The Brutalist Spoiler Free Review

 The Brutalist

Genre: Historical epic

Director: Brady Corbet

Released: 2024



     When it comes to movies, extreme length is something of a risk. On the one hand, length can amplify flaws that brevity may have been able to obscure; if your main character is irritating, the longer the film drags on the more time you give the audience to realize just how terrible David Aaronson-sorry, I mean your protagonist-truly is. On the other end of the spectrum lies your Lord of the Ringses, your Blade Runners, your Lawrences of Arabias, movies whose hefty runtimes exist to accommodate the scope and scale of something truly epic.

     I say all of this because length is one of the main talking points about The Brutalist, and likely front of mind for those considering it for their next trip to the theater. Is it worth the three and a half hours, plus a fifteen minute intermission, the movie demands from you? The answer to that isn't clear cut, as what's good and not so good about The Brutalist kind of runs together and makes the film a tough one to either outright recommend to or warn off people, but if the closest I can get to a definitive answer to whether or not The Brutalist is worth ten bucks and an entire afternoon is "Yes, but . . ."

     The forces contributing to the first half of that answer are numerous and potent. To begin with, The Brutalist is undeniably the work of a singular vision, and its sheer breadth is hard to resist. The film takes place across the span of decades in the lives of an ensemble cast of unique, brilliantly acted characters, and each one is drawn in bold, uncompromising strokes.

     Main character Laszlo is a Hungarian immigrant and former architect, and your classic brilliant but tortured artist whose glut of talent is only matched by his expansive catalogue of self destructive habits, and his story of drive and genius chafing against his own human limitations as well as the needs and plans of those around him is extremely compelling. Ditto for Harrison (my pick for best performance of the movie thanks to Guy Pearce), the movie's eventual antagonist whose natural charisma hides a truly malevolent core.

     It's tricky to describe, but all of the characters inhabiting this behemoth of a movie, not just the two leads, are almost mythic in their composition. None of them are small or prone to do things halfway, each one is dramatic, bold in their own way, and absolutely committed to the myriad tasks they have set before themselves. There's not much in the way of subtlety about them, their highs are soaring flights of euphoria, and their lows are lightless sprees of despair and depravity. Your mileage with that kind of thing may vary, but having been always attracted to the towering, almost inhuman heroes and villains of myth and epic, I found this approach to be hugely compelling. 

     The grandiosity isn't just limited to the characters, either. The movie's impeccable visuals, too, are suffused with a surplus of scale that makes everything seem so vast and so dense, like the architecture on screen is a prehistoric formation of stone. To me, that's one of the biggest appeals of seeing this in the theater: the sheer scale of the film is aided significantly by a big screen with big speakers that pump out the movie's thunderous, ear-ringing score. 

     All of this comes together to make two and a half hours of brilliance that had me reevaluating my front runner for best picture this year. 
But.
As the film continues to expand, as the character dynamics continue to evolve and multiply, as the thematic horizon continues to lengthen, there's no way around it, the movie just kind of falls apart. It doesn't come crashing down in a single moment, nor does the final hour do away with the film's quality entirely. It's the simple but undeniable fact of the movie's length and its multitude of spinning plates that undermines its climax. There's just too many characters and too many relationships and too many conflicts to resolve, so the movie lets some go anticlimactically, or loses control of them altogether and they disappear. 

     Conflicts between characters get hasty resolutions, massive decisions are rushed through without much time to breathe; it's as if the movie were writing an essay and came to the realization that it was too long and laborious to bring to any kind of satisfying conclusion, and so rushed out a few unsatisfying conclusions just before the midnight deadline. If the rest of the film was a moving, luxurious symphony, the final hour is a high school band concert.

     The question, then, is are those two and half hours of brilliance worth the disappointment of the finale? That's a question you'll have to answer for yourself. If you're the kind of person for whom a fumbled ending consistently ruins stories, then I'd advise you to stay away. For myself and those like me, I'd say it was worth it. Once again, the ending doesn't undo my enjoyment of the film, but it does reduce it. The Brutalist is a staggeringly dense vision, and if you like epics, larger than life characters, or are just partial to unique cinematic experiences, then I'd say go and watch it, but prepare for an increasingly uneven ride as the movie struggles to draw to a close.



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