Oscar qualification generally means a movie only has to play NYC and Los Angeles for a week by the end of the calendar year, which period is invariably cluttered by huge mainstream releases (like the current Wicked, Nosferatu, etc.). So outside those showbiz capitols, the rest of us usually have to wait a bit for some less overtly commercial awards-magnet titles to arrive. This week brings a truckload, heavy on the auteurist imprint from writer-directors who in several cases are in the later stages of very long, laureled careers. With one exception, the youngest among them is 75 years old.
Not quite half that age is Brady Corbet, an actor (Mysterious Skin, Melancholia) who abandoned that vocation a decade ago to move behind the camera. The first two features he directed, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, were impressively ambitious if also occasionally maddening. His latest The Brutalist (once again co-written with spouse Mona Fastvold) takes a considerable leap beyond them, its chronicle of another fictitious, problematic “visionary” spanning decades, continents and some 215 minutes. There’s an intermission. There’s even an overture, for god’s sake.
We first meet Hungarian Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) as he wakes on a 1947 boatful of refugee WW2 survivors to catch his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. He’s fortunate to have as sponsor a cousin, Attila (the always impressive Alessandro Nivola), who’s willing to put him up and put him to work designing for the furniture store he owns in Philadelphia.
The sleek, sculptural pieces he creates are much too forward-thinking for that market, but they attract a commission: Harry (Joe Alwyn), only son to fabulously rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), asks the men to renovate the library at their family manse as a “surprise” for his absent father. Unfortunately, that gift is poorly received—the elder Van Buren, in the midst of a family crisis, reacts with irrational fury rather than gratitude. Then the cousins’ already strained relationship is broken by an accusation from the thoroughly Americanized Attila’s very middle-class American wife (Emma Laird as Audrey).
Though he’s reduced to homelessness and manual labor, Laszlo—who was a fabled modernist in Europe before the Nazis turned his world upside down—would rather suffer those indignities than sacrifice his creative integrity to employment with some commercial firm. But once time has passed, tycoon Harrison calms down, realizing his new library is proof of an extraordinary talent. (It even gets featured in Look Magazine.) He excavates the expat from squalor, installs him on his own country estate, and gives him more-or-less carte blanche to design and build an enormous community/cultural/athletic/religious center on a nearby hill… as tribute to the late mother Harrison remains rather alarmingly devoted to. He even pulls diplomatic strings so that Laszlo can be joined at last by wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), now in a wheelchair due to starvation-induced osteoporosis, and his mysteriously mute niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy).
All these relationships are somewhat thorny, their palpable conflicts seldom defined. Our hero’s least complicated loyalty is to Gordon (Isaach de Bankole), another hard-luck case he brings along with him as a coworker. The monumental project runs into difficulties with local contractors and xenophobes, who take umbrage at this Jewish interloper’s unwillingness to compromise or charm. A major accident puts the whole enterprise on hold, and when it’s finally resuscitated, a last major section in Italy (where designer and benefactor have gone to find just the right marble) provides even more shocking cause for discord. The Brutalist ends many years later at a Venice Biennale. Most of its protagonists are now dead, but Laszlo’s career is retroactively celebrated—though most of that career evidently took place in periods not dramatized here.
This is an ode to stubborn individuality echoed by the film’s own aesthetic, which is at once epic and minimalist, dominated by giant close-ups; occasional anachronisms are thrown for no obvious reason. The script is expansive and frustrating, with numerous big ideas it often doesn’t feel the need to follow through on. In what’s possibly his best role since winning the Oscar for The Pianist twenty-two years ago, Brody easily suggests a man of myriad warring internal complexities—enough that it seems gratuitous when the screenplay additionally saddles Laszlo with a drug addiction that seems to belong to another movie.
