In a party of five, The Brutalist had an approval rating of 3.5. The way in which the issue of the holocaust was addressed with subtlety and discretion was praised. The reveal of Guy Pearce’s repressed sexuality was deemed by most a convincing device. The acting was in general admired. I found myself as the lone dissenter, feeling as though the film failed to live up to its ambitions, denoted in part by its running time, in part by its thematic. It felt as though there were too many breathy scenes in closed rooms, and lacked the bravura panache of Childhood of a Leader. But, as noted, I was in a strong minority, and it would appear that the director’s vaulting ambition has been well received. One aspect of being in London is that I find myself seeing far more of the buzzy films when they come out, rather than a few years later. The industry generates a sense of expectation, clearly required for marketing purposes, but perhaps unhelpful for a more considered take on the latest must-see. Either in terms of admiration or deception.
Nb. One of the things that strikes me, thinking about the film a few weeks later, is that the title would imply a reflection on the idea of brutalism as an architectural genre. Whereas what Lazlo seems to be designing is something closer to a neo-classical temple. In the brief scene where his future employer shows images of his earlier Bauhaus-y work, we get a glimpse of this ‘brutalist’ architecture, but this line of Lazlo’s work doesn’t feel as though it is explored in any great detail thereafter. Perhaps he will later gain acclaim as a brutalist, or perhaps the point is that with success he rejects this style. Whichever option he has taken is never interrogated, and the architect’s intellectual framework, so redolent in the title, seems to be swallowed up by the examination of his emotional framework.
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