The Brutalist (2024)

 

There’s this building on the UC Davis campus that looks like a concrete box.

That building would be 1100 Soc-Sci, a massive lecture hall with endlessly descending staircases both inside and outside. My Multi-Variable Calculus class with Kouba took place there. So did Linear Algebra. I left Linguistics early every Wednesday to submit my homework to the table at the bottom on time. Soshnikov slid all late papers into the trash.

Whenever 1100 Soc-Sci came into view on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I grappled with its aesthetic ugliness. Smooth and cool to the touch though it was, the building struck my eyes quite differently than my fingertips. It was the first thing I ever identified as utilitarian; it felt beamed in from a dystopian movie or sci-fi TV series. Somebody really loved concrete, I thought on more than one occasion. The place had its unfathomable weight going for it but nothing else.

There was a war on, and yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived and are still there in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus…I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear; a whole river of such frivolities may flow un-dammed, but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion…

László Toth (Adrian Brody) speaks these words during part one of The Brutalist, and it’s one of those moments where the audience sees through the artifice to the screenwriter hiding behind the IMAX screen. This noble, poetic response (pardon my pun) cements László as a man of intellectual and emotional depth despite the blunting style of his creations, but it also draws a thick pencil line between him and his soon-to-be patron, Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who has just asked him the dangerously shallow question “Why architecture?” At first, László hesitates to say anything, asking instead, “Is this a test?” Assured that it is not by a man so wealthy he proudly mistakes cruelty for cleverness, his answer echoes across the film while simultaneously selling the rectangular eyesore where I learned linear transformations.

In a word: buildings like 1100 Soc-Sci endure.

Still, to reduce his life’s work to 180ish words threatens to trivialize László’s art just as reducing The Brutalist to some singular statement of theme threatens the film. Directed by Brady Corbet and written by Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold, the film follows a man forced from his home who designs massive concrete structures. But that is merely one corner of the canvas in a 215-minute epic journey of a film.

It’s as good a place to start as any because a man like László Toth champions endurance. After surviving the Holocaust, László arrives in America by ship, looking not to build but merely survive long enough to reunite with his wife and niece. Taking a job he’s overqualified for at his cousin’s furniture retailer, László’s skills eventually catch the eye of the tycoon Van Buren after a remarkable library renovation. Van Buren commissions László to build a community center on a nearby hill, inviting him to live at his sprawling estate and introducing him to lawyers to help his family emigrate.

László agrees, and he designs a staggering structure objected to by every person beyond Van Buren. After his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) arrives, he begins guiding a contentious construction that brings lingering tensions to a head.

Sincerely, I don’t know where to go from here; there’s so much put on screen across those three hours and 35 minutes that selecting a path feels futile. It’s like staring at a massive building from only inches away: you can’t see enough to grasp its totality. I’ll do my best to shine a light on a few of the things that do its majesty justice.

Primarily, there’s László’s immigrant story. Orchestrating study renovations under his smooth-talking cousin Attila (Alesssandro Nivola) should demean an acclaimed craftsman like László, but he is humble and determined even when shoveling coal after that cousin throws him out under dubious circumstances. While Attila has converted to Catholicism and changed his Jewish name to better assimilate, László resists, inviting thinly veiled hostility when he refuses to compromise artistically or culturally. The wealthy want him around their projects, but they don’t actually want him or his people around.

Another part of László’s story becomes addiction. Introduced early on to heroin, the architect is soon a full-blown addict with Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), a single father he befriends soon after reaching Pennsylvania. There’s never a moment in The Brutalist where a character recounts for the audience the horrors they saw in concentration camps, but there is the recurring pack of hypodermic needles László keeps always nearby. They remind us there’s something inside him he’s hiding from.

Likewise, there are interwoven stories with his wife and the elder Van Buren. Erzsébet arrives in Pennsylvania confined to a wheelchair, famine leaving her stricken with painful osteoporosis; the sight of his wife so visibly wounded in his absence unlocks a new mania in László even while sexual desire eludes him. We see Braves faces on both Toths, but Erzsébet’s nightly anguish, though a physical affliction, is indistinguishable from a nightmare. Van Buren, to his credit, supports his architect publicly, but he keeps rubber-stamping changes off-screen, deferring to his (non-Jewish) contractor and consultant often enough to send László into increasingly frequent fits of rage. The aristocrat welcomes László into his home, but one is always a tool for the other.

