Since the first screenings of The Brutalist at the Venice Film Festival, where director Brady Corbet was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Direction, the film has garnered award-season buzz, but before praise for the film’s strengths, the first thing that always gets mentioned is the film’s length. The film has a running time of 3 hours and 35 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission, depending on how your comfort level with trying to skip the trailers without missing the start of the film, that means a four-hour commitment in your day at the cinema, if you can even find a showtime that works with your schedule. It is a commitment, which is why I think Corbet’s comment relating the perceived acceptable runtimes for superhero movies vs dramas in his recent Variety Directors on Directors disregards that regardless of genre, the longer the film, the greater commitment you ask of your audience. I’ve watched 90-minute movies that felt like 3 hours, and I’ve watched 3+ hour movies where time disappeared. The Brutalist, because of the scope of the story, does feel like a long film, but the minutes feel earned and hold you captive.
I attended a 9:30 am screening that was almost full except for the front row, and it was the most rapt audience I’ve ever been in. I am used to seeing a lot of shifting, or someone looking at their phone, or whispering too loud to the person next to them, especially in a house that full. But it was silence except for some scoffs at some of Guy Pearce’s line readings as the entitled industrialist Mr. Harrison Lee Van Buren, a big laugh when Láslzó (played by Adrien Brody) lovingly calls his wife Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones) a cow, and everyone rising to their feet when intermission started. Perhaps the takeaway for some will be that you can make a film any length, and audiences will sit as long as you give them an intermission. While I’m all for the inclusion of the intermission because I think its existence created an overall better viewing experience as no one left during the film to go to the washroom as they did during the similarly long Killers of the Flower Moon, I would hope the better message from the film is tell a good story regardless of the length, and an audience will find a way to make time for it.
The protagonist in The Brutalist is Láslzó Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who just survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the USA, where he discovers that his wife and niece, who he’d been separated from and did not know the fate of, survived. They are now an ocean apart. The film shows the long journey it takes for them to truly get back together and not just share space.
For much of the film, Láslzó is trying to have a community center commissioned by Mr. Van Buren built. The significance of the project and the true reasons behind his fight for the project are not made clear until the epilogue of the film. And that is the beauty of art. There was one meaning for the art that worked for the people he was selling it to and then another that he carried with him. Láslzó Tóth wasn’t a real architect, but now that his story has been captured on film, there is the narrative that Corbet and his co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold wanted to tell, and then there is what people bring to it from their own experiences. It’s like the line in the epilogue that says, “It is the destination, not the journey,” and while I think it’s a lovely sentiment, the very concept behind the meaning in the community center is painted by the journey. The destination is a product of the journey, much like the epilogue of the film is a product of the previous two acts.
The Brutalist is currently in limited theatrical release.
© 2020-2024. UniversalCinema Mag.