FILMOGRAPHY
The Childhood of a Leader (2015)
Vox Lux (2018)
The Brutalist (2024)
FILMOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Brady Corbet, born in Scottsdale, AZ, in 1988, began his career as a television actor, pivoting at a still-tender age into films of increasing art-house rarification, such as Greg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, and the American version of Michael Haneke’s intentionally unwatchable Funny Games.
He wrote a couple screenplays for other people’s movies, including his partner and frequent collaborator Mona Fastvold’s debut, The Sleepwalker. He then revisited– also with Fastvold– something from a drawer of cast-aways, a not very good one with a flatulent title, The Childhood of a Leader (2015). The film, adapted from the Sartre short-story of the same name, was also not very good, rather pointless in fact, but it wasn’t bereft of some very strong cinematic instincts. Namely, it mostly looked wonderful through Lol Crawley’s lens, and, not unexpectedly (Corbet is a strong actor) contained some very strong performances, notably from Stacey Martin and Berenice Bejo. It was also, in its ridiculous conceit (particularly its absurd coda), a work of real pretense.
He then directed Vox Lux (2018), with Natalie Portman starring. It was a mad film, in both senses of that word, and the kind (unlike his next, The Brutalist) for which the cinema always has both room and a need. It’s seemingly intended artlessness was, in sections, very artfully delivered. At the very least it proved that Corbet was a director who got things done (read: wielded some kind of mystical power to get very unlikely vehicles into production) and who truly cared only for what arrived on screen. But overall the film was again nothing special.
The Brutalist (2024)was brutal: Way too long, way too ambitious, riddled with hosts of issues. It looked great and, at times, was inspired in the way it upended the kind of expectations built by works of the past. Unfortunately, it then squanders even expectations of its own creation. Characters and circumstances do not evolve, nothing meaningful is relayed about the very art for which its protagonist is obsessed, even though Adrien Brody plays him with real commitment and skill. In fact, the art for which it is obsessed is not only no where on screen, but not even plausible. It culminates in an ending of such numbing simplicity that its hard to believe it is sincere, and similarly, that the film’s existence culminated in mountains of praise and accolades is just as numbing. At three and a half hours, its hard to imagine its esteem will grow with time, and it does the modern cinema no favors for that fact.
WORKS
Brady Corbet’s debut film, which he wrote with his partner and frequent collaborator, Mona Fastvold, is called The Childhood of a Leader (2015), and that’s a most on-the-nose name for a most on-the-nose film. Very loosely adopted from the Jean-Paul Sartre (god help us) short story of the same name, the picture follows three episodes in the childhood of a troubled young boy, Prescott, an American living in France with his abusive parents. It’s framed by an overture in the beginning and a coda at the end. The overture– which is scored by Scott Walker– plays to music that makes it sound rather like a Jason Bourne chase sequence. It’s quality composition, but you can see the straining on the screen. This is all to footage of the great calamity of World War I, which, when the film starts, is coming to a close. Prescotts father, unnamed and played by the great character actor Liam Cunningham, is an American in France to take part in negotiating the treaty of Versailles (so he “makes” his son a fascist in two ways). The film moves into a series of then three tantrums.How Cunningham’s “Father” and Berenice Bejo’s “Mother” respond to the tantrums is of much import. The first of these involves throwing rocks, after a nativity play, at churchgoers. For this Prescott is forced to apologize publicly and with much embarrassment. The second tantrum involves Prescott’s response to being called a “girl”. He’s already quite prove he is not, by awkwardly groping his French tutor (an utterly delicate Stacey Martin), so he takes his clothes off, puts on a robe and saunters around in the nude, as though his little piggly wiggly tail would make him unmistakably masculine. He then locks himself in his room. His parents try to starve him out, and when they find out the housemaid is sneaking him food, they fire her. Its rather obvious the Mother is having affair with “The Strange Friend” (Robert Pattinson, and his actual name in the film is Marker) and when Father sees the two of them together shortly after this, he takes out his vengeance on Prescott, injuring his arm. And that’s that– so, finally, the third tantrum takes place seemingly while U.S. and European diplomats, of which the father, Liam Cunningham, is