And that beckons in the art of it all. By all accounts, László is a genius of the highest order, a man with a distinct and uncompromising vision. To the Americans he works with, the Jewish Hungarian might well be an alien: when costs skyrocket, the team wants to scale back, but László refuses, investing his full compensation toward its completion. To Van Buren’s people, their project is a building, an edifice, a structure; to László, this is to be a monument. This will be his legacy, if not something greater. The film clarifies the architect’s vision by the time credits roll, but we see the lengths László goes to construct the community center, the way he trudges through its labyrinthine corridors at all hours, every bit the tortured artist. What tortures him he doesn’t need to say.

With a film of such length and depth, I struggle to select a unifying thread to anchor my review. Unlike Corbet’s film, which unfolds with a remarkable flow, I can’t seem to talk about The Brutalist without resorting to narration. Maybe that’s because I lack its Daniel Blumberg score that had me choked up mere minutes into the film. There’s a musical motif woven across the film’s grand tapestry that Blumberg molds to every scene and story to help unify Corbet’s grand vision for the film. No matter what befalls László Toth, we hear that four-note sequence and hold onto the part of him neither Nazis nor oppressive WASPs could take. Just as much as the architecture on screen, the score backgrounding it lends us a through-line. We know that László’s legacy will endure because those notes never fade away.

As I wrap this up, having spent the last two hours thinking, writing, and erasing words about the fictional László Toth, I wonder whether I should have devoted more to the visionary minds behind him. Corbet and Fastvold penned a screenplay as audacious as the Van Buren Community Center: during an era of diminished attention spans, The Brutalist is so long that it includes a fifteen-minute intermission. It is unyielding in its depiction of American cruelty, it is uncompromising in its presentation, and it packs every scene so full that even the most attentive viewer can’t help but miss a few dozen details hiding in its walls. A shocking development toward the end arrives out of nowhere, yet with hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Between the film, this review, and pure unstructured consideration with Blumberg’s score playing through my phone, I’ve spent nearly seven hours thinking about The Brutalist. I don’t doubt I will devote even more hours in the years to come.

Which is far more than I ever spent thinking about 1100 Soc-Sci. Never as I leaned against its smooth and impenetrable exterior did I consider why someone might revel in its concrete sturdiness. Never did I wonder who designed such a building and why he would choose to erect a heather-gray spectacle.

But when I next visit my alma mater, I’ll be sure to let my walk include a pass by that staggering edifice. I’ll descend the endless stairs and look for a placard denoting the designer’s name. I know it won’t say László Toth, who is fiction, but I do wonder if the brain behind it might be Jewish or have lived through atrocity. In any case, I’ll stand in the staggering shadow of that person’s legacy and think about The Brutalist.

I suspect Corbet’s film, too, will stand the test of time.

The Brutalist is a film devised to endure.

Here (2024)

My favorite moment in any film is when Emma and Mr. Knightley put their hands together in 2020’s Emma. It’s a silly scene, all stodgy costumes and ornate dancing; I’m not even sure I could call it well-acted. But when the two lock arms and orbit one another, the electricity of their touch renders me breathless. It’s as though I’ve been waiting all my life for that moment rather than an hour looking at Anya Taylor-Joy on the screen.

When that electricity strikes, when the coming together of two fictional hands overwhelms me, I know that a film is working. For all its historical adornment, Emma works; I buy into Emma’s journey and yearn for her, rather than those around her, to find happiness. But what I’m feeling, the invisible hand pulsing giddy emotion through my cynical veins, is tension. I can feel the possibility that Emma might not end up with Knightley—Austen makes compelling cases that she should not, ratcheting up the suspense as the delicate proto-romcom baubles toward its quietly triumphant pairing.

Here, the 2024 Belgian film directed by Baz Devos, would seem an odd companion for Emma, let alone all this talk about electricity. Set in Brussels during a rainy season, the film follows construction worker Stefan (Stefan Gota) as he leaves his high-rise work site for an extended holiday trip to his home in Romania. In the film's first half, we see nothing but Stefan preparing for his journey. He makes soup to empty his fridge and delivers it to family and friends.

I’ve never been to Brussels, but Devos introduces a lumbering giant with a soft side. As Stefan walks between destinations, we enter quiet communal gardens and dim cafes, places suggesting solitude despite their potential as hubs. Although Stefan cuts through lush locations on the outskirts, suggesting a peaceful coexistence, his profession looms; his work engineers an encroachment on the tranquil places across the road and behind the chain link fences. Still, Here resists recriminating these commercial spaces, lighting them with just enough gentle light for their intimacy to breathe. When he crashes on the table while his sister looks on near the film’s midpoint, Stefan bothers no one and finds no disturbance. “I have to go,” she says. But yet she waited while he dozed.

