The Brutalist review

I saw The Brutalist, and here are my thoughts…

After surviving the holocaust and coming to America, a famed architect struggles to survive and manages to be-friend a very rich man and gets the opportunity to build a very lavish building…

So let me start with the good… This movie looks incredible. I saw it in 70 mm, and I’m not usually someone who goes, “You have to see it like this to really enjoy it,” but this movie is so gorgeous and stunning, I think if you’re going to go to a nearly 4, you might as well go in style.

 

The cinematographer better start working on his Oscar speech, because this is one of the most beautiful and stunning movies I’ve seen this decade. The use of lighting and color, despite being filmed in 2024, feels right for a movie from the 40s or 50s, and it actually fits within the context of the story. That award is locked and loaded. 

 

The soundtrack is beautiful, absolutely elegant and heartfelt. 

 

Adrian Brody gives such a powerfully emotional and vulnerable performance, one of the best of his career; I wouldn’t be surprised if you want best actor.

 

This movie is unexpectedly hilarious, especially with Guy Pearce. Now he gives a grounded and great performance, but he’s so rich, and obviously to his own richness, he can come off like the Monopoly Man with his humor.

 

Felicity Jones has always been one of my favorite actresses, and she gives a very raw and scene-stealing performance, definitely bringing a lot of elegance into the role.

 

A lot of different actors, big and small, some known and some unknown, pop out throughout the movie. Everyone gives a great, memorable performance.

 

Speaking of humor, there were actually some pretty good jokes in here that got big laughs out of the audience, and I had a pretty full theater, so that was fun.

 

Now this is a nearly 4-hour movie, and while slow in parts, it was never boring. It’s the cinematic equivalent of reading a novel. Now there were a couple parts where I thought, “Well, this could’ve been shortened, or this could’ve been elongated”, but that’s just personal taste. I got to give Brady Corbet a lot of credit, dude knows how to make… cinema lol.

 

Now for the criticism... I thought some of the rich elite characters, especially Guy Pearce’s son, played the whole “elite looking down on poor foreigners” stick a little too broadly. It’s obvious the movie's trying to make some kind of comment about class and the difference between the rich and the powerful, but it does come off a bit too off-ish at times.

 

So for the first 2/2 of the movie, the film moves at a fairly good pace. I may have my ups and downs about what parts they choose to focus on, but nothing I can really complain about. It’s an artsy film about characters, and it’s doing a good job, and I’m rolling with it… And then the story decides to do something, start a storyline to introduce conflict for the third act, and honestly it kind of comes out of nowhere, like when you’re watching you’re like… Oh, we’re doing this? That’s an odd choice; why are we doing this? And then the movie just kind of goes back and forth, not feeling as cohesive as it was before, and while there is one really good performance scene for Felicity Jones, the movie then just sort of stops very abruptly, and there is a big, big, big thing that they do not resolve in any sort of satisfying way, and I do not know why you very obviously could’ve; it seems like the director made a choice, and honestly I don’t think it was the best one. Then the movie just wraps up quickly, and it’s like… what the hell was that? I mean, I just spent the last three hours following these characters in the story, and that’s how you’re gonna put a bow on everything? That anticlimax, really? There is one bit of dialogue that explains something that when you think about it through the rest of the movie actually brings a whole new context and dimension and heart to the film, but honestly the way they decide to handle the ending and wrap up really just a turd in the punch bowl. I don’t want to be mean because I can tell the filmmakers all had a lot of passion and put a lot of work into this, but they had to have known this ending would’ve pushed people the wrong way; this is some Joker: Folie à Deux stuff right here.

On a positive note, this film coast a little less than 10 million dollars, which is SUPER impressive, this looks like a 30-50 million dollar movie, so a big tip of my hat to the filmmakers.

 

To sum up my feelings, this movie has a quote that sums up my feelings: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” … This movie started out in the first 2/2 like a beautiful scenic cruise with all sorts of style and class and elegance... And then it stops, and you fall face first in the mud. No matter how much good that starting gave me, the only thing I’m going to remember is the dry cleaning to get all this guck off me.

 

If I’m being honest with myself, it’s really a three-star movie ⭐️⭐️⭐️ but the level of work that went into it with the filmmaking and acting just barely pushes it over the line to a low four stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and that may feel like a copout, but honestly, there is just a next level of detail and work put in that does merit praise. To take an architect analogy… No matter how beautiful the house is, if you have a shaky foundation, everything will fall apart.