I knew less than 15 minutes in that I would loathe sitting through The Brutalist, for right off the top it struck me as a melancholy slog, a swamp thing…a movie populated with draggy characters and a draggier-than-fuck storyline. Lemme outta here.

Silly as this sounds, I came to believe that The Brutalist hated me as much as I was learning to hate it.

I looked at my watch and moaned…dear God, over three hours to go. I was nonethelss determined to at least make it to the halfway mark. I almost managed that.

From Richard Brody‘s “The Empty Ambition of The Brutalist”:

“The Brutalist is [fundamentally] a screenplay movie, in which stick figures held by marionette strings go through the motions of the situations and spout the lines that Corbet assigns to them—and are given a moment-to-moment simulacrum of human substance by a formidable cast of actors.

“The themes [of The Brutalist] don’t emerge in step with the action; rather, they seem to be set up backward.

“[For] The Brutalist is also a domino movie in which the last tile is placed first and everything that precedes it is arranged in order to make sure that it comes out right.”

Brody subhead: “Brady Corbet’s epic takes on weighty themes, but fails to infuse its characters with the stuff of life.”