Making three-and-a-half-hour-long films about architecture is, I feel it is safe to say, a niche occupation. The reason why most people don't spend their time making three-and-a-half-hour-long films about architecture is, with just a little thought, quite obvious: the prospect of sitting through one is enough to give even the most enthusiastic of film-goers pause. If you're going to make a three-and-a-half-hour-long film about architecture and have it become a success then you have to have some kind of gimmick working for you.

Having said that, when I went to see Brady Corbet's The Brutalist the other day, it was rammed with people to a greater extent than any film I've seen since Barbie, despite a duration knocking on the door of four hours (including trailers etc) and the fact it is about. . . oh, you're ahead of me there. Not a bad achievement for an actor-director who not all that many years ago was playing Alan Tracy in the live-action Thunderbirds movie. So clearly Corbet has managed to crack the very-long-building-things movie problem. (Or possibly this thing is so long that the cinema is only scheduling one screening a day, resulting in the whole potential audience turning up to the same show.)

This looks suspiciously like another attempt at making a movie about AMERICA!, which is one of those themes which never completely goes out of fashion. Watching Americans attempt to make sense of themselves and their country is always interesting and it does frequently produce some very good movies indeed, with Citizen Kane and The Godfather just two of the names on the list.

The Brutalist opens with Laszlo Toth (Adrian Brody), a Hungarian refugee and victim of the Nazi regime, being shaken awake in a darkened room. He stumbles around for a bit, and we see flashes of faces and other things around him, not especially coherently. Simultaneously we hear the voice of his wife Erszebet (Felicity Jones), reading out a letter she has sent him: she and their niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) are still trapped in the chaos of Europe. But where is Toth? It suddenly resolves as a door opens and there is a startling coup de cinema.

Jones doesn't appear on screen in the first half of the film (it is formally split into two parts, with an intermission built in (thank God) – perhaps this is the secret to a successful really long film), which focuses mainly on Toth himself. Arriving in America, he ends up staying with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola, who doesn't turn into a rhino in this movie), sleeping in his cupboard and helping out at his furniture shop.

Eventually they get a job renovating the library of wealthy businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who is (eventually) mightily impressed by what Toth in particular does with the place. It emerges that prior to the war Toth was a celebrated and successful architect, but has been unable to resume his career in the States. A man with Van Buren's resources and connections could make this much easier, to say nothing of helping to reunite Toth with his family.

And in return, Toth is to design an enormous building which will serve as a gathering place and community centre for the people of the nearby town. Many arguments and much tension inevitably ensue (I don't recall so many discussions about pouring concrete in a film since I went to see Locke), only exacerbated by the arrival in the US of Erzsebet and Zsofia. The huge building is shaping up to have an additional function as a monument to one man's vanity and ego – but is that man Toth or Van Buren?

Right from its opening moments, The Brutalist properly thrums with confidence, energy, and purpose, and it never loses them across its considerable duration. This is a somewhat unusual piece of awards-bait, not being based on a true story and not being about the second world war or the film industry itself, but it has that aura of significance and gravitas about it one often finds in that kind of film.

�It's more like a TV miniseries than a movie,' I heard the fellow behind me telling his companion during the interval, once the massed charge for the bathroom had concluded and everyone was awaiting the second half, and I suppose he had a point – the structure of the piece means that you could conceivably chop it in half and show it across two evenings, without doing too much harm (the BBC actually did that to Gandhi once, many years ago). But I don't know. This is one unified story, and while a pause to draw breath is certainly welcome, the cumulative effect of the whole thing is a major part of the film's success.

At this point let us turn to our scientifically-tested method of assessing whether a film is, in fact, overlong. A duration of 215 minutes gives The Brutalist a C score (its running time relative to that of Casablanca) of 2.1, while I would award it a G rating of 4 (G for gravitas: this high score reflects the film's concerns with the American dream, the immigrant experience, the conflict between art and commerce, the Holocaust, and so on). The final operation of C/G thus produces a score of just over 0.5, only slightly outside the 0.3-0.5 sweet spot, which tells us either that The Brutalist is only very slightly overlong, or that the Casablanca/Gravitas system is still in need of a few tweaks.

In any case it's not as if this is ever a hard slog or one of those worthy movies which feel like homework – the story is engrossing throughout, with excellent performances from Brody (wiry energy, refusal to compromise), Jones (quiet strength) and Pearce (plutocratic self-assurance) leading the cast. There are graphic moments along the way, but also some highly impressive images and sequences, and running throughout it there is a great sense of confidence. And at the heart of it all is a story about the characters, with a final revelation that made me reconsider much of what I had seen over the previous few hours.

Flashy visuals, clever plots and impressive musical scores are all good tricks to get people to go and see a movie (and The Brutalist has these things as well), but it's also an intelligent film that doesn't talk down to its audience and finds interesting ways to talk about important topics. In a lot of ways this is the best gimmick of all.

Also Showing...

. . . James Mangold's A Complete Unknown, the latest in the pop-music-biopic genre. I'm not a particular fan of this kind of film – they can be very formulaic – and I've always been a bit lukewarm about Mangold, despite the fact I've been watching his movies for over a quarter of a century. This time round the subject is Bob Dylan (this is absolutely not the first time someone has made a film about him), who is played by Timothee Chalamet.

The film covers the period from 1961 to 1965, opening with Dylan's arrival in New York City and concluding with his notoriously chaotic appearance at the Newport Folk Festival (cries of 'Judas!' are duly heard). What's striking about the film is the extent to which it parts company with the usual template for this kind of movie – we learn next to nothing about Dylan's roots or what makes him tick, and the standard pattern of discovery-success-wobble-triumphant comeback is completely ignored. This film is more about the irresistible rise of Dylan as an icon and an artist – it somehow manages to make songs like 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'The Times they are A-Changin'' sound fresh and powerful despite their familiarity – while still acknowledging that he often appears to be, to quote Joan Baez in the movie, kind of an ***hole.

The film is brave enough to let its subject remain essentially enigmatic throughout – or, if you prefer, a complete unknown – but still succeeds on the strength of its performances and, of course, the music. Chalamet does a decent Dylan without quite capturing that classic sea-lion-with-emphysema sound. This is a cut above the vast majority of pop bio movies; reports of a boom in interest in Dylan (and harmonica lessons) are entirely understandable.

Awix

03.02.25 Front Page

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