Are The Brutalist and Our Evenings about the journey, actually?
Plus, five film reviews from a special guest critic.
I’m nothing if not a tightly wound ball of strong opinions. That aspect of my personality fuels this newsletter just as much as my deep curiosity. I say this because, usually, I form an opinion rather quickly after consuming some form of media, whether it be a film, or song, or book, or whatever. It isn’t often that I get “stuck” on something, but ever since seeing The Brutalist in 70mm one week ago, I have been stuck. In an attempt to unstick myself, I decided to write about it in tandem with a book I finished one day after seeing the film. I’ll explain why in the essay (instead of repeating myself like a seagull), but before I get to that, I want to say two more things.
The first is that after the essay, I’ve badgered another friend to contribute to the newsletter. Second, I rewatched Babygirl a few evenings ago and confirmed it is a masterpiece. I may write an essay on its masterful, quiet eroticism eventually, but until then, here’s my Letterboxd review: “seeing this again, as the credits rolled I turned to my friend and said ‘I’d sell my family to have one night in that big hotel room with Harris Dickinson’ and I stand by it (I love my family).”
Welcome to Public Service.
Journey to the center of the plot device.
Last week, I engaged with two very different pieces of media that, coincidentally, both used almost the same exact plot device to wrap up their respective stories (to varying degrees of success). The first was Brady Corbet’s monumental film The Brutalist, the three-and-a-half-hour epic centered upon a Hungarian-Jewish architect named László Tóth. The second was Alan Hollinghurst’s equally monumental novel Our Evenings, which tells the story of a Burmese-British actor named Dave Win. Both take place across decades, and both hinge on the exploration of how the world interacts with respective art forms in relation to their “foreign” identities. They are not just an architect or an actor; their identities filter their art through a smudged lens so that they will always be known as a Jewish-Hungarian architect and a half-Burmese actor.
Before I go any further, this is your official warning that I’m entering into spoiler territory.
As I’d said at the start, both the film and the novel introduce a plot twist that significantly alters the preceding story. In The Brutalist, it is maybe revealed that the community center at the center of the film is not a monument to the wealthy, morally bankrupt Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.’s mother (as was intended). Instead, this towering mass of concrete and marble is a monument to, and reclamation of, Tóth’s time in the Buchenwald concentration camp. I say “maybe” because, by the epilogue, Tóth is bound to a wheelchair and mute, a sad amalgamation of both his wheelchair-bound wife, Erzsébet, and silent niece, Zsofia. He is unable to communicate, so it’s his niece who literally speaks on his behalf at a retrospective of his work in Venice, saying: “For this project, he re-imagined the camp's claustrophobic interior cells with precisely the same dimensions as his own place of imprisonment, save for one electrifying exception; when visitors looked 20 meters upwards, the dramatic heights of the glass above them invited free thought; freedom of identity.”
Throughout the film, Tóth is adamant about maintaining both the dimensions and, more notably, the height of the ceilings — even having part of his fee taken out to offset the added cost of materials — so this reasoning makes sense, but it’s hard to take Zsofia at face value. Though this is a film about Tóth, it’s Zsofia whose face we see at the start and end of the film and it’s her eventual move to Jerusalem that forms the crux of her story. In defense of her move, she says that “our repatriation is our liberation,” yet Tóth and Erzsébet both refuse to leave the life they’ve established in America. This question of returning to a “homeland” doesn’t form a major struggle in Our Evenings (even if Win is often asked about visiting Burma), but it is Win’s mysterious Burmese father and the circumstances of his birth that weigh on him throughout his life. As a mixed-race actor in Britain, he’s constantly typecast into “East Asian” roles and fetishized in the bedroom and the theater.
Their stories seemed to be their struggle to move beyond the lens of identity and lineage and have their art stand on its own — or so I thought. The Brutalist ends with one final line from Zsofia: “It’s the destination, not the journey.” I’m not going to get into the controversy and ambiguity of how that line may or may not relate to Zionism (I’ll leave that to Reddit). I want to instead touch on how, in both pieces of media, their conclusion introduces a sharp tonal shift. The film jumps ahead to Venice in the 1980s and has thumping synths and a documentary-style visual palette, while the novel changes the font and switches the narrative to an almost newsreel style of speaking. In both instances, someone else speaks for the two men because one is wheelchair-bound and mute, while the other is dead (in a jarringly offensive plot twist). By taking away their agency to conclude their own stories, both works seem to argue that in the end, all the hard work, the trauma, and the sacrifice put into a work of art is rendered moot. What’s remembered is the final product.
