The Brutalist Behind the Brutalist

My feelings on Brady Corbet, and a link to a recent piece on My Feelings

I have one thing to say before the Oscars air this Sunday: what do we think of ambitious, tyro young director Brady Corbet? (Pronounced like “Targ-eet” for those in the know, which, uh, wasn’t me!) He made a big ambitious epic film in The Brutalist. It runs three and a half hours, it’s about immigration and genius and the artist’s relationship with the patron (always complicated) and it’s about America in big broad strokes. I loved it! Sitting in a room with a movie that was ambitious and broad and there to be a big movie movie making statements - my goodness that felt like a sheer joy. And what intrigues me about Corbet as a director is two fold. First, he has a perspective as an artist that’s interesting - his last film, Vox Lux, was about a pop star on a comeback performance who first rose to fame as an angelic young victim who suffered from a terrorist attack at her school. What themes! And then, on top of it, Natalie Portman is going full Lawng Island as the pop star. It is not boring. And that’s valuable!

Corbet, also, has been on the six-month campaign trail for Oscars, doing interview after interview. Some are with his wife, Mona Fastvold, who is also a film director and who cowrote the script. Some are just with Corbet himself. The sort of work that Corbet and Fastvold do together - they write together, they switch off directing duties, they both devote themselves to being artists - it’s admirable. It sounds equitable. And when they’re interviewed together, I’m interested in them.

But I listened to Corbet on Marc Maron’s podcast and it was just Corbet. He monologued. He said he was listening to Scott Walker at 14 which is a hilarious thing to say. He never quite mentioned anyone who worked on the film by name, save the actors, and there was a real sense of I am a hardworking, tired, broke genius who has been busting my ass for this movie forever and it is good but maybe it is also not sustainable at all. He sometimes sounded 70 years old. He is 36. Maron was ready to talk mostly about jazz. Corbet groused about the monoculture of pop stars his ten-year-old daughter has to choose from these days.

And Maron, bless his heart, never went too far. It’s interesting that Corbet writes with his wife. It’s interesting that The Brutalist is about Jewish characters who survived the Holocaust and then moved to Israel. As far as I can tell, there has been little discussion of Judaism in the movie beyond things that were very much surface reads. Is Corbet Jewish? Is his wife? I assume that they’re not, but I absolutely could be wrong. My best guess is maybe a little bit on Corbet’s side, culturally.

My take is that The Brutalist is the best, most quixotic, most beautiful film that I saw last year and I would love it to win Best Picture, but I also think that Corbet, tired, exhausted, on his own a little bit, isn’t sufficiently grateful enough (and why would he have to be? He’s a guy!) for the big intimidating things about The Brutalist to become an undeniable Best Picture winner. Even though Adrien Brody smokes a cigarette like an advertisement for just how cool you can look smoking cigarettes.

I wrote a long piece for The Cut on the quixotic relationship between taking Zepbound, a GLP-1 for weight loss, and my experience with PMDD. I would love to talk about this more - a piece behind the piece, even - but it’s been a weird month since it ran, considering the climate, the government, etc. Easy to get distracted. Anyways, if you want to read a piece about this subject, here you go! I have more to say, I think, perhaps in a blogpost come next week. I hope I end up typing it.

I don’t write here much because I don’t quite know what to say, what potential “niche” to fill, especially if I still have the energy to try to be fairly renumerated as a writer, creative, whatever, in *this* economy. But that’s okay. Assume that at some point I either start writing here regularly or I revamp this as a whole branded thing. I just need time, and that’s always in short supply when there’s Frozen 2 to watch with my daughter.