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.

Family Plot: THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Yorgos Lanthimos is out to mess you up. Even if you haven’t squirmed through the Grecian filmmaker’s international breakthrough Dogtooth – an intensely disturbing story of siblings unknowingly held captive by their own parents – or gritted your teeth through The Lobster – a cruel fantasy comedy that many seemed to like, but lost me as it ground a good fanciful premise into pessimistic repetition – you’d know right off that the writer-director of The Killing of a Sacred Deer wants to provoke intense reactions. The film sits on a black screen, soft and dramatic classical music playing underneath. Then: a smash cut to an extreme close-up of open heart surgery. I gasped. Then I squirmed as the shot holds. Then I looked away, repulsed but grinning. Oh, Lanthimos, at it again, up to his audience provoking jolts, his unflinching camera staring. After this startling opening statement, the build up to the next disturbing disruption is a long, soft timpani roll of suspense, the score doing its best to rumble under the imposing blocking and unflinching austere framing which turns every normal Cincinnati street and gleaming hospital corridor into a close cousin of Kubrick’s Overlook hotel. The film is a sustained creepy thriller with tension slowly simmering and clasping underneath every scene. Empty space and cavernous silence in the cold sets and pulsing grainy cinematography leaves room for disquieting suspicions as unfathomable escalating moral and karmic confusion ripples across an already-brittle family’s life.

Lanthimos directs his cast into performances of carefully modulated awkwardness and softly tripping monotones, their eerie implacability adding to a sense of wrongness that slowly builds. The film demonstrates its own twisted logic step by step as a surgeon (Colin Farrell), his wife (Nicole Kidman), and two kids (Sunny Suljic and Tomorrowland’s Raffey Cassidy) are slowly, subtly, and increasingly absurdly drawn into the plot of an unusual and insinuating interloper (Barry Keoghan, his quietly menacing face miles from the sweet innocence of his Dunkirk role). The young stranger is the son of a man who died on the operating table. The surgeon has tried to show him sympathy, striking up a vaguely paternal mentorship, maybe out of guilt. Big mistake. The boy wants to make the surgeon hurt. Suddenly, this creepy guy is the nexus of mysterious illness that spreads through the family. The kids are struck with paralysis that’s seemingly incurable, and completely inexplicable to a small army of medical experts. It only gets worse from there, including both inducement to murder and an awkward attempt by the boy to get his mom (Alicia Silverstone, never sadder) to watch Groundhog Day with his victim. With no shortage of disturbing emotions and plot developments roiling under every scene that follows, characters squirm intensely under pressure. Lanthimos keeps the proceedings darkly absurd, austerely terrifying, a deeply eccentric mix of the lurid and placid, the preposterous (a halting nervous laughs masking deep horror) and tense ethical quandaries stirring up grippingly sustained suspense. It’s all the more upsetting for being so inscrutable, for offering up no answers other than a desire to see brittle people break, even as they’re forced to confront their mortality, morality, and contradictions therein.

Retro-Future City: TOMORROWLAND

Tomorrowland tells a science fiction story we don’t usually hear these days. It’s a story of hope, saying the future doesn’t have to be as bleak as we fear. After a couple decades worth of cultural output drumming the dystopian beat, not to mention the generally terrifying disasters worldwide, how wonderful it is to find a movie taking on the mission of encouragement. Director Brad Bird, who also co-wrote with Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen, looks towards an imagined world in which science and progress really can change the world for the better, if only we allow it to be shared. The filmmakers give us a shiny city on a hill, chrome and glowing with Art Deco spires and Space Age retro-futurism. Jet packs and flying cars, robots, teleportation and Jules Verne-inspired rockets fill the frame, as a great big beautiful tomorrow comes to life, beckoning us to shake off cynicism and join in the fun.

This is a vision of the future straight out of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where, coincidentally enough, our story begins. A young boy (Thomas Robinson), visiting the fair with an optimistic invention in tow, follows a mysterious girl (Raffey Cassidy) through a secret doorway contraption to Tomorrowland, the futuristic city full of scientific wonder. Skipping forward to our time, we meet an irrepressibly sunny teenager (Britt Robertson) who remains excited by a potential for good in the world despite the her NASA engineer father (Tim McGraw) losing his job. After a great many (too many, perhaps) complications, she discovers a vintage pin. When touched, it shows her and only her a glimpse of Tomorrowland off in the distance, untouchable and irresistible. So begins the mystery powering the plot engine, as she tries to figure out what this city is and how to get there, a quest that leads her eventually a middle-aged man (George Clooney), who once was the boy who went there, and is now cagily reluctant to return.

The film trusts the very fact of mystery to pull us along, keeping characterization thin and the obfuscation thick. Late in the game, the truth about the city is revealed and the full extent of the stakes is known. The way there is a series of thick tangles of exposition punctuated with whiz-bang special effects sequences as the teen learns of secret societies, killer robots, laser guns, quantum particles, and ultimately the answers she and we desire about Tomorrowland. Bird and crew take great pleasure in concocting complicated backstory and appealing design, then hiding it, parceling it out in frustrating and tantalizing doses between cliffhangers and info dumps. There’s a cheery sincerity to this clunking structure, recalling early sci-fi stories in which an ordinary person discovers extraordinary secrets in episodic dreamlike fashion with great wonderment. It plays like an updated serial, with bigger effects, but the same potentially hokey spirit.

Although the cluttered exposition bogs things down, Bird comes to life when staging his exciting flights of sci-fi with an animator’s flair for visual timing. Would you expect any less from the director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol? Tomorrowland isn’t as fluid an experience. Though the actors mostly sell the sloppy connective tissue, it could've used more showing, less telling, and telling, and telling. But then a toy store is suddenly the stage for a martial arts battle, or a farmhouse bursts forth with high-tech booby traps. And I won’t even begin to spoil what happens to a famous European landmark, but it’s like something out of an eye-catching old pulp magazine cover. It’s a film full of images of wide-eyed speculative goofiness, and completely committed to meeting them on that level. The film’s design is charming, and photographed in cheerfully luminous ways. Who cares if the characters are vaguely defined and the world’s a jumble? Look at this thing go!

Bird approaches the concept with evident delight in conjuring, with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, these bright images and gleaming theme park (it is named for a section in Disney parks, after all) spectacle. But there’s also a sincerity of purpose and earnestness of tone as it moralizes about the power in the stories we tell ourselves about our future. It asks us not to accept dystopia as our only option, but to realize it’s never too late to change the world for the better. It may be given a cornball hard sell here, with a big speech at the end laying it on thick. But, boy, is it an honest sentiment, too. What we learn about Tomorrowland eventually sets a selfish figure intent on keeping progress to himself against those who’d rather open the possibilities to anyone willing to pitch in. Our heroes discover that even a perfect, gleaming city can’t survive without those willing to work at make things better for everyone.

It’s ultimately another film with world-ending stakes, but Robertson and Clooney, two utterly charming performers who work well together and steer the film lightly, embody a more humanist ideal. What good is a secret world for special smarties if you can’t invite people in? Why accept a bad outcome for humanity when you can work to change it? The message – and the worldbuilding – gets muddled in the telling, but Tomorrowland asks us to reach for the best of humanity instead of tolerating the worst. If our imagination dies, so do we. Accepting dystopia is easy and cynical. Making utopia requires talent, cooperation, creative thinking, and hope. We’re in this together, so we might as well imagine ourselves a nice, fun, shiny future where anything is possible. In its own imperfect, heartfelt way, Tomorrowland wants us leaving the theater thinking a little brighter.