one, are formulating and then celebrating the Versailles Treaty. Prescott announces, after being asked to give grace, that he does pray anymore and he does this rather more like a declaration of war than a simple statement. And that’s much of the film, most of it, in fact. Is this the childhood of Hitler? In a conversation with Vice Magazine, Corbet explains the film as “a chronicle of the childhood experiences of a would-be fascist.” It’s, I suppose, reasonably interesting that Corbett chooses to play these episodes right on the fringes of what would be normal pre-adolescent behavior. However much Prescott is certainly odd, it’s never so clear how much of his nascent misery is obstinate and how much of it is forced upon him until the forcing becomes clear. But is this the avavistic egg of a dictator? With each of these minor episodes, the intensity of the parents’ condemnation and brutality increases, and so does the garishness with which Corbett forces his aesthetic onto the screen, and by forcing seems to say, “Yes, this is how you make a fascist.” Kubrick did many things to the cinema that were good. But as the decades pass, in the aggregate, it becomes clear that he sometimes had a very detrimental effect, particularly on young filmmakers who were ambitious and trying to make a grand statement. This picture is just overweening in its desire to make you feel the truth of this foreboding menace, from which instincts come a coda that is absurd in what it seems to try to do, retroactively, to the film one has just watched. There often seems like there’s a chance that Corbet winking at you, until it becomes quite clear that the film finds its own premises worth exploring right on their face, or, more fittingly, right on the face’s nose. (w: Brady Corbet, c: Lol Crawley)
Vox Lux (2018) continues on the theme of reliably excessive aestheticism. It also contains whole swaths of evidence regarding Corbet’s obvious talents. He is an excellent director of performance and while his visuals often connect to very little, they are still in and of themselves very interesting. The film stars Raffey Cassidy and Natalie Portman and follows the trajectory of a young woman, an eighth grader from Staten Island, who survives a horrific school shooting, writes a hit song about it, and rises to relatively immediate fame. Corbet doesn’t cheat, and he doesn’t soften. Celeste is essentially a cretin from the start, or at the very least extraordinarily shallow and impressionable. The young woman has zero compunctions about writing lousy pop music (even though she pretends to decry it at some turns). So the partying follows, and the sex follows, and the dysfunction follows, as she churns out songs that are purportedly massive hits but frankly aren’t very good (the soundtrack was written by Sia, the Australian pop artist). Just like Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux indulges every coincident possibility so as to blow up its themes. So the school shooting obviously takes place right before the turn of the millennium, and the shooter—this sequence is very deftly handled—dresses like Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold. Even so, the direction here is quite elegant. After the shooter’s bomb fails to go off, he takes a quick moment to remove his black contact lens, sighs, and then apologizes to the group he’s about to mow down that he has no choice but to kill them. It’s both believable and horrific, an even nastier flavor of Alan Clarke and Michael Haneke conceits, and it establishes an undergirding theme that runs throughout the film—the collision between what is essentially cultural distraction and cultural horror. Just like Childhood…, Corbet begins the film with this overture before moving into the act I’ve just described. And that first act is also punctuated by the 9/11 attacks. So we’re touching every base here. The second act, which is titled “Regenesis,” starts off with a terrorist shooting at a beach in Croatia. Then we cut to an older Celeste in the form of Natalie Portman. Portman woefully overplays the role, and it’s frankly kind of wonderful. She can be an extremely boring actress, but she also has these forays into riskiness that have culminated in some of her best roles. So while she can be grating at many turns here, the second act contains Staten Island–accented fireworks, that Portman delivers like Stanley Kowalski via Nikki Minaj. Her manager—played by Jude Law, in one of his classically and wonderfully smarmy roles—informs her that the terrorist shooters all the way in Croatia happened to be wearing masks modeled off one of her lousy music videos. By this point, Celeste’s brain has been addled by alcohol, partying, sleeplessness, and even a bout where she apparently drank copious amounts of household cleaning products and poisoned herself. The ensuing press conference is wonderfully ridiculous and totally