Meanwhile, ShuXiu (Liyo Gong) stares through a microscope at a sample. A bryologist, ShuXiu splits her workdays between a solitary desk and a dark lecture hall where she teaches botany. Like Stefan, her emotions are restrained and subdued, but her investment in this minute work goes unquestioned. Just as all takers toast the soup he made, proving his skill and compassion, so too do we watch ShuXiu pause on the sidewalk to collect a square of moss. The building it grows beneath towers over her; she notices nothing. It’s the unseen infinitesimal forest that inspires awe.

Although I knew this film’s trajectory—Here made Tim Grierson’s personal Top Ten list—I’d bet you understand my invocation of Emma now. When Stefan and ShuXiu meet in the unfussy noodle shop of her aunt, there is instant, unspoken chemistry. Beset by persistent rain behind the window Stefan foregrounds, their polite interactions across the restaurant offer gentle sunlight. There’s no hint of flirtation unless you listen to Stefan’s slightly-more-eager chiming or squint at the corners of ShuXiu’s smile. The world goes on around them, something they thoughtfully commiserate over when a delivery man exits into the downpour, but you know what this is. We know. It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say these two will meet again.

Unlike Emma, a film that clamors toward the inevitable conclusion near-every romantic comedy since has taught us to anticipate, Here breathes. Deeply. When the two find one another again, by pure happenstance, Devos turns off all clocks and unspools time for our characters. Meandering through the forest, running fingers across microbial forests while the city they inhabit quietly looms just beyond earshot, these two engage with nature more than one another. Rarely, if ever, do we get a shot of these two together. The lanky Stefan loses his upper body to the 4:3 aspect ratio; the inquisitive ShuXiu strolls so far ahead that she momentarily loses her fortuitous walking partner. Do they spend two hours together? Do they pass two eternities out in the woods? No matter—their rendezvous with the natural world is timeless because so is this tether between them. When the moment arrives where they finally face one another, their expressive faces escaping the frame does nothing to tame the cosmic forces that have united

Nothing happens. Devos shows us nothing, that is. Not unlike Emma’s and Knightley’s hands, this acknowledgment of what we in the audience have been waiting for is ephemeral. It’s just a moment. These two might well be cellular organisms in a moss forest of merely another scale. It isn’t heartbreaking any more than the divergent forces postponing Emma’s ultimate romantic collision with Knightley because we know—we know—what we’ve witnessed, but it is disorienting. The film watches cellular slides and fluttering leaves longer than it gives us Stefan and ShuXiu.

We bring so much of ourselves into viewing a film. I toted that magical minute of Emma, for instance, but I also brought more harrowing questions. Stefan’s journey betrays signals of finality; the beet broth in his delicious soup puts ominous thoughts in my head. Is ShuXiu happy with her work? Her pleasant encouragement with students comes naturally, but her polite smile there pales in comparison to her rosy cheeks while chit-chatting with Stefan. The film has one blinking moment of magic realism—what does it mean? My brain isn’t wired for the gentle breeze that is Here. I spent many a languorous shot searching behind the frame for mysteries.

If I understand the science outlined in Devos’s screenplay, moss is little more than a cluster of tiny trees ShuXiu calls a forest. When I think of forests, I picture the massive sequoias in San Francisco or the sky-kissing oak that once graced my parents’ backyard. Those trees have massive roots, roots so large they can destroy a foundation or Challenge young climbers by themselves. Moss, therefore, must consist of tiny roots; that’s why our protagonists have no trouble extricating squares from their environment. There’s so much moss on every log, every stump, every boulder—the scale of these ecological marvels deceives us into missing the life sheltered within and waiting to spread its spores across the earth. Like those miniature plants, Stefan carries seeds in his pocket. He seeks somewhere to plant them but resists the generous plots others offer.

 

Pause Here before its final scene. I guarantee you’ll know when you’ve reached it. Give yourself a moment to think about what should come next. Think about everything you’ve seen, and maybe think about what I’ve written. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself listening for something. If you’re like me, you’ll be surprised by what Here delivers in its place and when it cuts to darkness.

If you’re like me, you’ll also find yourself with gentle tears of joy the film shouldn’t have earned but did.

In multitudes.

Nightbitch (2024)

As much as any movie I can remember, Nightbitch wanted to rip my throat out.

