The Brutalist
Directed by Brady Corbet
Languages: English, Hungarian
Year: 2024
Shaun’s Rating: 4.1/5 ★
Emilia Pérez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Languages: Spanish, English
Year: 2024
Shaun’s Rating: 0.8/5 ★
Before Watching:
This month, the Golden Globes briefly dethroned Tracker as the biggest waste of airtime on CBS (a distinction soon to be reclaimed, I’m sure, by FBI: CIA). Among the many awards bestowed by the sixty-five blithely Philistine members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association were the coveted “Best Picture” trophies—this time, they went to The Brutalist (Drama) and Emilia Pérez (Musical/Comedy). Now, the same two films are also jockeying for the Academy Award for Best Picture, holding the top two slots in the Vegas betting odds. But if there’s anything that 2024 has proven about Americans, it is that they can f*ck up even the simplest of choices.
The Brutalist is a 215-minute1 epic chronicling the journey of Hungarian Holocaust survivor László Tóth (obviously Adrien Brody) who immigrates to the United States and forges a career in architecture.2 Struggling through addiction and poverty, he is taken in by the affluent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, whom we also saw this year in David Cronenberg’s latest The Shrouds) who commissions him to build a grand community center as a tribute to his late mother. László’s very first sight at Ellis Island (the upside-down Statue of Liberty) serves as the perfect visual metaphor for his odyssey through the inverted American Dream—László is humiliated and exploited, only heralded for as long as he remains useful then mercilessly discarded, like Rednote 小红书 once TikTok was un-banned.
Emilia Pérez features a very different dream: a Mexican cartel drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) hires a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña in a refreshingly human hue) to orchestrate a secret sex-change operation. This is not just what ChatGPT spits out when you prompt it for a third-rail plot that would melt the face of every MAGA voter,3 it’s also (stay with me) a musical. But it’s a far cry from Wicked, as the lyrics of Emilia Pérez’s dance numbers seldom scan naturally onto their rhythms,4 and the bland monotonic melodies are done no favors by the fact that only some of the cast can carry a tune. Jack Hamilton agrees in Slate:
The main reason Emilia Pérez doesn’t scan as a conventional movie musical is because, as a movie musical, it’s completely incompetent. With the exception of Gomez, no one onscreen is an observably talented vocalist, which might not have been a fatal issue if the material they were tasked with singing wasn’t so uniformly godawful.
It is, frankly, a wreck of a film. Its themes are muddled and its conclusion is as nonsensically unclear as it is shockingly regressive. Audiard has, however, succeeded in one regard: uniting the Mexican, transgender, and musical theater communities in their unadulterated loathing for this under-contemplated anthem. If you needed a case study in liberal American virtue-signaling masquerading as art, championing mediocrity to check a box, then look no further than the Guardians of the Gal-Pal-axy.
Corbet triumphs in many of the capacities where Audiard flounders—The Brutalist has vision, direction, and an unbelievably fictitious protagonist. It’s TÁR for heterosexuals. Even eyeroll-worthy artistic indulgences (like Joe Alwyn, and how it was shot in VistaVision, an antediluvian variant of 35mm that hasn’t been used since before the Kennedy assassination5) can be forgiven because the movie commits to its singular, meaningful narrative. In contrast, each sour note of Emilia Pérez compounds until the film’s smug ineptitude topples over on itself before you have the chance to click “No, I’m not still watching.”
The Brutalist premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion award for Best Director. It is now available in theaters worldwide. Emilia Pérez premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Actress and the Jury Prize.6 It is now streaming on Netflix.
After Watching:
That is not to say that I didn’t leave the Alamo Drafthouse with some qualms. As exacting as a large-scale epic can be, I’m disappointed in the over-engineering of its moral findings—Zionism in particular (the draw that Israel has on the Jewish Tóths, who feel lost and aimless even in America) seems to be a conclusion in search of a cause. Even my frienemy Richard Brody notes this constriction:
These themes don’t emerge in step with the action; rather, they seem to be set up backward. “The Brutalist” is a domino movie in which the last tile is placed first and everything that precedes it is arranged in order to make sure that it comes out right. In a way, it does, with an intense dénouement and an epilogue that’s as moving as it is vague—and as philosophically engaging as it is practically narrow and contrived.
Then again, this is also the same line of reasoning he used to keep Parasite off of his best films of 2019 list. And he also pens this strange assertion:
[The Brutalist] is itself an imposing structure that fills the entire span allotted to it… with its clean lines and precise assembly, it’s nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that’s still in search of its characters.
I know you have a degree from Princeton, but perhaps I should point you towards the definition of “brutalism,”—the clean lines and dearth of details is the very guiding principal behind his art, how he processes the horrors of the Holocaust.
Emilia Pérez, by contrast, never even figures out what message to impart on its audience. The emotional climax of the film is just Selena Gomez’s character deadnaming the murderous Emilia in a way that is just Wizards of Way Off-Base, which is perhaps why so many transgender critics (“in queer media”?) have denounced the film. Brace yourselves for an Oscars sweep by this brutal, killing-prone protagonist—yes Selena, it is Only Murders in the (Dolby Theater) Building.
With a 15-minute intermission! Saints be praised!
The second farthest Adrien Brody has traveled, right after how much he’s distanced his career from Roman Polanski since The Pianist (2002).
Though I would love to hear Donald Trump try to give us a synopsis. “They’re taking the cartels and they’re making them trans, and they don’t even ask the parents folks… don’t you think it should be the parents, not the teachers? And Selena Gomez is back again folks, oh she’s gonna love you like a love song—Mexico isn’t sending their best to Netflix. People are saying that, and that Hailey Bieber is already funding the wall to keep her out… I said we should build it first, but now Haley Bieber is saying it—can you believe that folks?”
This is potentially because the concept of syllabic emphasis (which is mandatory in English and Spanish songwriting) doesn’t as much exist in French music, and the French production team overlooked this detail.
Which I guess… we’re going to be… learning more about soon?