THE BRUTALIST

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A PRISON OF ONE'S OWN DEVISING

Brady Corbet Paints Himself Into a Corner

By Cole Smithey

 

Director/co-writer Brady Corbet has made an overwrought, unlit, postwar [fictional] epic with an unreliable protagonist that is as frustrating as any movie you will ever see.

An utter lack of pacing variety, dangling sub-plot threads, and a tacked-on ending make this four-hour audience investment hardly worth the effort.

Fictional Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) celebrates his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp by escaping to America, the land of a colder more hidden version of Nazi ideology.

László's Philadelphia-based furniture store-owning cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) proves to be an ersatz Nazi collaborator who, since moving to the States, has married a shiksa and switched to Catholicism. In no time at all cousin László wears out his welcome with considerable help from Attila's racist wife. Welcome to America sucker.

A gratuitous subplot involving a black coal worker (Isaach de Bankolé) and his son, gives way to László being hired by Guy Pearce's little Hitler Harrison Lee Van Buren, a narcissistic millionaire intent on subjugating László as his own personal Jewish architect slave. Van Buren has a real hard-on for his self-imposed prisoner László.

Under Van Buren's thumb (cough), László designs a gargantuan monolithic "institute" (church) that looks every bit the prison of claustrophobic holocaust nightmares.

László Tóth is no Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is László taking a piss at his blue-eyed capitalist warder by designing the ugliest fucking prison-like structure you've ever seen? Perhaps.

The claustrophobic building's focal point involves an upside-down crucifix that sunlight shines through.

Weird.

The sexually impotent, heroin-addicted László fulfills his updated concentration camp existence when he forwards his payment for Van Buren's project toward its completion to his own specifications.

Victim-hood is its own reward.

László's wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters the movie a half-hour too late, and even then does little to relieve the fictional narrative's doom and gloom trajectory.

"The Brutalist" doesn't know what it wants to say. Is it anti-Zionist? anti-Capitalist? anti-socialist? anti-Bauhaus? No idea.

I do know that "The Brutalist" is an exploitation movie in love with its own misery.

No amount of editing or color-correcting can save this film from itself.

Save the back-slapping for Sean Baker's "Anora."

Rated R. 215 mins.

ZERO STARS

THE NIGHT PORTER — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Director/co-writer Liliana Cavani's mind-bending reflection on the Nazi era is a pure filmic transmogrification of power, war, sex, personal identity, and soul-searching.

Cavani reduces her complex wartime narrative to a dead-end reunion between Max (Dirk Bogard), an ex-SS officer and Nazi warder to his former prisoner Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), the imprisoned non-Jewish daughter to a Leftist activist at a Nazi concentration camp.

A chance encounter at the Vienna hotel where Max is employed as a bellman, derails Lucia's post-war life as the concentration camp-survivor wife to a successful American symphony conductor busy on tour in Vienna.

In Cinema, Vienna is the place where people go to die.

Max and Lucia pick up their leftover BDSM desires from the days of their concentration camp experiences together when he was master to her prisoner/slave.

It is significant to realize that Liliana Cavani launched her filmmaking career with two historical documentaries ("The History of the Third Reich (1962) and "Women of the Resistance" (1965), for Radiotelevisione Italiana.

Clearly, Cavani's deep insights into the mindsets of the Nazi's prisoners, as well as that of their tormentor goons, adds significant anecdotal historic depth to "The Night Porter."

The devil is in the details. Even wallpaper sends a message.

To compare "The Night Porter" to any other World War II film would be folly. Not even Bertolucci's "The Conformist" can compare.

The necessary mental, physical, and emotional escape hatch that Max and Lucia employ serves as a temporary life raft from the anger, repression, and violence that rages around them, and deeply inside their tortured souls.

Fearless performances from Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling give "The Night Porter" its humanity. For a film about the lasting effects of genocide, "The Night Porter" gives essential meaning to the madness with a delicate touch of palpable understanding.

Remembering the very thing that most people want to forget is a promise to oneself and a curse.

We are all damned by history, and all that history leaves out.

Rated R. 118 mins.

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT — SHOCKTOBER!

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Wes Craven's debut film is everything wrong with exploitation cinema. Mean spirited to its core, this film's overriding theme seems to be that society is broken up into three categories: killers, victims, and witnesses.

Amateur filmmaker Craven switches tone between horrific sexual abuse, lighthearted comedy, and hippie crushing thriller.

Schlock.

Just ugly.

Actor David Hess's folk guitar songs point in a dead-end direction. Hess takes a piss at Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" with a too often repeated song that states, "And the road leads to nowhere."

I suppose it is fitting for such a piece of shit movie.

David Hess plays Krug, a cigar-chomping killer living out his perverted obsessions on two hippie girls that Krug and his "family" kidnap to torture. 

Wes Craven reworks Ingmar Bergman's significant "Virgin Spring" into something cruel and disgusting.

The specter of the Viet Nam War only hangs over the movie with the thinnest of threads.

The sexual abuse and murder scenes are treated without regard to any meaningful subtext. This is a movie without a soul.

There is no social commentary to be found. This is exploitation for exploitation sake.

Gene Siskel put it succinctly in his review of the movie.

"My objection to The Last House on the Left is not an objection to the graphic representations of violence per se, but to the fact that the movie celebrates violent acts, particularly adult male abuse of young women ... I felt a professional obligation to stick around to see if there was any socially redeeming value in the remainder of the movie and found none."

Rated R. 84 mins.

ZERO STARS