Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 2 - The Brutalist (CENSORED)

So I've never run into this problem before with Blogger but the automated system - ironically for a review that starts with two paragraphs complaining about automated technology - decided to flag the first version as too explicit or against very unclear Community Guidelines. So I'm just trying to test what I did wrong, this version is missing a few words and a sentence I think flagged it, so that people can actually read the thing.

Also, this blog may no longer continue on Google if this how the future is going to be. I am not writing porn, I am not advocating violence, I am just trying to discuss a movie that covers adult subjects. The previous is under review, I don't even know if human beings work in that department and will ever actually read it. So let's see what happens when I post this version:

2. The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet

AI, huh?

[Scare Quotes] "Artificial [Scare Quotes] "Intelligence"" has been a knife hanging over the entertainment industry for over a year now. For all the grifters selling AI into everything, if not yet the kitchen sink than at least your fridge, the story is different here. AI actually, to my dismay, has a use in filmmaking. The tiny steps towards AI in films have been met almost universally with backlashes. Civil War's biggest story was not the war, but the generative AI posters with laughable giant swans. Late Night with the Devil almost became a sleeper hit this fall until a few seconds of AI footage turned the conversation against it. The Brutalist is the latest story, which has generated a unique sense of betrayal.

"AI" is such a nebulous term, at this point so buzz word-y and confused as to be halfway useless. This is not a discussion about a particular technology, since dozens of technologies have been wrapped together. This is a kind of battle between tech ideology and all of us increasingly uncomfortable and unconvinced by the future the tech billionaires insist we must have. That future is all the less convincing when they each bend the knee to the new administration, or if you're Elon Musk, are all but a shadow president - when one Trump is already far too many. This is a labor battle, an ecological battle, an artistic battle, and above all else, a battle whether we need any of this or whether it works. You can use these tools to fix a character's accent or make somebody sing like Freddie Mercury, I don't need these tools for Google to hallucinate nonsense lies when I want to know how long shrimp stays good frozen. Maybe I should just toss The Brutalist out with the rest of the poisoned AI bathwater.

I don't think I can though, because this movie is really really good.

The Brutalist AI hurts so sorely because this is a movie that sells itself on its physicality, on its reality, on its non-digital-ness. Director Brady Corbet have a vision for a very old-school kind of filmmaking. Maybe the monumental piece of architecture at the center of the story does not exist, but everything else from the Philadelphia streets to the film grain of the 70mm feels like somebody actually went out to a place and shot stuff. That used to be what filmmaking was: you find something, or you make something, and you shoot it. The Brutalist gathers an amazing cast of actors, has them put on posh mid-20th century accents, and puts on a grand show of melodrama. Even that melodrama is retro because the villainous family talks like Charles Foster Kane with a touch of Cary Grant. This is an "epic film" in the pre-blockbuster definition, the kind of roadshow experience that Hollywood would sell in the Fifties and Sixties. It is shot in VistaVision, a form of high-resolution cinema that had not been used to shoot a complete movie in over fifty years. At three and a half hours, The Brutalist is the longest movie of 2024. It has an Overture and a fifteen minute intermission. Nobody has done that since Tarantino's Hateful Eight, also released in 70mm. So if there are cutting edge high-tech shortcuts being made, that does not fit.

Beyond just nostalgia for pre-Star Wars cinema, The Brutalist has a nostalgia for mid-century America in all its grandeur and promise. However, it also has this fetish for the old economy. The first half is interspersed with these film reels of Pennsylvania steel and rail and coal, the tireless industrial muscle that could build mechanized armies from scratch during WWII. "We used to make shit in this country" said The Wire, and The Brutalist nods in agreement. All this power meant endless opportunity for those barely surviving the 20th century, such as the Jewish family at the center of this story. However, the a vision American capitalism when it most closely could back up its promises eventually becomes a criticism of its endless desire to devour in The Brutalist. All of this was poisoned: the industrial economy rusted away for service jobs, and the photography of making movies transformed into the grind of CG artists producing digitized slop for Marvel movies, soon to be AI slop.

