The reason I am leading the site today is that Lainey and I switched from my regular Friday nonsense, since I thought I would be seeing The Brutalist on Thursday night, and that movie is three and a half hours long, so I expected it to f-ck up my whole rhythm the night I usually write everything for Friday. Except that screening didn’t work out—because the movie is SO long multiple schedule pieces have to fall into place to make it happen—so now I’m just…here on a Tuesday. The trailer for The Brutalist just dropped, though, teasing Brady Corbet’s epic about architecture and America, which is expected to be a major Oscar contender.
My first thought upon seeing this trailer is “this is the movie Francis Ford Coppola thought he was making”, which isn’t fair to him or Brady Corbet, but the comparison is unavoidable. Like Megalopolis, The Brutalist is about America and uses art and architecture as part of its allegory. These films WILL be talked about in the same breath.
My second thought is that yeah, Adrien Brody is coming for Oscar #2. The trailer is light on plot, big on Adrien Brody emoting. He stars as László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America with his wife (played by Felicity Jones) and becomes an architect. His patron is an industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), and the trailer sets none of this up, except that Felicity Jones has a cool pair of sunglasses. But that is the gist of the film, a post-war émigré reaches for his piece of the American dream, and you can bet it will cost him his soul.
Corbet is an actor turned filmmaker, whose two previous feature films, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux are complex, layered works that require multiple viewings to process and unpack. This is not a filmmaker interested in slick or easy cinema, he, along with his creative partner and wife Mona Fastvold, digs deep and packs in meaning and metaphor. Vox Lux, for instance, is as much about anxious American childhood as it is celebrity as it is family.
Those films, though, while widely admired by his peers, did not do much to push Corbet into the mainstream of American filmmaking. Which is not everyone’s goal! It’s cool if Corbet isn’t trying to be the next Scorsese. But The Brutalist has a high-profile cast, particularly with Brody giving what looks like an Oscar-caliber performance, and it’s backed by tastemaker distributor A24, which guarantees film nerds will pay attention to this film in a way they maybe didn’t Corbet’s previous work. (Neon tried with Vox Lux, it just didn’t catch on, as school shooting movies never do.)
All of which means we’ll be seeing a lot of Adrien Brody this awards season, and maybe some of Brady Corbet, too, if any combination of directing, writing, or Best Picture momentum builds for him. And we’re in for a slew of “what The Brutalist gets right that Megalopolis gets wrong” thinkpieces, which again, isn’t fair to anybody but IS inevitable. You just can’t have two thematically similar works in which one bombs and the other is hailed as a triumph and expect people to be normal about it. No one is ever normal about anything on the internet.
