Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today. You may have also heard about the unique way in which it was all shot β in VistaVision, a high-resolution 70mm widescreen film format created by Paramount Pictures in that was already fading out by the early s. You probably saw it last when you watched White Christmas over the holidays. That means the imagery in The Brutalist is sometimes so distractingly beautiful, it takes you out of the film entirely.
Director Brady Corbet joins other analog-film-fanatic directors like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson in trying to preserve the astonishing image quality that used to be taken for granted by viewers of Hollywood movies. I appreciate that.
And certainly, Corbet has a sensitive talent for showing the surprisingly delicate details of brutalist architecture. But accompanying my appreciation for all this effortful commitment to taking cinematic art seriously is the more dominant emotion of bafflement. As so often happens, I seemed to be watching a film that no other critic described in their mostly glowing reviews, and I had to blaze a trail through its many dense thickets alone.
He makes it to America full of hope, only to encounter such entrenched hatred of his Jewishness, it poses a constant threat to his ability to establish himself professionally and personally in this country. This film homes in on another phenomenon, that of pervasive psychosexual sickness affecting both American bigots and Jewish victims of bigotry. Psychosexual sickness is also a theme that James Baldwin explored in terms of antiblack racism in his study of Hollywood films, The Devil Finds Work.
He argues that in an obscure drama by John Huston called In This Our Life , Bette Davis gives a brilliant performance that, Baldwin argues, indicates that she somehow fully understood the twisted eroticized hatred of black people by white Southerners, a phenomenon of which she was unlikely to have had any direct experience. But even before that point, there are scenes throughout the film stressing sexual dysfunction that are increasingly disturbing.
