One for Them: THE BRUTALIST

Architect László Tóth is in the great tradition of Governor Willie Stark and cult leader Lancaster Dodd and conductor Lydia Tár. He’s a fictional life invented to tell us about his times. The Brutalist, like All the King’s Men and The Master, borrows the structure of the epic biographical picture to sweep us into the middle of the 20th century and interrogate something dark and beautiful and true about the ways in which an era transforms a man and a man transforms his era. Like The Master and TÁR, it builds into its structure a heavy seriousness and sense of formal play. Director Brady Corbet, who also co-wrote with partner Mona Fastvold, starts with an overture and ends with an epilogue, throwing a 15-minute intermission into the middle of a three-and-a-half hour experience shot on VistaVision film. Loading the enormous experience up with the throwback textures signifying importance, he gives it a sense of grandeur and detail in presentation that extends to the precision of its writing and framing. Here’s a sweeping historical fiction about art and commerce and politics and man’s capacity for cruelty—both intimately, and globally—colliding in the life of one man.

It’s a mid-century Americana epic as an inverted Ayn Rand parable, in which the troubled genius man does not selfishly retreat from society, but imposes his artistry upon the very landscape of society as an act of transformation and, maybe, generosity in taking his pain into imposing beauty built to last. Here’s where genius is put into the fleshy stuff of fallible men, where individualism is paradoxically built into the foundation of the totemic and impersonal, where wealth corrupts passions, and passions corrupt souls, even while reaching for transcendence. Three-and-a-half hours is a long time to contemplate these big ideas, and the movie’s reach and scope is matched by its bustling incident and hustling modes. It never feels long. (I would’ve sat there for a few more hours if it remained so compelling.) It feels immense and dense, worth wandering around in, being pulled along with, and left puzzling over its dimensions and implications. Corbet makes full use of every connotation of the title. It’s brutalist as style, the blocky concrete edifices of post-war European architecture, a reaction to earthshaking tragedies transformed into something solid and imposing. It’s brutalist as an adjective, implying cruelty, violence, a lack of feeling.

We follow Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Holocaust survivor who leaves a wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) in Hungary as he immigrates to America, promising to send for them. He struggles in Pennsylvanian poverty—taking odd jobs with an assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), later shoveling coal—until he happens to fall in with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who learns this immigrant was once a brilliant, celebrated architect. He offers to bankroll a dream project, a seemingly fortuitous idea that grows only more complicated and fraught. The movie smartly moves with the deliberateness of a detailed character drama against the backdrop of ambition and ego and historical context. Thus begins an entwining of two families’ personalities and stories—haves and have-nots, privileged and impoverished, the tragic and the thriving. It’s as full of stark contrasts as the structure slowly building over the course of the film. The Brutalist architect and the brutal capitalist, each inflicting their brutalities through whims and wills altering their surroundings, leaving marks on the social and visual fabric of the nation. Here’s a movie about how tragedies personal and political—even, and especially, as they double up—write themselves onto our world and reshape our landscapes, leaving statements so obvious they become inscrutable.

The performers inhabit sequences of supple complexity and densely ambiguous beauty; it’s carried along by a fine filmic sense and a well-blocked interest in coaxing evocative realism around theatrical flourishes and sturdy, slippery visual metaphor. They start to feel like real people, and yet freed by its fictional biopic dimensions, it’s able to become all the more iconographic and symbolic. Corbet’s directorial efforts have so far been a series of solemn fictional biographies like this. His eerie Childhood of a Leader is an imagined origin for a dictator. His Vox Lux is a prickly, provocative tale of a teenager surviving a school shooting and then using that attention to become a troubled pop star. Those films are similarly stately and told in chapters and build with inevitable structures to clear theses. The Brutalist is a magisterial capstone to this trilogy, evolving those preoccupations and styles into something even more rich and transporting and novelistic in incident and detail, yet as showy and satisfying as the most enveloping moviegoing experiences.