vacuous, and the mad film starts to slowly reveal itself as an off-the-rails satire. She takes her daughter to lunch, gets in a confrontation with the manager at the restaurant, has an argument with her sister after finding out her daughter, Albertine—also played by Raffey Cassidy, in one of Corbet’s classic double roles—has just lost her virginity and might be pregnant. Corbet doesn’t give Stacy Martin a lot to do as the beleaguered sister. She’s both critical to Celeste’s early songwriting and quite lovely and smart and energetic in the first act, so the hollow shell we find her to be in the second act is odd and seems more to serve the satirical trajectory of Celeste than it does her actual character. Anyway, the film finally devolves into an excessively long concert where Celeste performs her hits, and they are all, each and every one of them, very banal pop music. Throughout the performance, while her adoring fans coo and roar, Eleanor and Albertine stand glumly, watching the extremely unspectacular (both literally and cinematically—Corbet is betrayed by his budget here) concert. Here Willem Dafoe chimes in. He had served to this point as a narrator who seemingly relayed all of the outrageous parts of what would come from a musical biopic, all of which we never see. So, in other words, the sequence where Celeste poisons herself on methanol—which would play akin to something like Ray Charles’s overdoses on heroin—is never shown, but rather explained in matter-of-fact narration. It’s actually how we find out that Celeste had in fact lost her virginity pretty much at the moment the planes crashed into the towers, and Dafoe dryly compares the loss of her innocence to that of the nation’s. But here he relays that Celeste informed her sister at one point that she had sold her soul to the devil to survive to become the star she’s become, and the devil even gave her a little cheer to give before her shows. None of this frankly amounts to much, other than another in a line of increasingly more compelling UFOs directed by Corbet and his partner, Mona Fastvold. Speaking of the film, Corbet mentioned that “nobody asked for it.” Of course they didn’t. Its unlikeliness is apparent from its first frame. The film is nothing special, nothing worth revisiting. But its audacity is wonderful to behold. (w: Brady Corbet, c: Lol Crawley)
The Brutalist (2024) was heralded as some kind of masterpiece. It’s not even close, but it has an energy and a bravado that could be mistaken for one. It also has a committed central performance from Adrien Brody as Lazslo Toth, an architect who escapes war-torn Budapest to begin a new life in America. He is “The Brutalist” although his work is not at all proper Brutalism, nor do we really see much of it, leading one perhaps to reconsider the title. The film begins in the innards of an ocean liner and with a score that, again, has an urgency akin to an action sequence, Lazslo weaving and shoving through hoards of immigrants to get to the deck, where the Statue of Liberty is revealed as a tilting, oblique totem of something very large and very powerful and almost seems to be warning that the boat should turn back. This sequence is the first of many where Corbet does so much with so little and it is part of an Act (Corbet continues his prologue-act-coda structure here) entitled, The Enigma of Arrival, torn from the far-more beguiling V.S. Naipaul novel of the same name, from which there is a similar passage explaining the inspiration behind an unwritten work. The film was made for $10 million and looks at times to use the budget on a single sequence (the actors worked for a tiny fraction of their normal salaries to bring the film to life and there are rumors that Corbet didn’t pay much to his Hungarian crew men, a funny irony given the film’s content). Corbet has very European cinematic sensibilities, both modern and classic. Here he treats his camera like Gaspar Noe, tossing it about as though his tripod mount were broken. His credit sequences play with a Gordardian flare and he likes shooting roads like Godard would too, or Jean-Pierre Melville. His frank shooting of sex is also Noe’s, or perhaps Bertollucci’s. His sedate treatment of violence is torn direct (most notably in Vox Lux) from Michael Haneke, who once directed him in the American version of Funny Games. And this is as close as Brody has ever come to the powers of his performance and the physical destitution he so beautifully rendered in Polanski’s The Pianist. As Toth, Brody is a wincing, grimacing, trauma survivor who is nice to cats, black people, eminently courteous, all when not shooting heroine and getting handjobs from hookers. Corbet stops only at having the legend appear on the screen, “Laszlo Toth, Tortured Genius”. He must see hookers, such is his nature, but so must he weep uncontrollably and practically pet those he loves when learning of the unlikely