All posts by One Guys Opinion

Dr. Frank Swietek is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dallas, where he is regarded as a particularly tough grader. He has been the film critic of the University News since 1988, and has discussed movies on air at KRLD-AM (Dallas) and KOMO-AM (Seattle). He is also the Founding President of the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics' Association, a group of print and broadcast journalists covering film in the Metroplex area, and was a charter member of the Society of Texas Film Critics. Dr. Swietek is a member of the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS). He was instrumental in the creation of the Lone Star Awards, which, through the efforts of the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Film Commission, give recognition annually to the best feature films and television programs produced in Texas.
Now Showing

THE BRUTALIST

Producers: Trevor Matthews, Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren and D.J. Guggenheim   Director: Brady Corbet   Screenplay: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold   Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Ariane Labed, Michael Epp, Jonathan Hyde, Peter Polycarpou, Maria Sand and Salvatore Sansone   Distributor: A24

Grade: A-

Actor Brady Corbet’s third film as a director can be accused of self-indulgence on the basis of running-time alone: “The Brutalist” is two hundred minutes long, not counting the fifteen-minute countdown intermission.  But the length is justified by its ambition, which, though arguably excessive, is also definitely impressive.

Essentially the film recounts the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who arrives at Ellis Island after surviving Buchenwald and a harrowing journey.  (The character is inspired in part by Marcel Breuer, but shares his name with the mentally disturbed man who attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972—a well as the assumed moniker comedian Don Novello gave to the crazed author of “The Lazlo Letters” in 1977—a fact that Corbet might intend to indicate something about him.)

The skewered view of the Statue of Liberty, artfully contrived by Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley, which greets him is a foreshadowing of the episodes to follow; they conjoin Tóth’s artistic obsessions with sharp observations on the painful immigrant experience, ingrained capitalist exploitation, stultifying American classism, and vicious anti-Semitism—big issues all, and rather unwieldy when packaged together, with addenda to boot.  Yet Corbet and his cohorts make the package compelling from beginning to end, in addition to being perpetually relevant.

In immigrating Tóth has had to leave behind his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a journalist who was sent to Dachau and is now trapped in a displaced persons camp under Soviet control.  She is able to inform him, however, that she’s safe with his orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).  She does not mention that she’s confined to a wheelchair after her internment, and Zsófia mute as a result of hers; and arranging their coming to America is riddled with hurdles.

László, whose background as a Bauhaus student and noted Hungarian architect means nothing in the New World, is taken in by his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who’d converted to Catholicism in marrying shiksa Audrey (Emma Laird).  They run a small furniture firm in Philadelphia, and employ him as a designer, even giving him a room in their apartment.  Attila is also instrumental in securing him a job redesigning a library in the Van Buren mansion outside the city in nearby Doylestown, a commission arranged as a surprise gift for their father by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) and his sister Maggie (Stacy Martin), the children of commanding Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to be completed while their father is away with his ill mother.

But things far apart for László.  Attila throws him out after Audrey falsely accuses him of accosting her.  And though he and Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), the single father he met at a shelter, begin work on the Van Buren commission, when Harrison returns to find his home in disarray he’s furious, tosses them out and refuses to pay for the work, noting in particular the destruction of a ceiling dome.  László and Gordon are reduced to doing crushing manual labor; they mitigate their pain with heroin.

Another change of fortune occurs after several years, though, when Harrison, an aesthete of sorts, seeks out László after the library in his mansion has been acclaimed by experts as a minimalist masterpiece and its creator as a genius.  Paying him his due, Harrison introduces him to his social circle as a sort of prized possession and offers him a larger commission, to design and build a grand community center on a peak near Doylestown.  As an additional incentive, he has his lawyer (Peter Polycarpou) use his influence to arrange the release of László’s wife and niece for admission to the United States.  They arrive in 1953, and László is shocked by their infirmities.  

But Harrison’s patronage is charged with the arrogance fed by wealth, privilege, and the superiority of class and race, and he seeks to impose his own views, and concerns about cost, on László’s monumental vision.  The situation is further enflamed by Harry Lee’s bitter, bigoted hostility and his unwanted attentions toward Zsófia.  The project is ultimately suspended in one of Harrison’s sudden rages and László reduced to taking a menial office job with a New York architectural firm.  Zsófia, who has been living with the Tóths, weds a Zionist, and they move to Israel.

