Of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I have only seen DUNE PART TWO and THE BRUTALIST all the way through. ANORA and THE SUBSTANCE have been in my queue for ages, and I do want to see CONCLAVE because I enjoyed the book. DUNE PART TWO is fine, occasionally brilliant, and a clever adaptation/update of the original text. Its flaws are minor – Javier Barden spends the last half of the film saying nothing but “Lisan al-Gaib” in varying tones, and establishing the family atomics and then having Timothee Chalamet looking directly at them exploding seems like a slip. But it’s fine.
THE BRUTALIST, working with a total budget that might just have covered the cost of DUNE PART TWO’s costumes, is something else. It, too, has flaws. We see what we presume to be Adrien Brody’s left hand writing a letter, but Brody is right-handed for the rest of the film. Scenes are over-long. It loses sense of its own timeline here and there. But it is a work of great ambition. Yes, so is DUNE, but DUNE is starting from an established text. THE BRUTALIST starts from scratch, inspired by true stories but not bound by them. It goes for something else, something bigger.
(The score, by the way, is brilliant, and goes a long way towards arranging the scale of the film. When it comes in, it’s immense. That Oscar was deserved.)
It’s the story of Bauhaus-trained monumental architect Laszlo Toth escaping to America after the Holocaust and falling into the orbit of a shallow, rapacious industrialist who commissions Toth to build a community center to honour his dead mother. Everything goes wrong. But Toth sees the shape of the place. He sees its statement. Almost all in his life is sacrificed to making it real.
It’s art as a balance between cost and reward. What the world wants and what the mind wants.
It’s a tricky film. Sometimes it wants you to take it literally, sometimes it wants you to see through it and its people. Its Brutalist architecture is a put-on, because the Brutalist of the title isn’t the architect or the architecture. Full marks for using Bauhaus design for the main titles, though. It’s a long film, and, like the center Toth builds, it’s far vaster in its underneath than it looks.
The coda is odd. It radically complicates and re-contextualises most of the previous two hours. It’s about the power of art to take ownership of victimhood and transcend it: the power of a creative mind to pull a victory from the mud.
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold pull off a huge magic trick in THE BRUTALIST, and it’s worthy of awards. I am faintly annoyed it didn’t get Best Picture, because that would have been a strong signal about art. I’m looking forward to watching it several more times.
“No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
(Written for my newsletter, 9 March 2025)
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