Least Wanted: KRAVEN THE HUNTER

I wonder how many awful superhero movies in a row it’d take to put a stop to the genre for a while? After the last few years it sure seems like we might be getting close to finding out. The latest dismal effort is Kraven the Hunter, and although it probably won’t end the superhero genre quite yet, it does seem poised to be the killing blow to Sony’s attempts to make a Cinematic Universe out of solo movies for Spider-Man supporting players. This Oops! All Side Characters approach, born out of a contractual need to have projects in the works in order to keep the Spidey rights in joint custody with Disney, has led to these Spider-Man-less curiosities that ask: what if some of his villains are heroes in their own stories? It works for Venom, at least once and fitfully twice more, and I kind of liked parts of Morbius when it leaned into its comic book monster movie intentions. Even Madame Web had its shambolic charms with oddball energy resulting from a hacked apart and barely reconstituted narrative buffeted by corporate meddling. Kraven is the most dead on arrival, though. It’s just boringly proficient, endlessly setting up future potential that’s never going to pay off. If not in this movie, then when? Looks like never, unless the whole gang is revived for a cheap jolt in a future Deadpool gag.

Kraven is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a performance that’s mostly nostril flares and ab clenching. He’s the son of a wealthy mobster played by Russell Crowe, who’s given so little meat with which to ham it up that he doesn’t even seem to enjoy putting on a thick Russian accent. (Compare it to his fun Pope’s Exorcist, in which he chows down on Italian with delicious genre delight.) The bad dad takes his son big game hunting, where the lad is mauled by a lion. Through convolutions too stupid and convenient to get into here, he ends up super-powered and dedicates his life to stopping international criminals. Also Spider-Man, eventually, presumably, although he is unmentioned, as is typical with these half-hearted attempts at spin-offs. The movie’s all flatly grey and boringly violent, with eruptions of CG blood indifferently staged as if the whole thing was only turned R-rated on a whim. Kraven’s killings are over-the-top and merciless in the boringly impersonal style of all bad vigilante movies. Kraven himself is as generic as these comic book anti-heroes come. Johnson’s given nothing to play, and the plot is somehow so grindingly predictable and totally cliched without ever caring about its own premise. It slogs from one flat, underwhelming sequence to the next with all the vigor of a sleepwalker doing his taxes.

There are a lot of characters and variables here, but none land with any impact or develop into anything of interest. For a superhero, Kraven has little distinguishing powers other than strength and agility—a few hints of communication with animals goes more or less unused aside from some flashes of psychedelic dreams of wildlife footage overplayed with runes—and his interactions with other characters are vaguely defined and barely believable. His strained relationship with a singing half-brother (Fred Hechinger) is one thing. But his magical savior, maybe-assistant, potential love-interest lawyer played by Ariana DeBose (this, after Wish and Argylle, further cements the West Side Story co-star in one of the most disastrous post-Oscar runs I can recall) is a total nonstarter in every direction. Even villain The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) just has few kooky line readings—a couple high pitched chortles and a few gargled threats—to distinguish him from the wallpaper. I preferred the villainy of Christopher Abbot’s hypnotic hitman, who waltzes in at random carrying zen-weirdo vibes as if he meant to end up in Madame Web’s zonked-out tone instead. It’s a movie that’s constantly tossing in new people and places with only the slightest intentions of actually putting them to work. If this is really the last of these Sony experiments, I’ll admit some sick disappointment in not getting the promised team-up movie. Alas, that’s par for the course for the whole endeavor as it is for these individual parts: lots of setups that never get close to paying off. Of course they’d give up on the whole thing before getting something like a conclusion.

Shadows Searching: THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK

In 2007, David Chase’s classic New Jersey mobster drama The Sopranos left us with a last supper. Now, it returns to us with The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel. It’s nothing if not consistent—a sprawling story deeply engaged with struggles of masculinity, family, moral weight, and the agonizing dissatisfying guilt the comes from a lifetime of sin. It’s religious and contemplative, torn between atonement and destruction, the holy and profane. That it’s also a multi-generational story of America in decline, a sad pack of boomers chasing the glory of their fathers and leaving less and less opportunity or exit strategy to their children, makes it uniquely suited to chronicle its moment and prefigure ours. But it’s also, at its core, and perhaps at its most appealing, a series about a husband, a wife, their children, and extended family connections; it’s the domestic dramas set up as counterpoint and intersection with the gangster plot lines that are the glue that holds the audience’s affection together. A viewer invested in them as a family, and the accumulation of character detail and thematic concerns consistently streamed forth from that font. A reason why the sudden cut to black in the series’ final episode is so shocking—still a jolt, a chill—is that it not only amplifies the ambiguity long embedded in the show’s philosophical concerns, but denies us closure on the people who, however deeply imperfect and morally compromised, have a humanity we learned to care about. Cold comfort it may be to know the cut to black is headed for us all no matter what we do. But it’s good to know life goes on and on and on and on until then, and for others after.

