The Brutalist

This ambitious post-war American epic begins with a mesmerising long-take sequence which will surely stick longer than the 3:35 hours of running time. The 70mm format fits the setting while making the movie visually stunning alongside with audacious camera works and stunning photography. Blumberg's music adds on that so the theatre would definitely be its perfect habitat. The script delivers interesting characters - albeit the secondary ones are purely cosmetic - valorised by great performances from Brody and Pearce. The issue here is in the last hour, as the writers decided to insert unexplored subplots which will prevent the movie from having a proper conclusion thus leaving a bitter feeling of incompleteness and preventing this monumental project to achieve what was intended for.

'The Brutalist' never lets you breathe. The director builds it with such purpose that you see the care in every frame. He's a talented craftsman, no question, but also so crushingly serious. And that chokes out any real feeling. You watch the artistry turn into artifice. And, after a while, all that weight just presses down.

The film is so obsessed with being Art that it forgets to let you in. It's so heavy with its own importance that it starts to close in on itself so much so that eventually all you see is this polished facade, reflecting its own seriousness back at you.

It doesn't stay with you. It stands there, sealed off by its own sense of importance, and you're left outside.

By all rights, The Brutalists should have been a triumph of contemporary cinema. It had all the necessary accouterments: a sprawling runtime (three-plus hours, no less), a cast of pedigreed thespians frowning meaningfully into the middle distance, and a grandiose self-awareness that all but guarantees critical accolades from the usual dreary pamphleteers of moral instruction. Instead, what we receive is a lumbering, self-indulgent exercise in ideological exhibitionism-an advertisement, really, for a laundry list of progressive orthodoxies, stitched together with the unearned gravity of a film convinced of its own greatness.

It is, at its core, an excruciatingly obvious sermon on the virtues of mass immigration, the tragic poetry of opioid smuggling, and the intersectional ballet of class struggle. One gets the distinct impression that the director, overcome with the giddy self-righteousness of a trust fund revolutionary, decided that any opposition to these themes-however slight, however nuanced-should be discarded as brutish and retrograde. The result is a film that does not argue, but dictates; it does not question, but demands obedience.

A particularly egregious example of this is the film's treatment of sexuality, which, rather than being a natural element of character or plot, is wielded like a cudgel, as if the director has mistaken provocation for profundity. This is, of course, the age-old trick of the modern auteur: to linger uncomfortably on scenes of grotesque degradation and then feign astonishment when audiences express revulsion. "Ah, but you are merely revealing your own prejudices," the filmmakers sneer, mistaking their own self-indulgence for bravery.

Then there is the matter of style-or, more accurately, the utter absence of it. The Brutalists operates in the now all-too-familiar mode of arthouse monotony, stretching its scenes to insufferable lengths in an attempt to pass off inertia as profundity. The cinematography, full of languid tracking shots and barren industrial landscapes, serves as a backdrop for dialogue so contrived, so consciously weighty, that one is left yearning for the honesty of silence.

But perhaps the film's greatest failure is its utter lack of humanity. Beneath its posturing, its po-faced political hectoring, and its parade of suffering, there is no genuine curiosity about human nature-only a tedious reaffirmation of fashionable narratives. It is a work of cynical calculation, designed not to challenge or illuminate but to reinforce the self-congratulatory smugness of its intended audience.

In the end, The Brutalists is not so much a film as it is a performance of righteousness, an expensively produced hymn to contemporary pieties. It is a cinematic endurance test, wherein those who survive its oppressive runtime are rewarded not with insight or catharsis, but merely the hollow satisfaction of having borne witness to its turgid self-importance. If this is the new standard of "bold" filmmaking, then one must ask: Is there anything left to rebel against, other than the tedium of the sermon itself?

It is the kind of movie that is so hard to rate. Is it a masterpiece? Is it great or is it just another movie that just look at itself? He has all the elements of a great story of a great film and yet to me it does not deliver.

For three and half hours long there's only one question in my mind I couldn't shake : what is it about. And I could never answer that question not even at the end if ever there was one. The whole thing left me septic.

But in all honesty, there isn't much to say about it all. To me it's like I've been handed over a homework. If watching « this kind of movie », I want to feel an experience, be engulfed in the ambiance of a whole, I want to be caught in the prospect of what the delivery will be, I want to feel like I've been outsmarted in some ways. None of it here.

Brody is magnificent, so is Pearce. Jones too, surely. Cinematography is mastered without a doubt, editing is smooth, and for three and a half hours it is enjoyable if you're able to glean the little sparks that here and there will keep you hungry for more.

If it was trying to lead me into an underlying experience, meaning or point of view, well I didn't find the path, or maybe was it just too obscure to even grasp a fragment of what the purpose of it all was.

Yes, it works whatever it is about or whatever it thinks it is about. I doubt it will be a movie that's remembered. It not particularly bold. It makes an attempt at being powerful but it never strikes. It too clean, it's too plain. It makes you believe straight from the opening shot that it will be grandiose. But it doesn't hold it promise.

I feel a bit duped by what I've watched. Just because you write a movie about an « unusual » subject, just because you try an unorthodox approach at something that's already been said before, well it seems sufficient to make praise.

That is not enough for me. This didn't prove me anything. I think it is possible and achievable and somewhat too easy to make beautiful movies that will pass for profound when it is just a very well made movie without substance.

It is ambitious and has some beautiful sequences, especially the opening sequence with the Statue of Liberty shot. Brody, as usual, is strong. The score is also strong. The movie has an epic sweep to it but also, I would say, some unnecessary scenes here and there. I didn't think all the sex scenes were necessary, or at least I thought they were too drawn out, and various other interstitial shots that felt excessive. I didn't like Pearce's performance so much. Although he's playing an unlikable character, true, there's just an artificiality about his delivery and mannerisms that I didn't like here.

The epilogue of the movie ends a little flat and on an odd note. It's just one of those "weird" endings, imo, but that's pretty typical for an a24 movie. I cared about Brody's character, but where did he REALLY go, in the end? Ask yourself that. He gets lost a bit, for me, with all the other side narratives and architectural explorations going on, and then it just kind of ends.

Thematically, the movie reflects the tension between artistry and capitalism well. Is it overlong? Yes, but the intermission dampens the impact of that. Would I want to see it again? No.