Brutalist haters unite! Here’s the whole thing but here, right here, are choice excerpts:
(a) “Heard great things about The Brutalist, [but] vou won’t find them here.”
(b) “Wanna see Adrien Brody with an (semi?) erection getting stroked by a hooker? You’ve come to the right place! As to where this fits into the story, it’s hard to say. But sex shows up here and there in [this] profoundly unerotic film.”
(c) “If you know me, you know I’m a fan of contemporary architecture so a story about Laszlo, a Jewish immigrant and his quest to make it in America, sounds like a great story. And that’s kinda what this is conceptually, except it fails to deliver on a number of levels.
(d) “For one, there’s a kind of filmmaking that’s now popular, which I think is weirdly, intentionally, inherently undramatic. Where big moments are left out and we cut ahead and instead of seeing conflict and struggle and adapting to that and, you know, creating and following a story — instead we leap ahead. It’s like they cut out the interesting parts. It feels like a series [that’s] missing half the story — the good half.”
(e) “Two thirds of the way in we see see a train…uhm…exploding? Apparently it was filled with blocks being used for [Laszlo’s] masterpiece and became derailed. We don’t see the wreckage. We don’t see the blocks. We see anger but it is misdirected anger. And it’s confusing. So the project is over! Why? Has everything been destroyed? We don’t know. We’re not really told. We don’t see it. There’s gonna be a lawsuit. Why? There’s a lot of anger that pretends to be a dramatic scene and someone says lawsuits, but we’re not exactly sure why. What should be a sequence of interesting, dramatic scenes, is told in a handful of sentences in one jumbled mess.”
(g) “I don’t think any of [of the scenes in this film] really work. None are memorable. Not one. There’s this tendency to hang on a take WAY too long – indulging the actor to do a lotta acting which doesn’t do much for the story but adds to their chance for an acting award. Yeah, your wife’s alive! Joy! Now cut! No…more joy! More and more! Please cut! Hanging in there doesn’t give us anything except adding time to an already too-long movie (3 and half hours).”
(h) “Then there’s a jump forward in time where we see a tracking shot (why?!) showing someone coming to visit the architect who is now a cog in the machine of a large architectural firm doing drafting work. The shot stops when they find Laszlo. But we don’t see why the guy went there. He apparently came with news that the project, which as been dormant for years, will go on. his masterpiece will be finished! But we don’t see that moment. God forbid you give the audience – who at this point is peckish for a little thrill of accomplishment – but the filmmakers deny us. Again.”
(i) “This movie is fairly punishing. [It represents] monstrously bad filmmaking. Do they not know how to construct an entertaining scene? Apparently [Laszlo] needs to go to Carrera, Italy, to pick out the marble. Here’s an opportunity to discuss marble, or materials and their importance to the structure, but naah. We’re told about some politics, then we run off to a party. And then Laszlo wanders off to get high (he’s a heroin addict) and gets raped by his benefactor. WTF? I guess it’s a metaphor for, uhm..being raped artistically, [but] it’s embarrassing.”
(j) King Vidor‘s The Fountainhead (’49) — a terribly flawed, absurd movie about similar struggles between art and commerce (so didactic it’s unintentionally hilarious) has far more content about architecture and the architect’s creative struggles that this overly- long mess. (there’s a rape scene too! De rigueur for architect movies! But this one is so politically-incorrect (she likes it!) it kinda becomes the highlight of the movie.
(k) “Anyway, some people love The Brutalist. I can’t imagine watching it again. Maybe at gunpoint.”