Some years later, Harrison contacts László with an offer to resume work on the building.  Despite misgivings he agrees and throws himself back into construction.  But when the two men travel to Carrara, Italy, to choose a block of marble for the center, they get drunk with László’s friend Orazio (Salvatore Sansone), and when László is defenseless Harrison assaults him in a show of dominance and contempt.  Yet László’s commitment to the project continues, despite his emotional unravelling.  So devoted is he to completing it as he wishes that he’ll not allow Harrison’s intrusions, changes proposed by the project managers and the quibbles of the local community to deter him; he even places his own salary on the line as a guarantee.  The intense stress leads to a meltdown in his relationship with Gordon and friction with Erzsébet, whom he unwisely tries to cure with the opioids he continues to take. 

When Erzsébet learns of Harrison’s abuse of her husband, an act of dark defilement committed against the pristine white of Carrara’s marble fields, she confronts the mogul in front of his family, even abandoning her chair to do so standing up.  While Harry reacts with fury, his father abruptly disappears into the monumental center László has built despite all the obstacles arrayed against him.

In an epilogue set at the first architecture section of the Venice Biennale in 1980, Zsófia offers a speech about her uncle, now an infirm man himself wheelchair-bound.  In it she explains why he was so intent on building the Brutalist-style community center for which he is being honored according to his very specific vision.  The secret lies in his own past.

This scenario, though intimate in terms of its characters, is a wide-ranging tapestry of issues that were critical in the American history of the second half of the twentieth century, and are still so today.  There is, to be sure, as much an intellectualized structuring to the screenplay as there is to Tóth’s building, but Corbet and Fastvold succeed in adding intense personal emotion to their plot’s scaffolding, and the cast embody it brilliantly.

It’s most notable in Brody’s overpowering turn as the obsessed architect, capturing his despair, hope and maniacal fixation in equal measure.  But he’s matched by Pearce, whose mixture of suave elitism and malignant egotism makes Van Buren a truly horrifying portrait of American hubris.  Jones is no less compelling as the defiant Erzsébet, stronger than her husband in spite of her osteoporosis, and Alwyn is the very personification of bigoted swagger.  Though none of the others have a similar opportunity to shine, all contribute to Corbet’s carefully plotted scenario under his tautly nuanced direction.

Technically the film is a visual marvel, with Judy Becker’s production design and Kate Forbes’s costumes evoking time and place superbly within the confines of a tightly managed budget.  Crawley, shooting in the near-obsolete VistaVision process, fashions outdoor tableaux of shimmering beauty and interiors that are rich and opulent.  And while David Jancso’s editing, in line with Corbet’s demands, hardly hurries things along, it deserves to be called lapidary in terms of its elegance and precision.  But the film is no less remarkable for its appeal to the ear: the sound design by Steve Single and Andy Neil is no less impressive, and Daniel Blumberg’s score, which draws one into the story with its insistently intoxicating strains.

“The Brutalist” is, of course, the second American epic about an architect to emerge this year, a young man’s expansive vision as compared to an equally ambitious one from a master veteran filmmaker.  But while Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” was an extravagant mess of half-baked ideas, Corbet’s film is a coherent statement of its themes—perhaps a bit too tidily constructed, in fact.  But a comparison to the alternative makes any design flaws pale into insignificance.                      

Now Showing

WOLF MAN

Producer: Jason Blum   Director: Leigh Whannell   Screenplay: Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck   Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Sam Jaeger, Matilda Firth, Benedict Hardie, Ben Prendergast, Zac Chandler and Milo Cawthorne   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: C-

Plenty of horror movies have skimpy plots, but Leigh Whannell’s take on the werewolf genre might have been written on the back of a standard-issue postage stamp.  Though “Wolf Man” tries to infuse the threadbare narrative with grace notes about generational rage and domestic discord, essentially it’s just a stripped-down version of the old story of a guy afflicted with an animalistic curse who must sacrifice himself for those he loves.  Unlike the 1941 original, it lacks a truly haunting, tragic vibe (as well as coherent if outlandish expository accoutrements to the macabre occurrences), and unlike Whannell’s clever 2020 reimagining of “The Invisible Man,” it fails to infuse the formula with issues conveying a particularly contemporary bite.

A prologue, set in a desolate region of Oregon forest back in the nineties, introduces young Blake Lovell (Zac Chandler) living with his father Grady (Sam Jaeger) on an isolated farm.  Grady is a stern, indeed fearsome father, harshly impressing on the boy a need to obey his injunctions absolutely when they’re out hunting deer.  One night Blake hears Grady talking over the shortwave about a terrifying encounter the two have had with a ravenous creature that, in his belief, is the animal the local indigenous people refer to as “the face of the wolf.”  Why Grady, a fiercely protective father, should be keeping his son in such a dangerous environment is never made clear, though there’s at least a suggestion he might be hunting the beast. 

