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The Brutalist

Even if you don’t know what brutalism is, you’ve seen it in action. “Brutalism” is a term given to an architectural style which arose after World War II. Prewar movements such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco had lots of showy bits. Look at the ornate staircase railings in turn-of-the-20th century houses or the intricate glasswork of Tiffany. Art Deco’s architectural masterpiece was the Chrysler Building in New York City, a soaring spire of glass and steel whose crown mimics the rays of the rising sun. 

Brutalism shed all of that. For architects like Mies van der Rohe, the beauty of a building lies not in the sculptural ornaments you can make from steel, but from the inherent qualities of the steel itself. The name is derived from a French term for raw concrete. Brutalist buildings often have long expanses of featureless concrete walls. It was somewhat of a utopian project; good architecture could help people live better, cleaner lives. By the late ’60s and ’70s, brutalism came into favor with large institutions like government buildings and college campuses. In Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry’s central tower on Madison Avenue is a prime example of brutalism done well. 

But the style has not always aged so gracefully. Many brutalist concrete exteriors got grungy as the years passed. Street artists love to use the blank walls of government buildings as a canvas for graffiti. When the BBC conducted a survey in 2008 to determine the 12 most hated buildings in the UK, eight of them were brutalist. But the style still has many champions, especially in the former Soviet bloc, where brutalism produced many unique works. 

When we first meet László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in The Brutalist, he is on a boat to America. When a cry arises from above, he and the other passengers race up the deck to catch their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Director Brady Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley make the visuals match both the ecstasy and disorientation of the moment by following László up the ladder with a handheld camera. When he finally sees Lady Liberty, the camera swoops and rolls, eventually ending upside down, with the torch seemingly hanging from the top of the screen.

Corbet and Crawley shot The Brutalist in VistaVision, a format devised by Paramount Pictures in the 1950s which uses a 35mm negative to produce an image wider than old-fashioned TVs, but not as wide as 70mm widescreen or the 16:9 ratio of most flatscreen TVs. The director said he wanted to shoot this story in a format which matched the time period, and he makes a stirring case for the now-obsolete format. The Brutalist offers striking compositions, which, true to form, highlight the beauty of everyday objects. When László, the impoverished immigrant, takes a job building a loading dock crane, we see it as he sees it — a steel colossus standing against the bright blue firmament.  

László makes his way from New York City to Philadelphia, where he is taken in by his cousin Attilla (Alessandro Nivola), who gives him great news. László was separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) when he was snatched from Budapest by the Nazis and thrown into the Dachau concentration camp. He had given them up for dead, but they are still alive. László longs to bring Erzsébet to America, but she is trapped in Hungary by the Soviet occupation. Plus, László is living in the store room of Attilla’s furniture showroom, so he must improve his station before he can expand his family. 

Then, opportunity comes from an unexpected quarter. Attila and László are contacted by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants them to renovate the library in his father’s mansion as a birthday surprise. During the job interview, László reveals the depth of his vision. He studied at the Bauhaus, an early modernist art and design school in Germany which was declared not Germanic enough when the Nazis took power in 1933. In Europe, he had his own architecture firm and built many buildings, to great renown, before the fascists destroyed the tolerant, liberal society which allowed him to flourish. 

The old library is a dusty mess with a cracked Tiffany glass skylight. When László gets done with it, it’s a clean, modernist space with built-in shelving of light wood with massive doors to protect the rare books from sunlight. In the center is a reading chair with a built-in book holder. When the homeowner Harrison (Guy Pearce) returns unexpectedly, he’s furious, partly because he says they have destroyed his room without permission, and partly because he saw a Black man, Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), on his property. At first, Henry refuses to pay for the work, and Attila blames László’s radical designs. But when a Look magazine journalist profiling Harrison sees the library and gushes about it in print, the wealthy magnate seeks out László to apologize and commissions a great building, which will be László’s American masterpiece. The long road to completing the building, which involves navigating both the conservatism of conventional architecture and the anti-Semitism of the Pennsylvania WASP elite, will consume László’s being. 

The Brutalist is a stubbornly old-fashioned film. At 215 minutes, it comes with an intermission, which would have made bloated recent fare like Avengers: Endgame more tolerable. (Lawrence of Arabia, by comparison, is 216 minutes and also had an intermission.) Brody is brilliant as the enigmatic Hungarian, so passionate about his art but chilly even towards his own wife. And why doesn’t Guy Pearce get more work? He’s every bit Brody’s equal as the rich industrialist who uses his talented friend for clout. If The Brutalist stopped after the intermission, it would be a near-perfect film, an immigrant story in the vein of The Godfather Part II. Unfortunately, Corbet can’t quite stick the landing, and it falls apart at the end. But that’s okay. Endings are hard. Architecture is forever. 

The Brutalist
Now playing
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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Alien Invasions

Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. 

Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales. 

Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.

The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?

The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.

Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.  

On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.

On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.

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The French Dispatch

Mention director Wes Anderson, and eventually someone will say he’s “twee.” What does that mean, exactly? The Merriam-Webster definition of “twee” is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” The word itself is thought to come from the way a small child pronounces “sweet.” Anderson’s films, which began with Bottle Rocket in 1996, were sort of retroactively lumped into a poptimist mini-movement that arguably began with a 2005 Pitchfork article titled “Twee As Fuck.” 