salvation of his wife and niece. This picture is challenging because Toth ends as he begins, long-tortured, long-suffering. He left a decimated and hateful Europe for a life in America and what he finds is that the land of opportunity is rather cut-throat, particularly if you are an artist. He tries to form something of a life with his cousin, Attila (Allesandra Nivola), but is chased off when it becomes obvious to both Atilla and his shiksa fiance (Emma Laird) that he wants to remain both an artist and, much worse, a Hungarian Jew. The last bit of work they do together is to re-design the reading room of a Doylestown, PA millionaire, with a ChatGPT generated name for a presidential hopeful: Harrison van Buren. Van Buren is played with brio by Guy Pearce. They manage at least two or three sequences of finely modulated tension. In one, Corbet writes an anecdote for Van Buren that perfectly encapsulates that fella one sometimes meets who hasn’t a sense of how trivial and boring are his stories of “personal principle” because his money has always ensured people pay mind to them. In this scene, Toth gives an elegant and beautiful response to the question, “Why Architecture?” “Nothing is its own explanation,” he says. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” This, before admitting that his work is largely a political statement and that it prefaces an uprising, the kind that happens occasionally in the “cycles of peoplehood.” This might be the only exchange of any real interest in this muddled screenplay. But alas, and for-shame (and I mean that seriously, this is pretty appalling), the line is lifted (directly and word for word!) from McCarthy’s 2022 novel Stella Maris, who borrowed its spirit from Wittgenstein. Anyway, Brutalist architecture might be mostly hideous– labryinthine gun-bunkers made of lego-like concrete blocks– but it is not so naive as all of Toth’s uprising non-sense. It was far more a hopeful movement, far more dedicated to resilience and not the kind that Laszlo seems to profess– that which would never be destroyed, never fade away– but rather the fact of rebuilding, with utility, a lost life, and for all. Once again, Corbet writes, in a sense, an anti-film with no true historical relevance. There is no architecture in this architecture movie, there is no historicity here, no real life to these caricatures. Every expected scene is truncated– we never even see Laszlo’s building finished, where those that connect to little are elongated. When Erzebet (a Felicity Jones who is strong and awkward intermittently, scene by scene) arrives with Szofia, the niece (the perpetually uninteresting Raffey Cassidy), there is little joy. Eventually, even the major project for which van Buren is a wildly generous benefactor is peopled by fools and charlatans, and there is no camaraderie and cooperation that would be the biggest indicator of Toth’s competence, not just his drafting work. (The difference between drafting and building in architectural terms is rather like the difference between screenwriting and actual film production, a point not lost on Corbet, but non-existent in the film). The project is then cancelled after critical materials are lost in a train accident. Laszlo and Erzsébet move to New York, where Zsofia (who to this point has been mute) announces that she is pregnant and will be moving to Israel with her husband. Soon thereafter, the Van Buren project begins anew. Although Toth seems to want to pour that egalitarian and utilitarian substance– concrete– into every crevice, he and van Buren end up in Europe, at a marble quarry (shot in Carrara, Italy). The setting is stunning and stunningly photographed (as is almost all of the picture) by Lol Crawley. They both get terribly fucked up, Laszlo on heroine, and here Corbet’s fundamental artlessness– his intoxication with grand gestures and his winking crudity– results in van Buren anally raping Laszlo while declaring jews “leeches” who “invite their own persecution.” Once again the brutality of Haneke without any of the subtlety. Because the topic is so top-of-mind many bristled at the idea that the Toths should then choose to escape to Israel. But this line of argument– that the film is somehow “pro-zionist”– is neither clear nor particularly interesting. More so is the puzzling coda, which takes place at the “first” Venice Biennalle. Here, a very confident, grown Erzsébet delivers (with which some would call a “Zionist’s” confidence, perhaps?) a speech on Laszlo’s many accomplishments as he watches, ancient, speechless, and decrepit, from his wheelchair. She punctuates her predictable, cliched speech with the absolutely non-sensical and insulting statement: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey” at which time Corbet cuts to a silly Italo-disco number and his credits. (w: Brady Corbet, c: Lol Crawley)
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