That first shot of The Brutalist sets up everything here. This will be an iconic scene, that is my called-shot. It shows László Tóth (Adrien Brody) climbing out of the darkness, unclear if this is a concentration camp or a Communist prison, only to pull himself out into the light, and we realize it was the bowels of a ship. Above us we see the Statue of Liberty while the classical score blares. Only Lady Liberty is shot from far below, at a strange angle, appearing upsidedown at first, like a flag raised in distress. Tóth will find most of the parts of the American Dream: a place for himself and his family to live, a place where his architecture talents are appreciated by ultra-rich patrons, a place where he pursue his vision and passions to create. Except, all of it, from his Judaism to his belief in the power of structures to endure, will be taken advantage of. There are two scenes of sexual violence in The Brutalist, one explicit, one heavily implied. Tóth battles against the limits of his boss's patience, the price tag, philistine architects making compromises. He has been driven to near-impotence both artistically and sexually by his life experience, and finally finds a hunger to build again. Only that building just drives him more in debt to evil men, and more certain he will forever be a stranger in his new home.

We have in the first act of The Brutalist a sort of a dry run for László's despair. Tóth arrives in Philadelphia (where I'll note, my own Holocaust-survivor grandparents immigrated to around this same time) to work under his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who is now going under the name "Miller". Attila has fully shed his Hungarian-Jewish identity, having lost most of his accent, converted to Catholicism, and married a shiksa, Audrey (Emma Laird). At first, this is a hopeful reunion, with László in tears upon seeing his cousin outside a bus. He goes to work under his cousin in his Miller & Sons furniture store - where Tóth notes there is no real Miller and no Sons - and thrives, building a magnificent modernist library for the wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Yet it all goes horrendously wrong, when the Van Buren family changes their mind just as Attila pushes the sexual boundaries, with Audrey getting very uncomfortable. In one day László goes from being toasted as a genius to back onto the street.

Harrison Lee Van Buren becomes the main patron and a repeat in grander scale of László's experience with Attila. They not just building some shelving, they're building a massive concrete community center. Tóth is not living in a closet, he's living in a guest house on the property. His half-paralyzed wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) is rescued from the communist government of Hungary, along with his traumatized silent niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) thanks to Van Buren's connections. But here again, the identity as a Jew, as an artist, as a man is chipped at, questioned, and aimed to be consumed. Van Buren flirts openly with Erzsébet. His awful son (Joe Alwyn) indulges himself off-camera with Zsófia. It is not enough that these immigrants find a life in America and even prosper, every part of them must be taken, consumed, and violated by their new home. The younger generations of this family finds themselves believing Israel might be a better home, free from America's tendrils, and history shows that will not be the case at all.

I've heard comments that The Brutalist's first half is stronger than its second. I cannot find myself to agree with this. The second half is where the movie becomes more difficult, more complicated. I would never, ever sacrifice Felicity Jones in this picture who only appears post-Intermission but fits so well you would believe she was there from the first reel. She is such a force of energy and propulsion right from the jump. Erzsébet is also a moral and emotional center for László, who I think might have been perfectly happy with her as an ideal, something to dream of but never have. When she finally appears, with her own cravings and wants, the movie becomes an awkward negotiation, a dream reunion facing realities.

The ending to this epic is very odd, but I love an odd ending. The conclusion of the villain's arc feel too "neat". They literally disappear, and with them goes all the problems and miseries of this Community Center that Tóth struggles for years to build. We then cut to the 1980s, in Venice, where a much-aged László in a wheelchair, being led around by Raffey Cassidy, now playing a great-niece, Zsófia's daughter. She is his caregiver during a lifetime achievement awards. Our protagonist does not speak. The announcer tells us how everything we've seen, from the Community Center to Tóth's other projects were, in fact, a representation of his experiences during the Holocaust, with some measurements matching his cell in Auschwitz.

At no point in The Brutalist were we told that anything László was doing was in response to his experiences under the Germans. Perhaps it was a subconscious desire. Or a secret he kept from his employer and even us, the audience. I do not believe this is the case. Tóth struggled throughout his life to build his art his way, according to his vision, and sacrificed immensely to do so. However, in the end, he is broken down not by Nazis or capitalists, but by the inevitability of age. With no ability to speak, his work can finally be taken from him, made to represent whatever means the most to his audience and descendants. They want the story about a Holocaust survivor, building monuments to a particularly Zionist vision of Judaism, so they got what they wanted. A building outlives its creator, it can last for centuries, making the architect, somewhat immortal. But that immortality is flexible, it can be used, misused, or exploited, and the artist, a ghost in his own decrepit body, has to lose their ownership of their pieces in silence.