THE BRUTALIST (A24 – TBD): The most remarkable thing about Brady Corbet’s epic may be that it’s so enjoyable to watch. The notion of a 197-minute saga (not including intermission) about Holocaust survivors and the crushing effects of capitalism practically screams “ordeal,” especially with the knowledge that Corbet’s last film was the cringingly pretentious Vox Lux. Happily, Corbet has learned from his mistakes. The Brutalist script he wrote with Mona Fastvold may not be speedy, and it has its flaws, but it delivers its messages through strong characters, and plot turns that stay absorbing all the way through. The protagonist is Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody, as good as he was in The Pianist and then some), a successful Jewish architect in Hungary until he and the rest of his family were sent to the camps. In 1947, he manages to immigrate to the US with the support of his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a much more assimilated Jew who’s changed his name and acquired a Gentile wife. Things go well for Laszlo with Attilla until they don’t, but along the way he makes contact with the industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, worthy of an Oscar nomination), who becomes his patron. Things seem to be going Laszlo’s way, as Van Buren hires him to design a monumental cultural center in honor of Van Buren’s deceased mother, and also helps Laszlo’s wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and their niece Zsofia, who had been unable to get out of Europe, make their way to the US. But that’s only the first half of The Brutalist. The film offers the pleasures of a fat, sweeping historical novel, the kind of story that now exists almost entirely in the world of streaming limited series. That format, though, wouldn’t do justice to Corbet’s filmmaking. He shot The Brutalist in 70mm VistaVision (the director of photography was Lol Crawley), and the images feature gorgeously deep colors. Production designer Judy Becker created an entire aesthetic for Laszlo, including the building being constructed for Van Buren. There’s also an enormously effective score by Daniel Blumberg. The Brutalist can be unsubtle in its metaphors and dialogue, and toward the end Corbet seems so desperate to avoid hitting 4 hours that he rushes some of the late plot developments. Still, this is a huge achievement, an artifact of the joys of sitting in a movie theater and being enveloped in an entire world.
THE LAST SHOWGIRL (no distrib): Gia Coppola’s drama, from a script by Kate Gersten, tells a bittersweet tale about the folding of the last old-time musical revue in the big Las Vegas hotels, the kind that featured its dancers in costumes that were both elaborate and topless. The casting exponentially increases the nostalgia factor, as the story’s main showgirl Shelley is played by Pamela Anderson, whose life story is its own narrative about sexy stars of the 1990s. Anderson acquits herself well in a more subdued tone than is normally associated with her, and there’s a solid supporting cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis as Shelley’s ex-showgirl BFF, Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka representing the younger generation of dancers, and Billie Lourd as Shelley’s estranged daughter. Dave Bautista, as the revue’s stage manager who has a history with Shelley, provides a reminder that behind those idiot action movies he takes is an actor with real chops. There’s not much more to The Last Showgirl than the women absorbing and adjusting to the seismic change in their lives (the whole movie is basically the song “Anatevka” for topless dancers), and Coppola wisely doesn’t try to make more of it than that. The film nurtures its cast and moves on after 85 minutes, content to compassionately tell its straightforward story.
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