screen to make us look hard at the family portrait before us). I would have liked the intermission about an hour later, when I found the film stretching a bit, but the placement is just right for the concept.
The length and bustle onscreen will not interfere with the audience’s thinking while absorbing. The film indirectly made me contemplate what the recent L.A. wildfires revealed about the fleeting value of most American wealth and architecture – a big point in the film.
Van Buren’s fascination with his own worth makes us look again at our current view of wealthy Americans and corporate bullies. The painful efforts at human connection make us think back at what really creates our motives and our goals.
It is a further effort by Corbet to make us aware we are on a journey to understanding American society as well as how the past help shape it. It is a necessary rather than a brutal cultural lesson.
About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff.
He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly.
A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
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