The Brutalist

Brady Corbet's epic historical drama was easily the most thrilling screening I attended in 2024. Crammed into the main theater of one of the greatest Boston-area cinemas, the 110-year-old Somerville Theater, with 800 other folks, including nearly all of my fellow local cinephiles, to watch a four-hour drama on 70mm film, almost made me feel like I was going back in time to the era when a big new movie could be the most important cultural event of a year. For that reason, I think this will end up topping my list of this year's best films, even though I don't think it's as good as James Gray's similarly themed The Immigrant, which I thought was the 25th-best film of 2013. That says more about what I think of 2024 as a year in cinema, at least so far, but Corbet's The Brutalist is still a pretty special picture.

Adrien Brody plays a visionary Hungarian-Jewish architect named László Tóth, who flees post-war Europe in 1947 and builds a new life in Pennsylvania. Felicity Jones plays his wife, who joins him after the war, and Guy Pearce plays his wealthy, mysterious benefactor, who commissions László to design and build a monumental community center in his signature brutalist style. Complications of class, ethnicity, and sexuality arise, and we begin to wonder if the building will make or break the visionary man who designed it. Does this story require such epic treatment? I don't know, but I sure wasn't bored. It's appropriate that a movie about an architect is the film I've seen in the last twenty-five years that actually understands what cinematic "world-building" is. Perhaps it is not surprising in this era that a post-WWI period piece, not a sci-fi movie, understands how to transport a viewer into an unfamiliar world. The Pennsylvanian site-specific detail works so profoundly well in terms of putting forward the specificities of the film's historical, political, stylistic, and thematic concepts. I guess it should also not be a surprise that this architectural movie about the lived past made by a thirty-five-year-old filmmaker feels a great deal more alive, moving, and connected to contemporary times than 2024's other architectural movie about an imagined future made by an eighty-four-year-old filmmaker.

The Brutalist is riveting on many levels. Some of which are extratextual and not the type of things that typically endear me to a movie. For example, Corbet resurrected the VistaVision process, a high-resolution, widescreen format that Paramount Pictures created in 1954 for movies like White Christmas, The Ten Commandments, and Vertigo. The Searchers and North by Northwest were also memorably shot in this process, but it hasn't been used, except for photochemical special effects photography on movies like Star Wars, since Marlon Brando's ill-fated western One-Eyed Jacks in 1961.

There's a good reason VistaVision hasn't been used for over sixty years: it's a completely outmoded technology. One can get the same quality of image shooting on regular 70mm motion picture film. Corbet's desire to shoot this movie in VistaVision was apparently motivated by the process's ability to capture a wide field of view without using wide-angle lenses. In press statements, Corbet has explained that VistaVision was ideal for architectural photography and that it "just seemed like the best way to access that 1950s period was to shoot on something that was engineered in that same decade." That's a fun idea, but it is perhaps the biggest indicator that we have reached the point in the evolution of cinema where shooting on celluloid is basically a gimmick implemented by young filmmakers as a way to try and recapture something elusive from the past, or to use celluloid the way others apply Instagram filters.

But, hey, I ain't gonna knock it. Most movies I've seen so far this year that were shot on film—Challengers, I Saw the TV Glow, The Bikeriders, Kinds of Kindness, Twisters, Cuckoo, Longlegs, Between the Temples, A Different Man, Saturday Night, Queer, and Anora all used celluloid for a retro-aesthetic that can be replicated digitally fairly simply, but I still appreciated the effort. There are a lot more shot-on-film movies coming out this year that I eagerly look forward to seeing, as I did many of the ones I just listed. It sometimes feels like shooting and releasing a movie on film is the last weapon of defiance filmmakers have against the Silicon Valley-owned studio CEOs who want everything to be made for streaming and dream of soon replacing nearly all the human effort, craft, and vision that goes into filmmaking with A.I.

It is also kind of astounding that a relatively unestablished filmmaker like the 36-year-old Corbet—who started out as an actor in arthouse movies like Thirteen, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Melancholia, and Clouds of Sils Maria, and has only directed two prior features, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux—can resurrect a decades-old, dead technology and produce an epic drama requiring a special theatrical roll-out on a budget of less than $10M! With The Brutalist, Corbet has turned the floundering film industry upside down to a certain extent, and it will be interesting to see how people react to the movie once it's widely released.