The Brutalist

Shout out to the couple besides me knocking back beers during this movie. I think this movie is worth watching just for the opening sequence. Holy shit, it was awesome. ~spoilers~ This movie reads like a novel and is much more of a portrait than a plot driven story. It takes it’s time, it shows us full conversations. Yes, there’s a lot of this that could have been edited out, but I actually appreciate the willingness to show things play out in full, to hold on moments for a while, to stroll from one moment to the next. You could write a PhD thesis on this movie. There’s so much happening visually with the literal brutalist structures, but also brutalist visuals in the marble quarry, and the way that light, shadows, and space are used. At its core, it’s an immigrant story that gets at many of the underlying political motivations for brutalist arhictecture (Laszlo’s answer to why architecture and his stand niece’s explanation of the design of the Van Buren building). The often perverse relationship between patron and artist is explored. Elizabeth’s relative facility with assimilating compared with Laszlo’s difficulty with it another interesting dichotomy (She has been among the wealthy at Oxford). Most graphically, the idea that being an immigrant artist at the mercy of wealthy patron is violating experience is touched on. Music in this movie was incredible. It’s visually stunning, with more great shots than I can remember. The performances were all great, with Adrien Brody and Guy Pierce stealing the show for me.