The Brutalist
Imagine if this 4 hour movie dropped an hour and spent that money on wide shots. And maybe a few more drafts of the script. It would at least feel less claustrophobic and less stupid, if nothing else.
But wide shots and better dialogue wouldn't fix the hammy acting, the hopeless (often crass) plot decisions and the endless grasping at prestige. The Brutalist's heights are a fraction of the least important moments in any Paul Thomas Anderson film (a director this film desperately apes). By the end of its exhausting run time we realise The Brutalist is a profoundly shallow film made by immature hands.
There's something going on with the critical consensus around new American/European films at the moment. So many of the recently released films with significant acclaim are wafer thin - this, The Substance, Girl with the Needle, Love Lies Bleeding, basically anything Eggers releases. They're often by "younger" directors (e.g. those in their 40s or below) who are clearly film-literate, and have some degree of technical skill, but rarely the juice to make truly excellent, resilient work. The response, often by an equally film-literate audience, is enthusiastic praise. It's baffling, and a bummer to think that this unprecedented access to film, and the passion for it, has not taught us to see beyond the surface. Beyond empty signifiers.
Turbo-nominated The Brutalist is a nadir of this in some ways. It has the quality of a LLM-generated checklist of Serious Subject Matter with Startling One Perfect Shot Images. But it does not move us, make us think or compel us to learn something. Films don't have to do any of these things, of course, but all the truly great ones do. They make film an exciting way to mediate and think about the world. The Brutalist is the film equivalent of a kid wearing his dad's suit.