Everyman
The Brutalist is a very long film. I think it is probably the best four hour movie about architecture I will see all year.It isn’t quite as long as it sounds, because it has an intermission. The intermission is baked into the movie: a twenty minute gap with a timer, so the cinema can’t skip it even if it wants to. The last time I saw Godfather Part Two, the “Intermission” card came up, but we all had to stay in our seats. The screen goes suitably blank between Act I and Act II of A Complete Unknown but there is no suggestion of a pause. I am just about old enough to remember second features, Black Angel, cartoons, the last days of British Movietone News, usherettes with trays of ice cream, or maybe some nuts.
It doesn’t feel like a very long film. I mean, it does feel like a very long film, but it doesn’t feel like a slog. Epic, but not demanding. There is probably something very technical to be said about the pacing. The Brutalist isn’t hurtling towards a climax: even during the interval I hadn’t quite worked out what it was about. So each individual scene and event has to hold your interest on its own terms. Which they mostly do. It’s maybe a film about being rather than doing? At the very end something quite surprising and unpleasant happens, which kind of casts a different light on the previous three hours. No-one sees dead people or reveals the name of their childhood toboggan, but you do stop and say “OK: I wasn’t quite expecting that.” Up to that point, I wasn’t quite clear if László Tóth was a very famous architect I would have heard of if I had heard of any very famous architects, or a purely fictional character. I understand he is a purely fictional character who is somewhat based on a real person, Marcel Breurer. I also understand that the only people who don’t think that this is an absolutely terrific film are people who do know a lot about architecture.
Big Huge American Movie is kind of like a genre in its own right. It begins with Toth arriving in New York, with requisite scenes of Ellis Island and Lady Liberty. He’s a Jewish refugee from Hungary—it only gradually becomes clear that he’s a concentration camp survivor. He starts out working in the furniture shop of his brother, who has gone native and married a Catholic; falls out with him, spends some time in a flop house, on a building site, and on the bread line, before forming a relationship with egoistical millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren who becomes his patron and commissions him to build a huge religious arts centre in memory of his mother.
It’s full of moments, although some of those moments go on for twenty minutes. Toth designs a state of the art reading room in Van Buren’s house, a surprise organised by his son. Van Buren, who hates surprises, is furious, until it gets a rave write-up in a society magazine. (I loved the reading room, I loved the genius of it, although it is quite impossible to imagine anyone actually reading anything there.) Toth goes straight from being a down-and-out to being guest of honour at Buren’s swish dinner parties. We see Jewish Toth presenting the ideas for the new church to the local community, winning them over with a huge slab of concrete that will project the shadow of the cross onto the alter at noon. We see him losing it completely with construction workers fooling around with his scaffolding. There is a huge picturesque set piece in a marble quarry in Sicily.
The actual ending may not quite work: or possibly its just redundant. The explanation of what Toth has been trying to say through his buildings is just a little bit too neat. And it leaves one wondering if anyone actually ever managed to live in one of the things. But the all-consuming historical sweep, and the self-destructive dialectic relationship between Van Buren and Toth makes any criticism seem redundant, if not actually presumptuous.
It is striking that the trailer doesn’t tell you anything about the movie, except that it is big and important and has been critically acclaimed. There are movies, and there are films, but this is clearly Cinema — a monumental epic that exists largely to remind you just how monumental and epic Cinema is capable of being.
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