The Brutalist

Designed to be impressive, and throwing every big theme the filmmakers can think of into the mix, but overdetermined by two messages that are hardly unfamiliar: America is bad; rich people are bad. Why does the “well-known” character of these messages not seem to matter to critics: perhaps because the pleasures of self-flagellation depend on ritualised repetition, not on novelty. We are constantly being told that this couple are oh so “intellectual”, but the film’s incorporation of culture and ideas is never more than skin deep (we might unfavourably compare it, for example, to TÁR, 2022, even if that film also, to an extent, mocks its intellectual characters in a way that this film could never do). Perhaps that is why the filmmakers felt the need to make things absolutely clear by introducing a rape scene, which allows the characters to directly state, in a very obvious way, what the movie wants us to understand, and allows a spectacle to be created that deliciously combines the pleasure of seeing the wicked “receive their comeuppance” with the earnest lesson that the rich and powerful can always squirm their way out of anything.

If that avoidance of real intellectual substance was a decision made because it was being saved up in order to generate a shock effect in the “epilogue”, then to an extent it’s a successful strategy, but the aftertaste is more than a little sour: one of those “big themes” is trauma, but is this architectural idea really a profound response to it? Is it really a convincing attempt by these filmmakers, seven decades later, to put themselves in the minds and souls of concentration camp survivors? Even more pointedly, for this viewer it was hard not to see this epilogue as an unconscious attempt to exploit the Holocaust by marrying the pleasures of that “shock” with a depiction of what amounts to the handing out of Academy Awards (see also the entry on ARGO, 2012): it almost worked. And it is because the film constitutes such an attempt that, despite its veneer of inhabiting the world of twentieth-century European-Jewish sensibilities, the film is ultimately very conventional, far more so than 2024’s other Rand-influenced movie, MEGALOPOLIS (and, for that matter, more conventional than THE FOUNTAINHEAD, 1949, itself), which, whatever else might be said about it, asked what art might actually be for and what it might actually do, and attempted in a genuine way to project those questions so that they would truly have the chance to become the audience’s questions: it was a film structured as a promise and an invitation, rather than just throwing up a cleverly-manufactured VistaVision projection that merely makes a show of artistic “seriousness”. Brody gets it right.