I like that Chase maintains the mystery of that moment, to the extent that any continuation of the Soprano family story simply had to go back in time. For a family, and a business, to concerns with legacy and lineage, it’s still a rich vein to mine. It feels haunted by future events, an inevitability that what’s set in motion here will reverberate down through the generations. There’s preordained tragedy in the mob life, a foreshortening of life and opportunity when the family and The Family are inextricable, petty crime and petty slights in the same terrible chain of cause and effect. Many Saints finds its main character in Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), a father and uncle whose absence, having long been whacked when Sopranos began, shaped some of his descendant’s actions and perspectives. Here he’s still in the prime of his life. It’s the late 60s. (Chase’s other major feature film effort, 2012’s Not Fade Away, sets its tender musical coming-of-age story against the time’s cultural upheaval.) In this new film Newark is burning. Gangsters are scheming. The world seems to be coming apart, and for the members of the interconnected Jersey crime families their underworld black market power is the thing that gives their lives structure and some sense of control. You can see why a young Tony Soprano (here played by the late, great James Gandolfini’s son Michael in a finely tuned performance) would think this time was a golden age of sorts, although the deaths and prison sentences might make one think it’s no better than his own.

This anxiety of influence as it relates to generations cycles of dysfunction and distress animates Chase’s screenplay, co-written by Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, series' vets both. It becomes a movie about people who almost know the way to do the right thing, but, mirroring the show’s Zeno’s paradox of morality, never can get there. Here it’s Dickie, who clashes with family and rivals, gets entangled in affairs and crimes alike, and who ultimately presents himself so slickly that the more impressionable around him might see in him a reason to perpetuate what is the cause of both the family’s wealth and its doom. That Dickie is given an almost literal angel and devil dispensing advice, in the form of a father and his twin brother (in a well-differentiated dual role for Ray Liotta) emphasizes the weight of his choices, and two potential futures. (That the whole movie is narrated from beyond the grave by another character related to him—the thing literally starts floating over gravestones where we overhear ghostly monologues—gives the project that extra weight of funereal fate.) Around him is a cavalcade of character actors playing younger versions of the old guard who haunted Tony’s adulthood: his intimidating father (Jon Bernthal) and snapping mother (Vera Farmiga), his bald bespectacled—and dangerous—Uncle Junior (Corey Stoll), and young up-and-coming gangsters like Paulie (Billy Magnussen) and Silvio (John Magaro). The extra-textual sense of winking inevitability is sometimes a nudge to the fans, but is also often adds to the overarching doom that settles around the ice-blue images and the sturdy mid-century design.

The movie is a relatively brisk two hours, but rambles and expands and never quite digs in to its shuffling surfaces. There’s something uneven—at once too much and too little—about its design, tracing a standard gangster set of concerns with hits and schemes and twists, against a larger family tapestry. It slips through time a bit, and finds pockets of characterization in which to get turned around. Without the space of a season of television, the scenes of sly humor and dark juxtapositions, simple philosophizing and earnest psychologizing, take up inordinate space. Though the movie leans on its Sopranos prequel status in ways that make this particular picture sometimes incomplete, there’s something alive in its ungainly design, especially as Chase introduces Leslie Odom, Jr. as a Black associate of the mobsters. He has his own through line that criss-crosses the other plots, and serves as intriguing counterpoint and counterbalance to their privilege, as well as valuable historical context. One scene finds a hit carried out in an army recruitment center where the flummoxed solider behind the desk yelps that Vietnam’s not his fault. Another has a white man drive a car with a dead body in the passenger seat through a line of riot cops too busy pointing artillery at protestors to notice. These ideas of whose behavior is policed, and who is allowed to get away with what, is emphasized and mirrored by the story of an innocent Italian immigrant (Michela De Rossi) who is brought into the Moltisanti family and becomes part of the mob lifestyle (with all the danger that entails) even as she dutifully takes classes to improve her English and assimilate. Even here there’s a sense that the events—moments of grace, and moments of betrayal—will continue to haunt the family, casting a long shadow.

