The Brutalist
A24
2024
Director: Brady Corbet
Screenwriter: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Novelist:
Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
8.3
album coveralbum cover
I've studied architecture and this movie is not really architecture. So if it's not architecture it's about the Jewish immigrant experience — but it's not even really about that, for all it means to this movie the Jewish experience is just a prop. So what's left? Photography, intriguing character and story design not fleshed out, cavernous dystopian philosophy and some American academic analysis dry but also a speck of magical realism like a fixed point in a furrowing matrix distilled to be rural Pennsylvania in the 1950s of Sopranos flashbackia. That's pretty good for $10 million dollars! It's too bad I couldn't sit down with the writers and trash their work so thoroughly and brutally they go back with only the bare bones and hills and apologia and return with something intellectually and or artistically fitting of their narrative ambitions. Jews don't think about Israel like this in America so don't use it like a salvo and also, before even approaching a sacrosanct art like architecture understand it's never and I mean never perfunctory about space—;:,!?–""/~() - but come again.