Likewise Pearce, another actor too often stuck in unworthy films, is terrific here…yet his character is subject to a lurid climactic revelation that feels like it either should have been a central focus all along, or excluded entirely. If the women are less enigmatic, that is presumably because the filmmakers don’t seem very interested in them…this being a movie in which men are either titans or parasites, and anything/anyone else is just decor.
While the performers fully inhabit their figures, one gets the sense that the writers kept most of those fictive biographies in their heads, preferring not to share them with viewers. I found it exasperating that at the very end here, we’re told that an elephant in the room which has been studiously ignored for 3.5 hours is the whole meaning of Laszlo’s life and work. Really? Was there no time in the prior 200 minutes or so to prepare us for that insight?
Nonetheless, The Brutalist—named after the architectural school Laszlo comes to personify—is to a large degree riveting in its singularity of atmosphere and self-importance. It reportedly cost under $10 million, but feels bigger in every way than many movies costing twenty times as much, its grandiosity of scale not so much purely physical as a matter of tone. You can detect the influence of sources as disparate as There Will Be Blood, The Master and The Fountainhead, themselves united by an awed fascination with half-genius, half-monstrous male megalomaniacs. Corbet’s choice of the 70mm and VistaVision formats, his curious decisions re: what to detail and what to neglect, the whole film’s novelistic idiosyncrasy etc. etc. are all factors that compel in part because we never fully grok the logic behind them.
The Brutalist has already picked up a slew of major awards, and if such things were given for how interesting a film is—both to watch and to puzzle over afterward—it would be at the top of everyone’s lists for last year. Maybe the mixed response generated in my first viewing will resolve itself in subsequent ones. It strongly asserts itself as a fictionalized biopic, and you might be surprised afterward to realize Laszlo Toth isn’t really based on anyone at all—his name was lifted from a still-living Hungarian geologist infamous for some delusionally-driven stunts (in 1972 he attacked a statue in the Vatican, proclaiming himself Christ), but who otherwise has no relevancy whatsoever.
A character at the close here sums things up by saying about the it’s all “about the destination, not the journey.” Not the least of Corbet’s perversities is that he’s just spent so much time proving the opposite—we still don’t quite grasp the workings of his hero’s mind, why he lived his life as he did, or what he achieved. Still, getting to that parting WTF is very, very interesting. The Brutalist opens in area theaters this Fri/10.
Still in his mid-30s, Brady Corbet will hopefully be further revealing and refining his talent for decades to come. Whereas three veteran writer-directors who also have films opening this week probably lack that option, and it is telling that two among their new efforts are very much about confronting mortality. A famed screenwriter who’s made some of his best-received directorial efforts (like First Reformed) in recent years, Paul Schrader’s latest Oh, Canada is a reunion with significant past collaborators. 1980’s American Gigolo was a commercial breakthrough for star Richard Gere as well as the director. And this film is based on a story by the late Russell Banks, whose Affliction Schrader also adapted into one of his best movies.
This much-less-straightforward tale doesn’t work as well, and has the feel of a conceit that might’ve flown in literary form yet resists a more literal-minded medium. Gere plays Leonard Fife, celebrated documentarian and film studies professor who’s consented to be interviewed on-camera by former students now considered the ““Mr and Mrs. Ken Burns of Canada” (Michael Imperioli, Victoria Hill). Still, he’s combative from the outset, ignoring their prepared questions.
He prefers to address only wife Emma (Uma Thurman), delivering a windy autobiographical “testimony” he’s seemingly thought out in advance. Nonetheless, he continually stumbles, correcting and contradicting himself, his mind perhaps clouded by Alzheimer’s and/or medication. Emma pleads for the filming to stop, protesting “He confabulates like he’s dreaming…most of what he’s saying is either misremembered or half invented.” But she’s overruled, mostly by the man himself, who seems bent on some kind of public self-immolation.
