I didn’t find Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist (A24, 12.20) distancing or vaguely off-putting or dislikable. Well, I did but it was worse than that. The cold, hard truth is that I hated, hated, HATED it. I was seething with disdain, convulsed with loathing. I found it slow, soul-draining and dull as dishwater.
I began to disengage less than 15 minutes in. I deeply hated Lol Crawley‘s dreary, murky-ass VistaVision cinematography. The dialogue sounded soft, whispery and often muddy-murky, and my son Dylan had the same aural experience so don’t tell me it’s my aging ears.
Daniel Blumberg‘s overture lasts for…what, 30 or 35 seconds, if that? The only overture that’s shorter is heard during the opening seconds of Pearl Harbor, written by Hans Zimmer, and it’s a much catchier composition.
Set in a glum, late 1940s and ‘50s gulag of suburban Pennsylvania and New Jersey, The Brutalist is an unwelcome envelopment…the 215-minute running time is a direct result of Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s screenplay yielding zero narrative urgency. The film feels like a head cold, vaguely suffocating and narcotized…somberly, pretentiously affected…like a three-hour-plus stretch in a Brady Corbet concentration camp…for my money it doesn’t engage or arouse or put any kind of hook in…it doesn’t even begin to organically or narratively develop into anything that an Average Joe or Jane might find compelling or which might amount to a hill of beans.
I didn’t give a shit about Adrien Brody‘s Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian holocaust refugee blah blah you’re boring my ass off. Toth is a gifted architect with an elegant sense of design, a bizarre back-room heroin habit and a curious, joined-at-the-hip friendship with Gordon, a mostly silent black dude (Isaachy de Bankole)…a relationship that makes no sense from a seven-decades-old cultural perspective, particularly that of a shaken Eastern European. Is Gordon his dealer or something?
As I took stock of Toth during the first 20 to 30 minutes and particularly a bus-station scene in which he succumbs to effusive, gushing sobs upon learning that his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) has survived the Holocaust horrors of Eastern European Jewry, I felt tortured and doomed by the notion of having to hang with this lethargic simpleton for the next three-plus hours.
It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want his company — it was the fact that if Toth had been murdered at the half-hour mark I would have breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was muttering my HE death wish….”die, you lethargic, cigarette-smoking junkie fucker….die, die, die, die, die,” etc.
I felt a bit more toleration for Guy Pearce‘s Harrison Lee Van Buren, “a wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s most important client” blah blah, but I didn’t care at all for his bullshit son (Joe Alwyn) or anyone else. I wanted Alessandro Nivola, Brody’s furniture store cousin who won’t stop smiling and hugging and cheek-kissing Brody and then hugging some more…stop it!…I wanted him bitch-slapped or better yet made a recipient of a stray bullet.
I hated everyone and everything in this film. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to leave less than a half-hour in, and totally bailed during the intermission…lemme outta here!
Everyone at the Venice Film Festival fell for the pretension. Only the phonies will stand by this thing during Oscar season. The movie is flat, plodding, boring. Fuck the immigrant experience, fuck Hungarian immigrants, fuck Brody’s thick and ooze-dripping bullshit accent, fuck his fucking cigarettes (he lights one up just about every damn scene), fuck his stupid-ass heroin habit….bullshit, bullshit, bullshit….pot-bellied Corbet can go fuck himself.
