Every year, there’s at least one big Oscar-nominated movie that takes on the patina of homework: the long, anguished slog that only movie critics could love and therefore bully the Academy into recognizing. (Would that critics had this kind of influence over the Academy, but it does offer an explanation, however unlikely, of how the voting body sometimes seems to nominate movies they don’t actually appear to like or even necessarily watch.) This year’s prime candidate is The Brutalist, which is currently available on premium VOD as its theatrical run winds down at the end of Oscar season. It’s long – longer than any other Best Picture nominee this year, and also longer than any other 2024 movie that’s played on a thousand-plus multiplex screens – without the benefit of a familiar subject or a connection to a beloved movie and/or book. It lacks the immediate genre pleasures of comedy (Anora), thriller (Conclave), or horror (The Substance). It’s practically begging you to skip it if you’re not fully committed to a three-and-a-half hour movie about a put-upon architect. And yet!
Why Watch The Brutalist Tonight?
If you have the time to spare, The Brutalist is also easily one of the actual-best of this year’s ten Best Picture nominees, a movie that turns out not to need the preconditions of a real-life figure or Broadway-style spectacle to justify its muchness, because the filmmaking creates its own center of gravity.
It starts from the opening sequence, bustling through darkness of what turns out to be a boat bound for the United States, where László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew, is emigrating, having escaped the horrors of the Holocaust in World War II-era Europe. He has been separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and his first glorious look at his new home is depicted via an already-iconic shot of an upside-down Statue of Liberty, as seen from his crowded vantage on the boat. Director and co-writer Brady Corbet, with cinematographer Lol Crawley and composer Daniel Blumberg (all Oscar nominees for the film) builds to this moment as the end of an unlikely crescendo; it should be too soon in a 215-minute movie to reach such an emotional peak, yet there it is – an impossible hope that we suddenly share with Tóth. It also provides visual connection to the flashback portions of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, another epic of 200-plus minutes, and the kind of big-canvas ’70s New Hollywood cinema Corbet clearly aspires to.
One of the movie’s finest, strangest achievements is how Corbet manages to catch the tenor of a movie like Godfather II without the salacious intrigue of a crime plot. (Not that there’s a lack of crimes and other bad behavior in the film, but there’s also not an incident as traditionally suspenseful as young Vito Corleone’s violent revenge on a local don.) Arriving in Philadelphia, Tóth meets up with his assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who provides a place to stay and a job at his furniture store. This is how he happens to meet Harry Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), whose son hires the business to built bookshelves for his father’s opulent study. Eventually, following a streak of the mistreatments that typify the American immigrant story, Tóth – an architect in his home country, the extent of his accomplishments not clear until this point, well into the movie – is hired to design and build a community center for Van Buren. This massive project and its attendant struggles take up the bulk of the film’s hefty running time.
About that: In theaters, the movie has a built-in 15-minute intermission, after its first “act” ends with another unlikely crescendo accompanied by narration from a letter, this one heralding the arrival of Erzsébet to join her husband. The ensuing interlude brings its official runtime to 215 minutes – over three and a half hours, but really just (just!) three hours and 20 minutes of movie, which is broken out so neatly that it can easily function as a double feature of “normal”-length movies, with an at-home break of your choosing.
That said, the movie’s immersiveness on a big screen is formidable, even as the cast of characters remains relatively intimate. There are just a few people we get to know in detail: László, Erzsébet, and Van Buren, an industrialist who is delighted to serve as a great artist’s patron – until he notices, perhaps too late, that László’s vision, and the project itself, may not show him proper deference. Perhaps overmuch has been made (by critics, and by Corbet himself) of The Brutalist as a metaphor for the Herculean task of Making Art, specifically something as resource-consuming and (in present conditions) difficult as a film. But the movie is most fascinating as a film about ownership: Tóth is building something personal that Van Buren feels, by virtue of his money and his land and his power, belongs to him, even if he makes noise about serving the community at large. That multi-directional push and pull between vision, stubbornness, ego, and capitalism, all in service of a structure whose full scope and personal meaning are not shown to us until the very end, feels like a perfectly fraught depiction of this country as one built by immigrants who nonetheless risk destruction in its vast machinery. So yeah, it’s a move about America.
Those are the kinds of terms that may rankle skeptics of The Brutalist, who make the (not entirely invalid) point that maybe Corbet and his collaborator Mona Fastvold too transparently yearns for big-picture importance, perhaps more than some of the film’s writing bears out. It’s certainly striking to see Corbet operating so self-consciously in the ’70s New Hollywood mode the same year that Francis Ford Coppola, an actual director of movies from this era, returned with his own architect-centric opus. Coppola’s Megalopolis is more ridiculously Randian in its half-baked themes but arguably freer, less constrained by his own history, more deliriously inventive in the parts of film history it pulls from, than the more solemn good taste of Corbet’s film. Yet it is invigorating, to see a youngish director working in that old-fashioned mode, striving for a movie that despite a relatively small cast, shockingly low budget, and likelihood that it will be seen on a moderate-sized home screen, feels monumental by design. If the Academy was tricked by its bigness into honoring it, well, that feels pretty American, too.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
The post What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘The Brutalist,’ an Oscar Contender That’s Worth the Big Runtime appeared first on Decider.
