"The Brutalist"

   ☆☆☆☆ 

Few movies have ever felt as much like a novel as The Brutalist, a film that defies easy categorization; that saves the revelation of its most important themes for the last few pages—sorry, I mean minutes; and that doesn't shy away from the kinds of moments of introspection that are largely impossible to film. It's a big, sprawling movie that engages the mind more than the heart.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for most people who see The Brutalist—it certainly was a surprise for me—is that it's fictional. The central character of Laszlo Toth feels very much like someone we've known through history, whose story we've read.

Perhaps that's because Toth's story in The Brutalist is such a concise crystallization of the story of American immigrants, and in that regard The Brutalist comes at the most compelling and perhaps the most heartbreaking time in American history to consider all it has to say. After surviving the horrors of World War II and separation from his wife and niece, Hungarian Toth (Adrien Brody) makes the journey to the U.S. and, over time, again becomes what he already was: an architect of grand vision.

The Brutalist is the long, epic story of his life and work, though about halfway through it becomes focused on one project in particular, a project that is so specific it is part of the reason we're astonished to learn that the movie is a fiction. In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Toth crosses paths with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce), who provides both every financial and creative largesse necessary to create a massive, ambitious cultural center.

Divided both into five chapters (including prologue and epilogue) and into halves (thanks to a 15-minute intermission), The Brutalist becomes a tale of obsession and madness—not just Toth's, but the even stranger and darker millionaire Harrison Van Buren, who becomes an inextricable part of Toth's life.

When Van Buren helps Toth bring both his wife (Felicity Jones) and his niece (Raffey Cassidy) to the U.S., nothing goes as planned, and the massive, all-consuming construction project takes over every part of their lives.

The Brutalist surprises with a labyrinthine story that never goes quite as we expect, which helps the film hold our attention for more than three and a half hours. If its central characters, particularly Toth and Van Buren, never quite reveal themselves in satisfactory ways, they do become grandiose, overpowering icons—it is to the film's great credit that we spend the entire running time assuming we are watching fictionalized history. If these characters didn't really exist in the world, they should have, they must have; that's how convincing the movie is, even as it always feels a little hollow at its core. It's hard to know any of these characters, to empathize with their obsessions, or to be emotionally invested. Much as Toth's architecture, they are cold, impersonal, brooding, and huge.

But it's the film's epilogue that clobbers us with a secret the film has been keeping—and rightly so. 

(SPOILER ALERT) 

"No matter what the others try and sell you," a character (I won't say which) tells us as the film's final line, "it is the destination, not the journey." In its final moments, The Brutalist hits us hard with the truth of art and creation: We are left only with the end result, and the rest is for us to determine for ourselves. When we know the truth behind it, the creation takes on a different meaning. So it is with this big, confounding, absorbing film itself.

Viewed January 19, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

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"The Last Showgirl"

  ☆☆☆ 

Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis deliver heartbreaking, grounded performances in The Last Showgirl, a movie that otherwise feels aimless, as if as much in desperate need of purpose as its titular character.

Shelly is 57, and since she was in her 20s she's been starring in "Le Razzle Dazzle," an old-style Las Vegas revue, the kind with topless showgirls tastefully showing off their large breasts while tottering in high heels and balancing enormous feather hats—the kind of R-rated ogling that doesn't offend Republicans. Occasionally, men mistake Shelly and her co-stars for prostitutes, but it doesn't happen often, and it's something they've gotten used to. They've gotten used to a lot—especially the idea that, even in the age of Cirque du Soleil, $3,000-a-seat musical residencies and a sports-oriented reinvention of Las Vegas, "Le Razzle Dazzle" will continue.

Until the day it doesn't. The show is going to close. What will become of Shelly? That's both the setup and, unfortunately, the plot of this sometimes meandering and often deeply affecting look at the way it becomes harder with age to adapt to the ways the world changes. But the movie has little sense of what to do with an excellent setup.

