Not overly impressed by “The Brutalist”.
One reason: it’s based on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, which I thought was a really bad novel. So “The Brutalist” starts in a cesspool.
Second reason: Brody’s acting seems showy and broad, and obviously pitched for awards. Emoting, emoting, and emoting.
Third: it’s written by the director (from the school of James Cameron of “who needs a writer? Can’t be that hard. I’ll do it myself.”) Director Brady Corbet’s previous experience is almost solely as an actor. His co-writer– sometimes, a director writing his own movie will smartly bring in a real writer to help– is his girl friend, Mona Fastvold.
Fourthly: it is permeated with pernicious method acting (I am SO intensely into this character that actual articulated sounds fail me).
Fifthly: overuse of jerky, hand-held camera. I’ll concede that there are rare occasions in which jerky hand-held camera works (like in, “Dr. Strangelove”, during the attack on the base). But today it is mostly used to substitute incoherence for trajectory, movement for action, and evasion for composition. It has become universal, like autotune in music recording, for artists who have realized that the vast swath of audiences don’t care about real artistic quality any more.
It all reminds me another incoherent film, “Megalopolis”. In fact, there are too many similarities to dismiss the idea that they are alluding to the same source material, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.
I’ll be rooting for Chalamet to win best actor over Brody, but Brody has two things working in his favor: “Brutalist” is a Holocaust film, and he plays a character with an accent. Bonus points for playing an architect (Hollywood loves films that evoke tastefulness).
Watch the scene where Laszlo is reunited with his wife. The most obvious thing about it is that it’s a dud, it falls flat. Why? There’s nothing about the long time they have been apart that shows up here. They act as if they had just seen each other minutes ago at rehearsal.
What Brody does looks like great acting the same way the Mormon Tabernacle Choir looks like good music. It’s size and quantity, rather than quality. Brody can be very good– he was great in “The Pianist”– and he’s not really terrible in “The Brutalist”; just too much, and untuned dramatically and tonally discordant. He’s committed and passionate but he’s trapped in a narrative so obtuse and clumsy that it just feels self-indulgent. He’s a catalogue of moments that do not add up to a character.
There’s a big difference between a great actor directed by a great director and a great actor directed badly.