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