Oh, Canada gets more interesting once we realize Leonard is an unreliable narrator of his own story. But that wrinkle doesn’t develop towards any satisfying revelation or structural gambit. The flashbacks (in which he’s played by Jacob Elordi) limn a rather banal portrait of the artist as a young cad, skipping out on various women, etc. Did he actually land in Montreal to dodge U.S. military service during the Vietnam War, or was his motivation more crass? We’re not sure—and unfortunately, we don’t care much, either.
This solemn drama’s meditations on death and legacy feel heavy-handed crammed into a 90-minute progress that covers too much ground too superficially to say much. An entire nation’s expansive contributions to the documentary form (in some ways the Canadian industry’s leading achievement) get unceremoniously dumped whole into the lap of a fictive expat Yank, whose ouevre encompasses every hot expose topic from Agent Orange and clubbing Arctic seals to indigenous residential-school scandals and pedophile priests. But where did that crusading zeal come from? All we see is an egotistical if muddled scold.
There’s more than a whiff of auteurist self-examination here. But as depicted, Leonard seems a poor substitute indeed for Paul Schrader, who from Taxi Driver to The Card Counter has been anything but a generic example of his generation’s screen creativity. Oh, Canada is worth seeing for its thematic ambition and seriousness, but is unlikely to impress anyone as among its maker’s better efforts. It opens Fri/10 at SF’s Roxie Theater.
Attempting to wind up unfinished business and make a more graceful exit from this mortal plane is the whole gist of The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature. Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a successful writer of autofiction books who learns that her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) is hospitalized with cervical cancer. Very close when they worked together on a magazine in NYC in the 1980s, they’ve lost touch since, partly because Martha became a globe-trotting war correspondent. But once contact is renewed, they find their bond as strong as ever.
Nonetheless, Ingrid is initially taken aback when Martha—whose hopes of an experimental-treatment recovery end up getting dashed—asks her to “be in the next room” when she eventually practices euthanasia, just so she won’t be completely alone. That prospect terrifies Ingrid, but she relents, and the two women repair to a luxe rented rural home outside Woodstock for a month-long “vacation” only one of them will return from.
Based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez (of National Book Award winner The Friend), this is a film so top-heavy with talent, you might be reluctant to admit how talky, contrived and humorless it is, let alone how out ill-suited for Almodovar. The endless, stilted dialogue feels stuck on a literary page, with discussions of right-to-die ethics and climate change (the latter from an ex-lover figure played by John Turturro) that feel like prepared speeches.
There are inexplicable digressions, like an emergency road-trip back to the city for forgotten pills, that add nothing but length to an already patience-testing narrative. One keeps expecting some great irony or twist to arrive, but it doesn’t—in fact the fadeout reinforces a dullish sentimentality that the film doesn’t back up with enough depth of feeling, despite the warm gush of Alberto Iglesias’ old-school orchestral score. As a rather stolid tearjerker with prestige actors, Room is okay, but it’s hard not to have expected something more. It opens at the Alamo New Mission, Smith Rafael Film Center and Rialto Elmwood this Fri/10, then expands to more Bay Area theaters Jan. 17.
On the flipside, the heroine in 81-year-old Mike Leigh’s new Hard Truths is a gorgon whose only emotion that might pass for “soft” is hypochondriacal self-pity. The inaptly named Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, of the director’s prior Secrets and Lies) is a bitter malcontent living in London’s outskirts, hypochondria providing an excuse to rarely leave home. When she does go out, she can’t help verbally tearing the head off sales clerks, neighbors, total strangers, the world in general…then of course blaming them for the altercation she’s caused. Nor does her own roof offer much shelter, at least for the unfortunates who share it with her. Long-suffering husband Curtley (David Webber) has retreated into near-complete silence, while their overweight adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) is even more withdrawn—and who could blame him? His mother’s constant invective would immobilize any timid soul.