Games People Play: AMERICAN HUSTLE

There are no sincere moments in David O. Russell’s American Hustle. It goes beyond the narrative, which follows an F.B.I. operation in the late 1970s that involved blackmail, bribery, corruption, and con men. And that’s just the guys doing the investigating. The film’s characters are constantly pulling one over on each other, trying to make any given situation slippery enough to wiggle away with the upper hand. The problem is the film takes after its characters and in doing so refuses to take them seriously. It’s a true(ish) story filled with great heist movie-style brinksmanship and game playing, but I didn’t believe any of it for one second. That’s not to say I called foul on the facts, but that I never bought into the stakes or emotions of the story. The whole thing is exhaustingly inauthentic, full of pushy camera moves, fussily casual period piece production design, and self-satisfied banter. It expends lots of effort, but ends up with only awfully thin insight. Turns out people, given the right circumstances, might con other people to get what they want. You don’t say.

The film is a nesting doll of deceit, cons within cons within cons. Christian Bale plays a con man sleazily juggling many cons at once. He supplements his laundromat business by selling forged paintings on the side, as well as accepting payment from sleazeballs in return for trying to set them up with loans that will, of course, never materialize. His partner in crime is his mistress (Amy Adams), so there’s another con, this one the relationship he’s hiding from his boozy young housewife (Jennifer Lawrence). Bale and Adams are busted for fraud by an ambitious FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) who says they’ll walk free if they help him bust some of their fellow fraudsters. It takes a con to run a con to find a con or two.

With no choice, that’s what they do, helping to create an elaborate entrapment scheme that soon involves a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner), a fake sheik (Michael Peña), and increasing amounts of FBI money sitting in bank accounts and renting private jets and hotel suites. With each new expenditure request, Cooper’s boss (Louis C.K., a welcome sight) grows increasingly exasperated, denying them until his boss (Alessandro Nivola), another guy smelling good career moves, overrules him. Cooper keeps urging the project’s expansion, using each new mark to get to another mark. It’s a tangled web of competing interests that’s bound to ensnare some of the people laying the traps as well as their targets.

In the middle of it all, the cast’s central quartet delivers big booming performances that fit the film’s swaggering shallowness. Bale, with a protruding gut and complicated combover, exudes frustrated confidence mixed with desperation, while Adams, shifting her accent around, comes across as a fiercely determined faker and striver. Cooper’s a hard-charging naïve, smart enough to cook up a plan, but overeager to see it through. He’s too earnest for his own good. When one mark says something incriminating, Cooper smiles a little too broadly and exclaims, “That’s great!” Lawrence, meanwhile, thinks she’s scheming, but she’s just good old flighty passive aggressive. Her performance is a whirlwind. The film’s phoniness is hardly their fault. They’re giving the best possible performances this material could get. They’re so good I kept wishing I could like the movie more, if only to reward their likable hard work. They throw themselves into unflattering clothing, funny hairdos, and silly accents, chewing through the script with energy and humor.

But that’s not enough to make it anything more than sporadically entertaining. It’s breezy enough – well over two hours and rarely dragging – but scene after scene, I found myself feeling emptier. Russell and co-writer Eric Warren Singer’s script follows the hodgepodge of cons in a slapdash manner, sometimes revealing too much or too little and scrambling up who we should care about at any given time. It’s shifting allegiances, but always tilting towards mockery – a style that scoffs at strong feelings, a howl of emotion seen as a plot point and a joke and little more. When it all shakes out in the end, it doesn’t feel like resolution for characters as much as it is checking off boxes with little sense of what it all means for the individuals in question beyond the surface level of winners and losers. No matter how fine the performances are, there’s nothing to latch onto.

Why am I to care about the results of any of these cons when the film is only interested in playing them out to play them out? It only cares about pulling out rugs and staring at scheming. When it comes to the whys and who cares, it could care less. The actors give it their all, and to the extent the film is watchable and compelling, it’s that they manage to break through the film’s suffocating artifice with some actual emotion. The rest of the time, Russell’s swooping, energetic camera and non-stop period rock, pop, and disco soundtrack – often the only aspects of the film Russell seems interested in, and a passable, if muddled, copy of every other big swinging 70s-set crime film's style – pounds out and counteracts every genuine emotion with insistent inauthenticity.