Adrien Brody in The Brutalist
THE BRUTALIST
Running three hours and 35 minutes, with another 15 added in the form of an intermission, director/co-writer Brady Corbet's The Brutalist opens with an overture. This would've been evident simply through the majestic strains of composer Daniel Blumberg's theme music, but Corbet underlines the fact with an accompanying title card reading “OVERTURE.”
As I see it, there are two ways audiences might react to this. (Or three, if their reaction is simply “Huh?!”) The first, and the route I reflexively chose, was to all but rub my hands together in grinning anticipation of a big, juicy, mid-20th-century epic, one that we Midwestern cinephiles have been hearing about and looking forward to for nearly five months. “Here we go!” I thought. The other, perhaps more common way is for viewers to roll their eyes thinking “Here we go …”, slumping in their seats a bit as this immediate burst of baldly stated ambition – or, depending on their threshold for auteurism, self-serious pretension – inevitably led to more of the same.
I'd like to think that patrons in the latter camp would still find much to admire in Corbet's and co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold's mammoth tale of the triumphs and tragedies of a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor following his forced relocation to America in 1947: Adrien Brody's staggering lead performance; the faultless period design; the breadth and scope of its decades-spanning narrative; Corbet's ability to pull off this grand endeavor on a budget of under $10 million. (!!!) By the same token, I completely relate if, like me, you were fully prepared to be knocked silly and instead left thinking “That was … interesting,” your initial adoration and sky-high hopes gradually diminishing through the second half's awkward shifts in focus, unconvincing conceits, and muted climax – I'm sorry: “EPILOGUE” – that's like a text-only condensation of a four-hour Brutalist sequel. I used part of the 15-minute break to text two movie-geek pals, telling them that the time was flying by and how much I was loving the experience. After the film ended, I texted them again … but not until another hour had passed. I was busy trying to come up with a followup text more descriptive than a mild frowny emoji.
When we first meet Brody's László Tóth, he and dozens of fellow travelers are being hustled out of the bowels of a steamer ship headed to Ellis Island, their initial impression of the United States, witnessed through László's perspective, an upside-down visage of the Statue of Liberty. That's about as on-the-nose as visualized metaphors, and mission statements, ever get. Because for the next 210 minutes, the America that László finds himself in will indeed be topsy-turvy: a promise of freedom eternally upended. Following a night spent at a brothel, László boards a bus to Philadelphia, where his Americanized cousin Attila (the marvelous Alessandro Nivola) is waiting for him. Hugs and tears are exchanged, along with the shocking news that László's wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), both long-presumed dead in Hungary, are actually alive, and hoping to also emigrate soon. With Attila's Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird) viewing the new arrival with a polite indifference that might be veiled repulsion, László is given a place to stay in the spare room of his cousin's furniture store. He and Attila also get a job offer from the rich, smiling creep Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn): the surprise refurbishing of an estate library owned by the young man's industrialist father Harrison (Guy Pearce).
László, we belatedly discover, was an acclaimed modernist architect in his native country, and his hopes for an American Dream fulfilled appear possible when his professional know-how leads the cousins to a construction fee of twice their original asking price. There are, however, hindrances on the road to László's Happily Ever After. One is his dependence on heroin, a habit shared by his new American friend and co-worker Gordon (the subtly wonderful Isaach de Bankolé). Another is László's uncompromising artistic vision, his overpoweringly severe, geometric, Bauhaus-influenced design for the library not at all appreciated by its owner, who, upon seeing the creation, throws a millionaire tantrum that ends with him firing László and Attila and refusing to pay their $2,000 fee. László is promptly evicted and disowned by Attila, who, for good measure, accuses his cousin of making a pass at his wife. (An unsubstantiated claim made, we suspect, by the untrustworthy Audrey.) But after years of László enduring meager construction work, he gets an unexpected visit from Harrison, whose library is now the toast of architectural digests and New York taste-makers. He apologizes for his past behavior and promptly hires László to design a massive, forward-thinking community center – a combination library, gymnasium, theatre, and chapel – that will bear his name. László accepts the commission, and from that point on, the native Hungarian Jew is in service to the wealthy American Protestant. Potentially forever.
That's far more plot synopsis than I generally include in reviews, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't get us to the end of The Brutalist's first hour. Corbet and Fastvold give us a lot of story. Yet their screenplay, at least its first half, is overstuffed in the best possible way. Beyond its deeply engaging chronological narrative, we're given hosts of thematic detours – on the immigrant experience, on financial and ethnic divides, on the mid-century art scene, on artistic ownership in general – that routinely percolate beneath the dialogue, and sometimes pop up even in seemingly throwaway dialogue. (Audrey's nonchalant mention of knowing someone who can “fix” László's apparently broken nose is layered with galling anti-Semitic subtext.) Despite its intimidating length, Corbet's movie inspires you to lean in rather than recline, eager to catch all of the telling details in its words, compositions, and moments of performative expression.
