39/35
When a visionary architect and his wife flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are forever changed by a mysterious, wealthy client. This film has an intermission built into the actual 70mm film reel that counts down from fifteen minutes in. Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.: When dogs get sick, they often bite the hand of those who fed them – until someone mercifully euthanizes them. Featured in The 7PM Project: Episode from December 10, 2024 (2024). The Brutalist is full of surprises. The characters are not who you expect – not in the manner of the end of Scooby Doo, but in the subtler, incremental ways that real people reveal themselves – unfolding over time, in a new context, or as circumstances force them. Here the circumstance is post-WWII horror. Laszlo (Adrien Brody), a Jewish architect who escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, reaches out to the welcoming arms of America — or faces them — in a frenetic opening sequence that literally evokes being born next to the Statue of Liberty. His becomes a journey of perpetual navigation through life’s array of horrors — existential, professional, familial, intimate — never taking his eyes off the prize of great achievement and never assessing the value of that prize to begin with. What is the lesson? Is it the shameful discovery that his success was born not in spite of his trauma, but because of it? Do we owe a debt to abuse? To the forces of culture, country, power and those who wield it, in building our brutal legacies (and homelands)? Are our lives the gasoline that burns on the way to somewhere more meaningful? The film is charming, it looks engaging, and it’s not boring (did you hear it was long?). It feels like it’s based on an ancient novel, a mysterious tome from which I’d love to extract some of the details the film refuses to share. But there is no novel. This aging man’s search for meaning becomes our own, too. And any greater understanding of Lazslo’s arrival, the machinations of his family, his country, and his rootlessness, for better or worse, seems left for us to construct. Brutalist writer-director Brady Corbet shares five films for troubled times.