But I’ve never thought of Anderson as particularly twee in the way, say, Shirley Temple was twee. Yes, he’s meticulous in his visuals, and childhood has been a recurring subject for him. You can tell he’s someone who has cultivated what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind,” staying in touch with the awe of youth most people lose as they grow older. But there has always been a darkness underneath the curated surface of his films. The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family trying to deal with the aftermath of growing up with an abusive drunk father. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is about failing to deal with failure. At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hero M. Gustav is summarily executed by Nazis, and the narrator Zero’s wife and child die in a flu epidemic. Moonrise Kingdom is … okay, I’ll give you Moonrise Kingdom. But it’s also a major fan favorite, and one of the director’s biggest financial successes. 

Anderson’s latest film is The French Dispatch. I’m going to go ahead and cop to being biased toward this one, because it’s about magazine writers, and that’s what I am. (Read me in the pages of Memphis magazine!) Befitting the eclecticism that is the magazine form’s bread and butter, it’s an anthology movie — an exceedingly rare bird these days. It begins with the death of publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (a magisterial Bill Murray), whose will specified that his magazine, whose name is the film’s full title, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (okay, that’s pretty twee) would shutter after one final issue which re-runs the best stories from its long history. First, we get Owen Wilson narrating a cycling tour of the fictional French city of Ennui, which lies on the Blasé river, because of course it does. 

Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and a whole bunch of other people.

Then, Tilda Swinton delivers an art history lecture on the origin of the French Splatter-School Action Group. The wild painters were inspired by Moses Rosenthaler (an absolutely brilliant Benicio Del Toro), an insane, violent felon who takes up painting to pass the time during his 30-year prison sentence. His first masterpiece, a nude portrait of Simone (Léa Seydoux), a prison guard who becomes his lover and muse, is discovered by Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), an art dealer imprisoned for tax evasion. 

Lyna Khoudri, Frances McDormand, and Timothée Chalamet on the barricades.

In “Revisions to a Manifesto” Frances McDormand plays journalist Lucinda Krementz, who abandons neutrality by having an affair with student revolutionary leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) of the 1968 “chessboard revolution.” Due to the students’ lack of demands — beyond unlimited access to the girls’ dorm — Krementz drafts the revolutionary manifesto herself. 

Jeffery Wright working on deadline.

“The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” is the least coherent episode, but it features a killer James Baldwin imitation by Jeffery Wright as Roebuck, a writer whose assignment to do a profile on chef/gendarme Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) spirals off into a tale of kidnapping and murder, with very little actual food content. 

“Twee” implies closed off, hermetically sealed, and precious. The French Dispatch is anything but claustrophobic, even in the scenes set in an actual prison. This is Anderson’s most expansive and generous work, teeming with life in all directions. Heavy hitters like Willem Dafoe, Griffin Dunne, Christoph Waltz, Elisabeth Moss, and the unexpectedly dynamic duo of Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban appear for only seconds at a time. The dizzying array of faces flashing across the screen led me to count the acting credits on IMDB. I gave up at 300. While there are some great shots of the actual French countryside, most of the action takes place on soundstages. Nobody does set design like Anderson, and all kinds of wonders are on display, from tiny dioramas to livable multi-story cross sections. 

The French Dispatch is a love letter to the golden age of magazine journalism, and it made me think I was born in the wrong era. But the underlying theme is revolution in all its forms, from the students manning the barricades to new artistic movements springing from a prison riot. Maybe the critics are right, and all this stylized attention to detail designed for aesthetic shock and awe really is “twee,” but if so, it’s twee AF. 

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Third Person

What turns a comedy into a drama? It’s a good question that Third Person writer-director Paul Haggis would never deign to answer. But it’s a question the film raises, and you might come up with a few theories after watching it.

Like his Oscar-winning 2004 film Crash, Third Person is a sprawling and ambitious network narrative powered by pretty people in big cities trying to connect. One story set in NYC follows a downtrodden former soap opera star (Mila Kunis) engaged in a custody battle with her ex-husband, a world-renowned finger painter (WTF?) played by James Franco. A second story, which features a sad-sack corporate lackey (Adrien Brody) who slowly and justifiably grows infatuated with a mysterious beauty he meets in a bar (Moran Atias), takes place in Rome. The third story concerns a successful writer (Liam Neeson), who, when he isn’t staring meaningfully at the MacBook on the desk in his gigantic Paris hotel room, is carrying on an affair with a woman (Olivia Wilde) young enough to be his daughter.

As Third Person‘s stories unfold, a few provocative cross-cuts combine with some odd coincidences and repetitions to suggest a deeper connection among these people.

Wilde, however, stands out. Like Cameron Diaz, Wilde uses her intense, playful sexiness to go two places instead of one; the way she lounges about on couches and beds also heightens her cutting coolness, intelligence, and emotional distance. Wilde’s aspiring writer and gossip columnist character may be smarter and more attractive than anyone around her, but even she can’t breathe the necessary life into the perfectly sculpted and obviously written dialogue she’s given.

When the script’s literary aspirations mix with the rough-draft incompleteness of its interpersonal encounters, Third Person‘s deliberate yet roughed-in feel starts to undermine the weightier moments. Big emotional scenes can’t be trusted, and any bite or zip in smaller moments is lost; every meaningful frame, gesture, and slow-motion action sequence starts to look funny. Humorless ambition may be the currency of dictators and football coaches, but it makes for lousy art.

Third Person

Opens Friday, July 18th

Studio on the Square