Movies: The Brutalist

Adrien Brody recently won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Brutalist - was it deserved?

Mostly, I think it was. Brody is a fine actor who has worked in a wide variety of films (everything from twee Wes Anderson comedies to genre flicks like King Kong and Predators), and he gets to display the full range of human emotion in The Brutalist's exorbitant 3-1/2 hour runtime: embarrassment, inspiration, despair, relief, with a little drug addiction thrown in, too.  If the other nominated performances this year were entrées, Brody's turn as fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth is a full-course dinner.

However, Brody's work (alongside the always-interesting Guy Pearce) isn't enough to elevate The Brutalist's lackluster story. The film is simply a mess...you can see where Brady Corbet gestures at a Godfather II-style immigrant epic, but he lacks the writing and editing chops to tell an interesting story. The final 30 minutes, including a ham-handed epilogue taking place decades after the main plot, is a case study in how not to end a film (if you need an on-screen character to deliver a literal lecture on the symbolism in the movie, you've failed as a director).

Rating: 5/10