And because the photography (with cinematographer Lol Crawley shooting in rarely employed VistaVision) and Blumberg's tear-inducing score are so arresting and the unburdened pacing so transfixing, the film's first hour-45 seemed to pass in a breeze. I knew an intermission was coming and was still astonished by how quickly it arrived. I also wasn't quite ready for the Brutalist experience to pause, given how enraptured I was by Brody's thunderously affecting emotionalism and, handed his finest big-screen role since 2001's Memento, the queasy thrill of Pearce's reptilian charisma. (At one point, Harrison delivers a monologue about a deservedly dastardly trick played on his wife's parents, and we'd all be pointing to the scene as the one that cemented Pearce's Oscars victory … if Kieran Culkin weren't also in the mix this year.) As a 56-year-old, my bladder was certainly grateful for the break. But I would've happily stayed in the auditorium for as long as Corbet asked me, relishing the weighty yet never overbearing gravitas and sublime production design and continued emergence of Joe Alwyn as modern movies' go-to guy for entitled, hateful scumbags. After making his debut as the sweet-faced, continually wet-eyed martyr of 2016's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, who would've predicted this as the young Brit's career trajectory?
After the intermission, however, events begin going perceptively south, both for the characters and the audience. And even though I've never been a fan of the actor, it would be inaccurate, to say nothing of rude, to claim that everything went downhill the moment that Felicity Jones showed up … but that's kind of how it felt. Erzsébet and Zsófia do indeed make their way to America, the former wheelchair-bound as a result of osteoporosis, the latter made mute from the horrific tragedies endured. As opposed to either complicating or bettering matters for László, though, their arrivals, principally Erzsébet's, merely alter the film's presentational bent, and in increasingly frustrating ways.
It was a relief to see Jones not playing a stereotypically hushed, timid émigre; before the war, Erzsébet was clearly a self-possessed, even chic Central European with a flowering career as a journalist and no compunction about speaking her mind. Yet the woman's lack of mobility, attacks of fierce pain, and emotional distance from her husband still require Jones to play too many levels of victimization, and unlike Brody, she's not a resourceful enough performer to make continued suffering commanding, or even nuanced. Jones, with her serviceable Hungarian dialect, is perfectly adequate here; she's always perfectly adequate. As written, however, the role of Erzsébet makes more demands of her than she can reasonably fulfill, and Jones is stuck with two of the movie's more alienating sequences, to boot: one a drug-fueled sexual encounter that briefly turns The Brutalist into Queer, and the other a motivationally confounding confrontation at the Van Buren estate. Landing right before the epilogue, this strange diversion – precisely what was Erzsébet hoping to accomplish? – causes the film to peter out at the exact moment it should be grabbing us by the collar, and we consequently enter Corbet's final minutes significantly less than shaken. If anything, we're merely confused.
A lot of good does come from The Brutalist's second half, particularly in its assessment of the “What now?” behind an immigrant's journey in the mid-1900s … though it feel disingenuous to constrict that statement to a specific era. What do you do when the country that promised refuge and solace to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, in practice, doesn't appear to want you? (As you might imagine, the release of this American epic could hardly be more timely.) And even when the plot mechanics in Act II are forcing Corbet's and Fastvold's material toward redundant or unsatisfying directions, there's always the harrowing beauty of Brody's portrayal to turn to, as well as the adventurous, messy, gloriously unwieldy beauty of the thing itself. I'll readily admit that I left The Brutalist less exhilarated than bemused. Yet this flawed work of near-greatness absolutely deserves an audience, and more than a few awards. Just because its vision isn't 20/20 doesn't mean it doesn't see us.
PRESENCE
Watching RaMell Ross' newly minted Best Picture nominee Nickel Boys, our first-person perspectives gleaned by the camera presenting events through direct points-of-view, I felt as though I'd never seen anything like it. What were the chances that, not even 10 days later, I'd wind up seeing another movie almost exactly like it?
In Steven Soderbergh's lightly creepy, terrifically enjoyable Presence, we find ourselves in a haunted house. Here, though, we're effectively cast as the one doing the haunting. Well before an affluent family of four takes residence, the camera – one operated, as usual these days, by Soderbergh himself under his cinematographer alias “Peter Andrews” – slinks through the rooms and halls of a lovely, empty, two-story suburban dwelling, seeming to give careful attention to the home's geographical layout. Although there are sizable front and back yards, we never leave the house's confines. If anything, we retreat further inward, especially after the domicile's new residents arrive: tightly wound mom Rebecca (Lucy Liu), easygoing dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), college-bound swim-team son Tyler (Eddy Maday), and depressed teen daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). It's Chloe who, with her early focused gaze at the camera, let's us know who we are in this ticklish experiment by Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp. We're the house's resident poltergeist, and for the brisk 85 minutes of Presence, as with Nickel Boys' protagonists Elwood and Turner, what the ghost sees is what we see.
