The Brutalist reminds us what cinema is capable of
Did you see Oppenheimer?
If you did, chances are you thought, “Wow, Christopher Nolan is the best director in the world and it’s not even close.” That movie was so proficiently made and displayed so much skill, you wondered if anybody could ever make something that felt more like a movie ever again.
Well, that lasted about a year.
I would be willing to bet my life that Christopher Nolan watched The Brutalist and thought, “I have a long way to go as a director.” Because The Brutalist is 100x the movie that Oppenheimer is. It is pure cinema. It is the reason I got into this stuff. You watch this film and you get taken AWAY. Not just to a different world but to a different universe. It is so uniquely cinematic that it’s reinvigorated my hope for movies. Cause it shows what’s possible when you have this level of mastery over your profession.
The cinematography and score were magnificent. It’s like Terrance Malick but with purpose. You get these powerful couplings of image and sound, and they’re moving towards these sweeping moments that burrow inside of you, like bass in the loudest nightclub in the world.
If you haven’t seen the film, it starts in 1947 with a Jewish architect, Laszlo, who comes to America after having endured the concentration camps. He used to be famous back in Budapest. But now, he’s a nobody and has to work his way back into the fold, a task complicated by his pride and a worsening drug habit.
But he eventually gets a job redecorating a sitting room for a very rich man named Harrison Van Buren. The room so impresses Van Buren that he hires Laszlo to build an elaborate multi-purpose building for him, a job that will take years and require Laszlo to live on-site.
While this is happening, Van Buren’s lawyers move mountains to get Laszlo’s wife and niece to America (they were split up in the Holocaust). When she finally gets there, Laszlo learns that she’s permanently wheelchair-bound due to extreme malnutrition from the concentration camps.
The build is fraught with conflict as Laszlo refuses to compromise his vision. Later, when a huge shipment of materials is destroyed in a train crash, Van Buren is forced to scrap the project, leaving Laszlo without a job or a purpose. This forces him to finally face his wife and their marriage problems. He then must decide what is truly important in life.
I’ve already lauded the ‘movie’ side of this film. In addition to what I said earlier, this movie has you asking, “How the heck did an actor as amazing as Adrien Brody disappear for 20 years??” He’s soooooo good in this. This guy was made to help movies win Oscars. And I hope he wins his second Oscar for this one.
For anyone who loves the minutia of screenwriting, a film like The Brutalist is critical nirvana.
On the surface, this is an anti-script.
There is no true overarching goal. There are no stakes. And there definitely isn’t any urgency. So how does the film work so well? Because I suspect a lot of ignorant people are going to claim that this is why screenwriting doesn’t matter. That true cinema trumps the need to abide by a formula.
Well, The Brutalist actually uses a few screenwriting techniques to achieve its purpose. And it starts with character.
I’ve said this a million times. If you want to write a script that is offbeat or different or non-traditional or unorthodox, YOU MUST GIVE US A MAIN CHARACTER WE DESPERATELY WANT TO ROOT FOR.
If you don’t do that, YOU CANNOT go off book with your plotting and structure like The Brutalist does.
The reader WILL NOT FOLLOW YOU if you have an average main character and you’re bobbing and weaving around an unfocused narrative. They will only follow you, when going down these nontraditional paths, if they desperately like your hero.
Laszlo is established as a Holocaust survivor. Not just a Holocaust survivor. But one who’s been separated from his wife and niece. Oh, and, he has no idea if he’s ever going to see them again. Oh, and he used to be one of the most famous architects in his country but now nobody knows who he is.
All of this creates tons of sympathy. Sympathy makes us root for people.
Still, there is no initial goal for Laszlo when he makes it to the U.S. So, beyond us liking the guy, how do we remain entertained throughout the next hour of the film?
Well, Laszlo is TRYING TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA. Readers will follow characters who are TRYING TO BECOME BETTER. I learned this lesson in both American Beauty and Goodfellas. We like watching characters improve. We liked watching Lester Burnham try to become the best version of himself. We liked watching Henry Hill make his way up the mafia ladder.
When we like somebody, we want to see them do well. So we love watching them improve. We love when Laszlo gets that first job with Van Buren.
Once he finishes the room and it makes the magazines, Van Buren hires him to design and construct the building on his property. This happens about 90 minutes into the movie and it creates the most traditional feature of the script – a concrete goal that must be achieved.
