For people who say they don’t make movies like they used to, The Brutalist gives you a reason to head out to the theater again.
Even though it’s a three and a half hour movie complete with a 15 minute intermission, the title of The Brutalist doesn’t refer to forcing viewers to stare at a screen for over 200 minutes. Rather it refers to a school of architecture that the protagonist practices. Brutalism describes structures characterized according to Oxford, “by a deliberate plainness, crudity, or violence of imagery”.
Boiled down to its simplest essence, this is a movie about a man wanting to build a building. But set in post-World War 2 America, The Brutalist is ripe with as many allegories and metaphors as you want to dig into it.
This is the first movie completely shot in VistaVision this century. The wide screen film stock gives it a look that stands out and the cinematography leans into the medium’s uniqueness. The Brutalist finds a way to depict cities that have been filmed a million times like New York and Venice from unique angles. Even the opening and closing credits have a different stamp. The opening credits of cast and crew crawl from right to left on the screen rather than from down to up. The closing credits come at you diagonally.
The film’s budget was under 10 million dollars.
That’s a fifth of what The Rock gets paid for his most recent performance. And every penny seemed to be put on the screen from the period details of the production design to the replication of construction of a Brutalist form of architecture. Pre-release comparisons to The Godfather felt like hyperbole. After seeing it, I’m comfortable with that statement. It’s definitely reminiscent of the adult epics of yesteryear helmed by Coppola, Kubrick, or Lean.
The Brutalist is the rare movie that demands to be seen on the big screen. Don’t let the obscene running time intimidate you. From the second scene on the movie flies by with dynamic visuals, fantastic acting , and a forward moving plot. I was unfamiliar with the co-writer/director Brady Corbet. Now I need to see his previous two films.
But first I might need to rewatch The Brutalist again.