There are some secondary characters that float around the edges of the screen, but only one, the cocktail waitress Annette played by spray-tanned Jamie Lee Curtis, stands out. The Last Showgirl never allows Shelly to question her abilities, to explore the reality of her situation, or even enough agency to make definite decisions about her future.

Mostly, The Last Showgirl is an exercise in mood and restraint. In keeping with its theme, it's lovely to look at, quiet and melancholy, and Pamela Anderson does more than prove she has transcended her origins as a sexpot. The role is tailor made for her, an opportunity to remind the world that while she was traipsing about topless and showing off her ample assets, she was learning, growing, changing—in short, that she's a real person, interesting and multi-faceted, and with genuine talent.

But just as Shelly needs a better vehicle than "Le Razzle Dazzle," Anderson needs a better vehicle than The Last Showgirl, which mistakes quiet for thought, and restraint for introspection.

Viewed January 18, 2025 — Screener

"September 5"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

On the first day of 2025, the day I saw the expertly crafted thriller September 5, two possible terrorist attacks took place, possibly committed by people possibly affiliated with known terror groups or possibly acting on their own but possibly collaborating with others for crimes that might or might not be terrorism.

Many media outlets reported as much as they knew as fast as they could, in a race for clicks, the 21st century version of giant headlines or Nielsen ratings. It's common parlance that we live in a "24 hour news cycle," and that "mainstream media" are often too hasty, too sensationalistic, too inaccurate. Famously, they've been branded "the enemy."

September 5 takes us back more than a half-century ago to a time when news might break at any hour, but people at newspapers and especially broadcast news actually went home for the evening. A group of broadcasters—the movie takes great pains to remind us that they were not journalists—from ABC Sports is creating one of the first truly international live broadcast events: the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. Their entire operation is dedicated to making sure people a half a world away could watch the events unfold live.

When armed gunmen storm the Olympic Village, killing some members of the Israeli Olympic team and taking others hostage, this sports team has its boots on the ground. That fact forms the setup of September 5, an utterly absorbing and captivating movie that explores the machinations and ethical dilemmas of the group of producers and technicians as they beam the pictures and information live to the world.

It's a little surprising, in the best possible way, that a movie like September 5 even exists—much less that this German production, in English with an international team of performers, was picked up and distributed by Paramount Pictures. I can't remember the last time a major studio took what must now be perceived as a risk by presenting a movie filled with wall-to-wall dialogue, that expects a certain level of awareness and intelligence from its audience, and that never tries to pander with excess violence or unnecessary action.

Swiss director Tom Fehlbaum, who co-wrote the taut screenplay with Moritz Binder, has made a tense and claustrophobic thriller, a movie that is not as interested in the politics or background of the terror attacks themselves as in the outsized influence this one day had in the way media packages and we consume news. It's also a fascinating and authentic appreciation for technical craft of broadcasting—throughout September 5, producers and engineers and camera people and technicians need to use their brains to solve problems no one had ever seen before.

At the heart of it is a sports producer named Geoff Mason, who's played by John Magaro. Although Peter Sarsgaard, as Roone Arledge (who would parlay this moment into a career as one of the most influential news executives in TV history), is given top billing, it's Magaro whose anxious intensity and passionate commitment to his work holds the film together. Equally impressive is Leonie Benesch as a German translator who is thrust into a job she has no idea how to do. No one does, really, but they do it anyway, and September 5 is, despite its grim subject, a celebration of ingenuity and commitment.

It's certainly one of the best films of 2024, but it's important to emphasize that it's in no way meant to be an examination of the politics and causes behind the Munich massacre. While the film must delve into the specifics—often through the character of Peter Jennings, who was covering the Olympics, and was known as a geopolitical expert—and doesn't shy away from complexities, it's not about the gravity of the event on the world stage. It's about the way the moment changed media forever, and for anyone with the slightest interest in journalism and media and the way the world gets its information, it's not to be missed.

Viewed January 1, 2025 — AMC Century City

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