However, interestingly enough, it does not come with stakes or urgency. We eventually come to realize that it doesn’t matter if Laszlo finishes the building or not. There’s nothing else dependent on him finishing it. He even waives his salary for some reason. So it’s not like he has to finish it to get the money.
And there’s no time when it needs to be finished by. Typically in a movie, you want urgency because urgency creates pressure. And pressure creates drama. But I’ve found that true “auteurs” hate urgency. They think of it as artificial, which I get. But there’s always a way to add urgency invisibly. It doesn’t have to feel like Taken, where it’s a hard 72 hours before his daughter disappears forever.
Now, what’s good about this job is that it creates enough structure that when the rest of the narrative bobs and weaves, the story still has focus. We know that everything will eventually come back to finishing this job.
That is a VERY IMPORTANT POINT because some writers believe they can write artsy independent narratives without a central goal. For example, someone else might write an immigrant story where the hero isn’t an architect. He’s just some guy trying to survive. But, if there isn’t a looming goal representing some aspect of his life, then it’s just a dude stumbling around New York without purpose. So it was smart to create this building. It brings this as close to a traditional narrative as Corbet is comfortable with.
But what about those four hours?
Did the movie really need to be that long?
Probably not 4 hours. But it needed to be long to work.
I’ll give you a specific example of why.
This script is not a straight line. We don’t go directly from the bottom of the graph to the top. There are a lot of dips along the way. Laszlo will have a big success. But it will be followed by a big failure.
For example, when Laszlo first gets the Van Buren job, it’s secured through Van Buren’s son, who is planning to surprise his father when he comes back from a trip. So Laszlo creates this stunning reading room. We can see that he’s alive again for the first time in years. Then Van Buren drives up, storms in the room, and starts screaming at him. Who are they? What are they doing? They’ve ruined his house! He not only kicks Laszlo out but he doesn’t pay him either. Which forces him to go right back to construction work.
There are a lot of these rises followed by falls in the script, which make you feel like you’re on a roller coaster. Which is exactly what you want to do in a story. You don’t want everything to be positive. You want to bring the reader up, then down, then up, then down. That sort of emotional volatility is like crack to audiences.
I realized that you can do more of that with a 4 hour movie than you can a 2 hour movie. A 2 hour movie has to be so lean that you don’t have time to include many falls. I mean do we NEED the scene of Van Buren kicking him out? No. Technically, we do not. He’ll later come back to hire Laszlo again. So why not just jump straight to Van Buren liking the room and hiring him for the bigger job?
In the 2 hour version, that’s probably what you’re doing. But when you have this extra time, you can add a lot of these falls. And they work to create more of that volatility, which leads to a more riveting emotional experience.
I was ready to grant this movie ‘masterpiece’ status throughout the majority of its running time. But it sort of loses its way towards the end. This happens a lot when you’re working with non-traditional narratives.
One of the benefits of the traditional three-act structure is that the first and second acts are designed to set up a clear climax. If you establish in act 1 that the cat is struck at the top of the tree, then we know the climax is going to be the attempt to save him.
But if there’s only a tree, how do you know where to end the story? While it’s true that Laszlo is building this building, the building has such low stakes attached to it, it doesn’t really matter if he finishes it or not.
So, then, what’s your ending?
(Major spoilers) Corbet realizes this and injects a rape storyline into the final act that felt manufactured and inorganic. Which, again, is always going to happen when you aren’t using a traditional narrative. You will struggle to figure out how to end your story. I just know that when writers are building rape into the narrative this late, it’s usually a desperate move made to add “gravitas” to the story. Ironically, it achieves the opposite. It feels cheap.
But there’s so much good in this movie that I can overlook that. I can’t emphasize enough how often I go to the movies these days and the script is so weak that I’m analyzing the writing within two minutes. Whereas, with The Brutalist, I got completely lost in this story for hours. Everything was so well done — I mean, I can’t remember the last time I teared up in a theater and I, as well as everyone else around me, was weeping when Laszlo’s wife showed up from Europe. It was a testament to how authentic the storytelling was.
I know this movie isn’t going to be for everyone. But if you miss the experience of going to the theater and losing yourself in a movie, go see this movie ASAP. It will give you that experience again.