Thirty years later Blake (Christopher Abbott), a stay-at-home dad who describes himself as a writer “between jobs,” is living in San Francisco with his successful journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), of whom he’s also extremely protective, sometimes apologizing to her for coming across so strong.  Obviously he’s concerned with having inherited the toxic parenting tendencies of Grady, whose place he left as soon as he could and from whom he was estranged ever since.

Because of his insecurity as a husband and father, the marriage is in trouble, so that when news arrives that Grady, who’d disappeared in the forest sometime earlier, has finally been declared legally dead, he suggests that to reset things, the family should go to Grady’s farm for the summer to see to closing it down.  Charlotte reluctantly agrees, which explains why the three are soon shown driving a moving truck deep into the Oregon forest.  Unwisely, they find themselves in the middle of nowhere at night, and Blake isn’t quite certain where the cutoff to the farm is. 

They’re helped by a local, Derek (Benedict Hardie), who remembers Blake from their childhood.  Ginger spies him in a watch tower off the road, and he approaches them with a rifle and jumps into the truck to guide them.  He has a slightly sinister vibe, but nothing much is really made of it before Blake runs the truck off the road to avoid a figure, half man and half beast, blocking the way.  Derek is thrust from the vehicle and carted away by the creature; the Lovells escape the crash and run frantically to the relative safety of Grady’s place, but Blake is scratched or bitten in the pursuit.

The rest of the movie is basically a trapped-in-the-house tale, albeit one in which the invader is some terrifying beast and the familial protector begins turning into a beast himself.  Whannell’s intent is to fashion a crushingly tense standoff in which Charlotte must try to tend to her husband, whose condition is rapidly deteriorating, protect their daughter, and try to reach out for help—something that’s made impossible because, of course, the smartphones don’t have service in such a remote locale.  (Is there any more boring a screenwriting crutch nowadays?  Perhaps the one in which the police do in fact arrive, but are quickly killed.)

In any event, despite a few inventive moments like the way Blake’s development of hypersensitive hearing is disclosed—an example of the nifty sound design by P.K. Hooker and Will Files—the makers’ touch is off here.  In Ruby Mathers’ production design the interior of the house is nondescript, and the action scenes staged within it by Whannell, cinematographer Stefan Duscio and editor Andy Canny are cluttered and messy, making for a claustrophobic feel more murkily oppressive than genuinely scary.  Even worse are those outside, like a supposedly suspenseful sequence atop a greenhouse tent that might have seemed a winner on paper but is flatly executed.  (It does, however, allow for the inclusion of young Firth, who often mysteriously disappears when the action gets too nasty in the house.)  Nor does the shrill rants of Benjamin Wallfisch’s score add much to the goings-on. The repeated use of a camera trick to suggest how things see from Blake’s animal perspective—“werewolf vision,” so to speak—is not a good idea, with the shots, blue-tinted but with shafts of glistening colors and brightly blazing eyes, frankly looking more cheesy than bizarre.

The best thing about “Wolf Man” is easily the soulful performance by Abbott, who manages to retain a human spark even as his transformation progresses, just as Lon Chaney Jr., in what is arguably his best work, did in the original.  But though one appreciates Whannell’s decision to go with old-fashioned prosthetics and makeup effects rather than the crushing weight of CGI so commonplace today, it’s undeniable that the ones devised by Arjen Tuiten aren’t very impressive; they make the latter-stage Blake look more like a wizened old man with stringy hair and bad teeth than a werewolf. (In fact, Jack Pierce’s then state-of-the-art effects for the 1941 film are far more chilling and more memorable.)  Still, Abbott is close to being the entire show, since Garner is reduced to doing little more than stand around looking distraught, apart from the few instances when she gets to swing a knife or crowbar to defend her husband, and Firth is only adequate as the kid in jeopardy.      

“Wolf Man” is preferable to Universal’s last attempt to resurrect this old franchise, 2010’s ghastly “The Wolfman.”  And its stark simplicity comes as a relief after the company’s inauguration of its abortive Dark Universe, the overstuffed, undercooked 2017 Tom Cruise vehicle “The Mummy.”  But it’s a slight, distinctly unfrightening addition to the werewolf mythology—in many ways inferior to the recent, not dissimilar Kip Harington effort, “The Beast Within.”  Even by low Blumhouse standards, this is pretty much a dud.