Those who prefer their fright flicks (if Soderbergh's latest even qualifies as one) ladled with gore and titillation will no doubt be disappointed by this one's almost monastic restraint; I can't recall seeing even a droplet of blood, and when Chloe takes a shower, our unseen POV spirit is respectful enough to avoid the bathroom and hide in a closet. Unlike a lot of modern chillers, however, the key to Presence's considerable appeal lies in its mystery. There's the question, of course, of what kind of ghost we are: Paranormal Activity evil or Casper friendly. The bigger puzzle lies in precisely who we are. Chloe, who feels our titular Presence practically from the moment she enters the house, is quickly convinced that we're the spirit of her recently departed friend Nadia, who, like another teen in the area, recently perished from a drug overdose. But when a medium-for-hire (Natakie Woolams-Torres) shows up with her belief that the poltergeist, in its human form, died inside the house – and may even have died in the future, living now on a different plane of existence – that complicates matters. Nadia may be less of a suspect, but everyone in our clan of four, as well as the neighborhood kid (West Mulholland) with the determinedly unsettling vibe, is inarguably more of one.
I had a blast at this thing. Having their director-slash-camera-operator always within feet of them, literally walking and running on the set with them, likely aided the actors in their path toward charismatic naturalism, and the performances here are universally first-rate. Ditto the relatively low-rent tech, with “Peter Andrews” doing a stunning job of alternately sidling and sprinting, and the few instances of visual effects we get – principally the employment of floating and traveling objects – making you smile when they're not making you squirm. What I didn't anticipate was how surreptitiously touching this frequently edgy movie would be, with Chris' and Chloe's affecting familial bond emerging largely from the comparative crudeness of Rebecca and Tyler (whose relationship boasts icky incestuous undertones), and the ultimate reveal of the ghost's identity causing you to re-think, maybe with a hand on your heart, everything you'd previously seen. What a treat to find that, more than a decade after announcing his retirement from films, Steven Soderbergh keeps on giving us presents. Among them Presence.
FLIGHT RISK
When I first saw the trailer for Flight Risk and realized that this airborne action thriller was touted as “by the acclaimed director of Braveheart, Hacksaw Ridge, and Apocalypto” with no mention of that director's name, I presumed it was a decision made by the film's marketers at Lionsgate. Beyond our current president, who recently anointed him as “special ambassador” to Hollywood (along with the apparently equally special Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight), who wants to be publicly associated with Mel Gibson? Having seen the movie, though, I'm wondering if the choice wasn't actually its director's. Given his Oscar for helming Braveheart, his nomination for Hacksaw Ridge, and his $120-million-plus worldwide grosses for Apocalypto – to say nothing of his figurative canonization by many due to The Passion of the Christ – why would Gibson want to be publicly associated with this?
Gibson's first directorial effort since 2016 finds Mark Wahlberg's pilot escorting Michelle Dockery's U.S. Marshal and Topher Grace's enchained federal witness on a trek to Anchorage, and even though it's only January, no Internet Movie Database plot synopsis this year might fill me with as much joy as Flight Risk's. Through IMDb, we learn that “As they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar and trust is tested, as not everyone on board is who they seem.” Having seen the trailer, in which Wahlberg's obvious loon speaks like a drawling good-ol'-boy before launching into his “You talkin' to me?!?” De Niro impression, I mistakenly thought there might be someone else on the plane, or that maybe Dockery's or Grace's characters would also have a surprise reveal up their sleeves. Nope. That lone “not everyone on board is who they seem” surprise is given away in the movie's first 15 minutes. It's given away in the freaking trailer.
Aside from waiting for the end credits to mercifully roll, that leaves us with nothing to do for the next 80-ish minutes but watch Dockery's easily distracted government agent learn to fly in a manner befitting an overwhelmed stewardess out of a 1970s Airport sequel, listen to Grace's shrieking apoplexy when faced with a maniac or an approaching mountain, and endure Marky Mark's hambone attempts at miming psychosis. Wahlberg does this, by the way, principally by uttering juvenile, purportedly comedic threats of rape – equal-opportunity offender that he is, threats toward both genders – and sticking out his tongue like Michael Jordan mid-slam-dunk. We're also, I think, meant to take the faux pilot's secret baldness, which is also given away in the previews, as a sign of his deviance. Yura Borisov should slap this movie's face.
Reportedly, at the tail end of 2020, Jared Rosenberg's script made that year's famed Black List of Hollywood's most-liked unproduced screenplays. I can only assume that “most-liked” actually meant “worst,” because what Gibson's film gives us is utterly atrocious: labored plotting meets aching exposition meets obvious twists meets junior-high-grade insults meets forced (unseen) political machinations meets retrograde and vaguely racist asides. (What's with Maaz Ali voicing an Indian ground pilot who spends every breathing second flirting with the panicked air marshal on the other end of the line?) Because the editing is solid and the traditionally brittle Dockery is giving an invested, refreshingly emotional performance, you keep waiting for Flight Risk to get better – or, at the very least, to have something to offer other than Wahlberg's freak showing his true colors, being sidelined in handcuffs for an inordinately long period, making a brief escape, and being sidelined in handcuffs for another inordinately long period. But Gibson's latest gets gets lousier and more disheartening with each passing minute, so much so that toward the end, my screening's true flight risk wasn't Topher at all. It was me.
