Briefly Reviewed – Brady Corbet’s ‘The Brutalist’

I watched The Brutalist on an IMAX screen, and I’m yet to recover from the experience. Experience. That’s the word for it. With most films, it’s easy to say… “I liked it”, or “the film did not work for me”. The Brutalist had parts I loved, parts that left me scratching my head, and a few minutes, early on, it even had parts that made me nod off for a bit (I hadn’t slept very well the previous night). But overall, it’s the kind of vast, kaleidoscopic thing you rarely see anymore. It’s an Ayn Rand kind of movie. It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson kind of movie. It’s a Yuval Noah Harari kind of movie. It’s an Architecture Digest kind of movie. The Brutalist is seemingly about a Holocaust survivor, an architect, who is given the commission to create a “building”. That’s the ‘one line’, as they call it, but the movie is like an amoeba that constantly keeps splitting itself and creating new shapes, sometimes neat, sometimes clunky. It’s like watching Nicolas Cage from Leaving Las Vegas trying to recreate the Sistine Chapel. The cinematography, the music are standouts, in that they, too, seem to be following as unique a blueprint as the buildings built by the protagonist. They seem to be governed by that man’s drugged-out id: masterfully formal (classical) shots coexist with chaotic handheld ones, just as melodic riffs rub shoulders with sudden bursts of atonality. A very prominent character (heretofore only spoken about) is introduced in a still photograph at interval point. Another prominent character disappears into the darkness, as though swallowed up by his sins. In other words, the screenplay, too, is structurally… something else. I can’t say that I fully got The Brutalist… but it’s dazzling, it’s draining, it’s the most cinematic piece of cinema I’ve seen in years.