Cinderblocks, ahoy

I've often criticized storytellers of all kinds of being too obvious in their delivery of their central themes. In most cases, you want the audience to draw out and discover the themes of your work as they're conveyed by situations and characters, unless you happen to be writing a polemic, the sole purpose of which is to deliver The Message. The Brutalist is not a polemic, but its method of delivery is both as blunt as the architectural style from which it draws its title, and sometimes as direct as "being hit over the head with a cinderblock", which is my usual phrase of derision for storytellers who do that in their work. There are several themes at work here: the immigrant experience in America; the post-war European Jewish experience of processing what had been done to them; the casual bigoted disdain for Jews in America during the war and even afterwards; all of these things are presented in this film. The problem is that none of them are delivered by any stories or character that feel human or even really interesting. They're just kinda there.

Fair warning: This is a three-and-a-half-hour film, which is something to sit through for a lot of people, which is why it comes equipped with a 15-minute intermission. Now, unlike travesties like Megalopolis, it didn't have me checking my phone to see what time it was 10 minutes in. This isn't a horrible film. With a cast that includes Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, most films are still going to be at least watchable so that you can see where it's going and this one is no different. I was eager to find out where it was going, but largely because most of the time it didn't feel like it was going anywhere. I kept waiting for a dramatic moment to emerge or some kind of real emotional response that felt like I was watching a human being, rather than a character designed solely to deliver the cinderblock to your skull. And this is a film with Adrien Brody-! Despite my affection for films like Julia and Schindler's List, I will continue to say that the best representation of the Holocaust that I've seen on film is The Pianist, mostly for Brody's spectacular rendition of one human who was lucky enough to live through it. So, I know that he can deliver that kind of performance and, indeed, the most interesting aspect to his character was absolutely the most human: his addiction. But even that ended up being more of a detail that was an obvious segue into a dramatic moment with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), that everyone was anticipating for at least an hour before it happened, thus sapping it of any emotional effect it might have had.

And that's probably the film's biggest failing. Despite being interesting enough to keep watching for three-and-a-half hours (at least until they get to the search scene for Harrison Van Buren (Pearce) at which point I was doing the 'hand twirling to move things along' motion), at no point does the film escape the essential style of the architecture: it's all just basic story motions that are apparent to everyone and none of them deliver any sense of style or human texture that would make them memorable. I'm sitting here less than an hour after walking out of the theater and struggling to remember any moment in the film that stood out to me as one that I could mentally point at the screen and say: "Yeah. That's something to file away for a writing moment." Maybe the only one that approached that is a couple views of the marble mines at Carrara; complete with Lászlô's (Brody) friend, Orazio (Salvatore Sansone) who at least talked about doing something dramatic, by stating how he traveled across the country near the end of the war to beat Mussolini's corpse with his bare hands. But that's almost three hours into the film and, even then, is a bit part to set up a rather intimate encounter between Lászlô and Van Buren that is, once again, so obvious a depiction of Pearce's character that's just this side of parody.

The most galling thing was the epilogue, where co-writer and director, Brady Corbet, apparently decided to stop to explain all of the subtexts in his story, just in case the audience didn't get them. It was a 10-minute encapsulation of the previous 3+ hours that felt like a coda to an encyclopedia entry. Why do we need this reminder of the things that you've been tossing in front of us for three hours? If they had injected a small amount of the emotion that adult Zsôfia (Ariane Labed) carries when memorializing her still-living father (seated not far away, in a wheelchair just like Erzsébet used throughout the film; did you get it?), then there might have been something else to remember. As it is, the most prominent emotional message I carried from the film was me pining for something interesting to happen for most of it. Even if it involved just dropping a block of Carrara marble on someone's head, it might've been worth it.