As far as the final product of these two works, I didn’t like Our Evenings (I found its disjointed narrative a headache by the midway point, and it only got worse from there), and I’m still unsure how I feel about The Brutalist (even if it’s an undisputable technical masterpiece). The ending to both left me feeling unsettled, a feeling that’s lingered for a week now. On the one hand, it is about the journey. If it wasn’t, there would be nothing to film or to write. We all bring ourselves to our creation, yet — and I hate to say this — I also agree that the production of art really is about the destination.
Looking at buildings or works of art in a museum or reading a book, there is no way to know about the journey that brought this creation to life without deeper research. It’s sad to think about how many stories have been lost to time, but it’s also beautiful to know we’re surrounded by works that so many different people poured themselves into. We can argue on and on about journeys and destinations, but at the end of the day, is there anything more human than the desire to leave a legacy?
A selection of Letterboxd reviews by cultural critic Jake Indiana.
There are few people more trustworthy for movie opinions than my friend Jake. This is because, in addition to being a future Jeaporardy winner and the person who introduced my plebeian ass to the Criterion collection, he is also a lifelong film snob. After prodding him like a dairy cow to finally make a Letterboxd account, he relented and has been methodically logging both new films and a seemingly endless amount of films he’d watched in his pre-Letterboxd era. Here are five of my favorites he logged in January.
Mrs. Doubtfire (2/5 stars) — Why don't I like this film? Let me count the ways.
A FRIGHTENING glimpse into how normalized transphobia was baked into modern culture. The child feels the need to ATTACK his nanny with furniture upon the discovery that she pees standing up and must therefore be a man?! And then even after it's Ru-vealed that it's been DragDad all along, he refuses to give him a hug? On the other hand, perhaps it would be strange to hug your father with a heaving bosom of pendulous breasts, that feels psychically charged.
Robin Williams is not funny when he has to play his schtick to kids. Part of his true genius was, of course, being the greatest improvisational mind for character acting and theater that the world has ever known, but doing this in service to the lowest common denominator of audience does a disservice to his work for adults, which is both laced with insight and capable of real emotions that aren't "GEE WIFE YOU'RE TEARING THIS FAMILY APART."
[interlude: Sally Field is actually just great in this. She's such an actor's actor - it is genuinely breathtaking to watch the parade of emotions fly across her face during the climactic restaurant RuVeal.]
We are forced to accept this is a film about a dad who is representing moral good by doing a psychotic form of emotional manipulation and control over his family who have forced him to leave the family unit due to some very valid concerns! I don't think this behavior is good! This should not get studio comedified into being an ideal!
The script is actually quite bad. The children could not be more one note, and for Williams and Field to have their initial family breakdown with the clunkiest exchange of dialogue imaginable is disheartening, as it's just the beginning of a langorous 2 hours. We need not one not two but THREE dance montages to songs with gender bending lyrics. The climax of the film feels like it lasts 3 hours and remains strangely inert in terms of suspense or action.
NOT ENOUGH HARVEY FIERSTEIN. THIS WAS A CRIME!
Uptown Girls (3/5 stars) — Ridiculously good - a beautifully told story of non-traditional motherhood and accepting grief that also has the manic energy of every girl-centric studio film from this era. I really need "Sheets of Egyptian Cotton" on iTunes already!
The Big Blue (3/5 stars) — This movie is completely outrageous. A three-hour tragic rom com about deep sea divers with latent commentary on humans evolving from dolphins and homoerotic bromances and weird breeder-fetish women eating spaghetti ai Frutti di Mare on the Sicilian coast?? This is a movie that feels like every minute of its 3 hours if not feeling like 3 days. What the hell kind of coke did Luc Besson have access to in 1988?
The Exterminating Angel (4.5/5 stars) — Legitimately crazy they let Buñuel make this film in 1962, essentially presaging the entire oeuvre of Adult Swim in its deranged commitment to a bit that neither makes sense or is all that funny but in its totally outré execution it becomes essential.
In something of a contradiction, I feel like this film's inverse - 1972's 'Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' - is both funnier and better, but the sheer outrageous, audacious endeavor of 'Exterminating Angel' makes me hold it a bit more preciously. I can't even begin to try blocking scenes for a 20 person cast in one room for 90 minutes. I love how you doubt your sanity when images and patterns repeat themselves leading to the totally inexplicable and bafflingly dumb resolution. I love how in the confines of this room Buñuel depicts every facet of human life with razor sharp satire - life, death, sex, religion, classism - it's all here!
In the Realm of the Senses (4.5/5 stars) — Fucking in defiance of encroaching fascism is a tale as old as time. I'm actually comforted this was based on a true story <3