By contrast, her hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a stubbornly breezy type who’s raised two good-humored, outgoing daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown). Yet they come in for Pansy’s merciless criticism, too. She is insufferable—and the problem with Hard Truths is that the film seems to think we ought to sympathize with her, while not providing any reason to. You might think of this as an “answer film” to Leigh’s 2008 Happy-Go-Lucky, which some found fault with because Sally Hawkins’ lead character was so cheerfully one-note.
Again working with his actors to develop the entire project, Leigh gives them a lot of rope, and there is no disputing the furious intensity of Jean-Baptiste’s performance. But Pansy is exhausting, for the viewer as well as her family, and the film doesn’t provide the catharsis needed to turn so much bile into a path toward redemption…or anything, really. After 90-odd minutes, the story just jerks to a halt; little has been resolved, or even explained. Leigh has made some great films, but others have felt like overextended, underdeveloped character studies, and for me this fell into that category. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/10.
Two films making just one-night appearances in coming days are worth a note, as both provide a significant showcase for another venerable director. The oldie is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 The Manxman, his final silent feature. Distant from the thriller territory he’d soon become identified with, it’s a romantic triangle set on the Isle of Man, with a handsome sailor (Carl Brisson) and his lawyer pal (Malcolm Keen) vying for the love of a vivacious barmaid (Anny Ondra, the first “Hitchcock blonde”). No end of melodramatic contrivances complicate that rivalry—including the announced death of one suitor who turns out to be still alive–in an adaptation of a novel by Hall Caine that was described as about “the mounting consequences of sin.”
Though updated from the late-Victorian period in which it was originally set and published, the story is creaky—you can see why its once hugely popular author is no longer read today. (Trivia note: Hitchcock apparently moved the entire production to Cornwall from the Isle of Man when Caine, who lived on the island, proved too meddlesome.) But while the material may have dated, and appears to lie outside its director’s wheelhouse, Hitch handles it with more sincerity and energy than you’d expect. It’s a handsome, elaborate and lively production that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be presenting at Grace Cathedral this Sat/11 at 7 pm, with Stephen Horne’s score performed live by the Oakland Symphony. More info here is https://silentfilm.org/event/the-manxman/
By the standards of the filmmakers above, the great Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov is a relative young’un at age 71. But Fairytale aka Skazka, which plays BAMPFA in Berkeley next Wed/15, is his first film in years—and is banned from being seen in his own nation. Like various Iranian directors, Sokurov has had works suppressed (both under Soviet authorities and since), his passport confiscate and travel restricted, the reasons seldom articulated. There is no content specific to Mother Russia’s current leaders or politics in his latest—but then again, you needn’t be a Putin minion to realize its bitter ridicule might easily be interpreted as coming at that autocrat’s expense.
Fairytale is a sardonic and bizarre phantasmagoria that uses deepfake technology to animate archival images of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Mussolini—with special guest appearances by Jesus and Napoleon—as they wander about Purgatory, waiting to meet with God. For some, it may be an eternal wait. Meanwhile, they exchange frivolities and insults (“Don’t get sassy, fatty,” Der Fuehrer tells Il Duce), discuss capitalism, communism, religion and regrets (like not bombing Paris). They occasionally confront evidence of personal crime. But in death as in life, they remain to self-absorbed to notice, or care.
This woozy 78-minute B&W reverie is in some ways reminiscent of what’s arguably the director’s greatest film, 1997’s Mother and Son, in that its characters simply wander around landscapes, musing. Except here the figures (dubbed voices provided by actors) are legendarily historical, their environments a surreal collage reminiscent of Xerox art and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg.
It has been said that that Sokurov’s dreamy reckoning for world leaders is too formless, and plays longer than it is. But as with most of his work, it casts a hypnotic spell you can resist and be bored by, or surrender and enjoy a singular, mystical, aesthetically striking experience. Fairytale has an indicting fin de siecle weight to it—Sokurov knows where the bodies are buried, and how history repeats itself. No wonder Putin & co. chose to take offense. This art, somehow at once monumental and a baroque prank, makes them look very puny indeed. More info here.
