Welcome back to the blog readers. As you know by now, Oscar nominations are out now and this is one of those films that is up for a good amount of prizes, garnering 10 nominations. I am currently on what I am calling my "Best Picture Expedition," where I venture to watch all 10 Best Picture nominees and I am 60% of the way there so far. With this film making it 70%, would I wind up loving it as much as all the critics do? Stick around to find out.
The Brutalist was directed by Brady Corbet from a screenplay by him and Mona Fastvold. The film stars Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola. In the film, a Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor immigrates to the United States, where he struggles to achieve the American Dream until he meets a wealthy client that will change his life.
I remember when I heard all of the buzz regarding this film coming out of the festival circuit that I absolutely had to see this film, even though the film had an exuberant runtime of 3 hours and 35 minutes (including a 15 minute intermission). While I thought that runtime was unnecessary before I saw it, I absolutely still believe that it was unnecessary after seeing it. And aside from a few story elements in the second act that kind of bog the second half down, this is a fantastic film with Oscar-level performances from Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce.
I really wish I could have seen more performances from Adrien Brody before seeing this film, being he is the youngest person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor and has been in some pretty decent-sized films. I am so glad this was really my first exposure to him (The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) blows) because I think he has a real shot to win Best Actor again at the Oscars this year. Brody was absolutely brilliant as the Hungarian architect László Tóth. Even from his first scenes as the character, you can sense an understanding that he has of this character and you see a wide range of emotions from fear to loneliness to sadness to joy to elation that Brody plays so well. I personally will not be mad if they (and by they I probably mean Emma Stone) call his name in March.
I next want to praise the performance of Guy Pearce, who I feel has been kind of overlooked because Brody is the star of the show here. He has been in major films like The Hurt Locker (2009), The King's Speech (2010), Prometheus (2012), and Iron Man 3 (2013), but his role in this film is drastically different than anything I have ever seen him in. The Australian lands his first Oscar nomination with a powerhouse performance that sees him taking on new opportunities in some of the most visceral acting I have seen in a while. There is a brutality (no pun intended) with Pearce's performance that permeates through every scene. Whether he is telling a story or chastising his son or doing an unspeakable act in the second act of the film, the strength of Pearce's performance is palpable and much deserving of the Oscar nomination he has gotten.
I want to briefly address the "controversy" that has been going around regarding the film and its use of artificial intelligence. Before the film came out, an interview with the film's editor Dávid Jancsó was released where he revealed he fed dialogue from Brody and Felicity Jones, along with his own, into a program called Respeecher. Respeecher is an artificial intelligence system out of Ukraine that specializes in speech synthesis, and Jancsó used it to make the Hungarian dialogue that Brody and Jones speak sound more precise and like actual Hungarian dialogue. People were coming out and saying that Brody should be disqualified from award ceremonies, but director Brady Corbet came out and said the following in Deadline:
[Brody] and [Jones]'s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of [Brody] and [Jones]'s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.
Now I will say that when artificial intelligence is used in a capacity like this, I can get behind it. I will not get into my whole "artificial intelligence is dangerous" shtick in this video, but I wanted to say that I think if it is used as a tool to make films better, I am all for that.
Now with that being said, I do want to commend the film's message and what it is trying to say. I think the message Corbet is trying to get across is that the United States has always been unkind to immigrants, whether they come here legally or not. And this message, I think, is more relevant now than it was back in the 50s and 60s when this film takes place. It is not something that presents itself early in the film, but it does present itself in about the final hour of the film. I will not be delving into details but I think this is a very relevant message now as I said, especially as things are happening to immigrants in this country that I do not agree with at all.
The final point I want to make regarding this film has to do with the massive elephant in the room: the runtime. Back in September, Corbet called it "silly" to talk about runtime and "we should be past that, it's 2024." From the minute I heard this film was going to be 3 hours and 35 minutes, I was calling bullshit because I did not think it needed to be that long, and that point is only exacerbated as the film has been out for a bit over a month now. Aside from the glaring pacing issues this film presents in which scenes are way, WAY too long for their own good, you absolutely could have shaved 45 minutes to an hour off this film and told a way more effective story that flows a whole lot better than it did. While it was nice to see the film have an intermission, it really was not necessary to be honest with you.
In conclusion, The Brutalist is a fantastic period drama which features Oscar-level performances but kind of overstays its welcome. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.
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