Maybe that’s appropriate.

That Amy Adams’ character has no name beyond “Mother” telegraphs Nightbitch’s bent. Adams plays the exhausted mom at the film’s center. The former high-brow artist totes her toddler son to storytime and keeps him from electrocuting himself with a fork. She’s frazzled, she’s harried, and she’s pissed. Her working husband’s job necessitates travel, and he’s useless in parent mode.

And she tells us as much. Over and over, Adams reads dialogue or plays out fantasies of spewing philosophic all over those who cross her. If you told me Nightbitch was adapted from a blog or first-person novel, I’d nod and go, “Yep”. Every time Adams talks, the film becomes a blunt instrument of righteous fury. Nightbitch froths at the mouth, daring you to criticize its overclocked protagonist.

 

 

Who also turns into a dog. Maybe. You see, Nightbitch is high-concept that takes its high on the side. Trying to stake some claims about the animalism of motherhood and its violent suppression of humanity, sometimes the film goes body horror, with Adams unfurling a stringy tail from a puss-filled lump above her butt. Another time, she viciously maims the family pet…probably?

For a script that believes its audience incapable of detecting subtly and a Scoot McNairy performance that puts its hand so forcefully on the scale the thing explodes, Nightbitch withholds a lot of answers. Whether the writer/director believes that lends it a hazy surrealism evocative of late-night feedings or because she’s struggling to unite such a diverse and unruly pack of conceits, I’m not sure, but the result is a clunky, jarring, pseudo-magic realist lecture about parental sacrifice.

Contractual obligations dictate that I now acknowledge that I am not a parent and, thus, incapable of comprehending the metamorphosis wrought on the DNA of a woman when she becomes a mom. I watch many movies whose wavelengths I never find, but Nightbitch doesn’t want me on its wavelength. This is a chained-up dog of a film growling at me while I pass its yard. “You’ll never get it,” the film says, glaring at me with murderous canine eyes.

I might believe my lack of motherhood renders me ineligible to offer compassion for what it broadcasts, except I can’t: I’ve watched a film with this message about the fractured identity and eternal apocryphal fatigue of motherhood devastate me. My muse, of course, would be 2018’s Tully, starring Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis. In Tully, Diablo Cody’s script engineers empathy with expert precision; like Heller, she champions the gritty dysfunction of parenting by invoking [[SPOILERS]] something akin to magic realism, but every decision has a purpose. I bawled at Tully and thought about my mother’s many sacrifices with lips that quivered until I got home; during Nightbitch, I dared say nothing lest Adams’ character might sic her pack on me.

Which is too bad. Adams remains a magnetic performer, and her stripped-down portrayal here ties imbues every shot with proof of the draining costs of her unpaid labor post-labor. Heller doesn’t trust Adams to let her expressive bloodshot eyes invite us to understand; she’s constantly narrating like the script was lifted directly out of a novel without adaptation. Everything in this script is awkward, sacrosanct, and so aggressively on the wet nose that I looked up the number for animal control. And don’t even get me started on the cartoonish depictions of professional artists (that basically gets thrown out at the end for…reasons).

Admittedly, there was a part of me that thrilled as the film progressed and refused to yield from its “Mothering makes monsters” message. There’d be guts in committing to hostility toward the demands of child-rearing…so of course, the film pauses to insist it’s not the child but the role, as though we hadn’t already repeatedly seen Adams pouring from an empty cup to delight her son. Instead, it buries all of its intensity at the end in exchange for a Milkbone of compromise, communication, and a groveling husband who sees the error in his ways while sweeping a warehouse moments earlier full of moms bonding over the animals they murdered.

Reflecting now, I wonder if this film got chopped to pieces; its 98-minute runtime felt a tad slight for its premise, and there were jarring cuts and suddenly-central characters who leaped from NPC to VIP in a blink. Maybe a more expansive screenplay (or the novel it’s evidently based upon) did more with those extra square inches of canvas. There’s definitely something here because I cried at the end, albeit while certain I was crying because Adams so resembles a brilliant friend who wants to be a mother, and my heart broke thinking about what life bringing life into the world might strangle from her according to this movie.

 

 

Great films can make something specific feel universal, but even mediocre films manage that for me. I enter films wanting to empathize and connect and find personal truth in the story on screen. By that measure, Nightbitch ranks among the worst movies I have watched. Like a wild dog, it took my intended empathy, tore it apart like a wild skunk, and left it on my doorstep to rot.

WOOF.