Why 'The Brutalist' Will Win Best Picture (And 'Babygirl' Will Not)
#303: "The Brutalist," "Babygirl," "Owning Mahowny," "War Game"
Edition 303:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: If it looks like a Best Picture winner, and it quacks like a Best Picture winner…it’s probably our new Best Picture favorite. Then, that steamy Nicole Kidman movie I can’t wait to forget, a movie that made me want to stop gambling forever, and a documentary about a potential Civil War that somehow made me more hopeful about the country. In this week’s trailer watch, insert generic Jason Statham movie here.
The Brutalist
Back in October I called my shot, telling you all that Anora’s days as the Best Picture favorite were numbered and that The Brutalist would be the one to dethrone it. Et voilà! After Anora went home empty handed at the Golden Globes and The Brutalist won three of the top prizes, it’s now the odds-on favorite at the Oscars.
Really, that prediction shows my cynicism for the much-discussed change in the Academy’s voting body. Younger, more diverse…sure sure. This three-and-a-half-hour American epic about a post-WW2 immigrant is Boomer-bait in the deepest sense, with all the prestige bestowed by its runtime and the fact that it’s shot on VistaVision (I don’t know exactly what that means but all the nerds are losing their minds and it looks incredible so I mention it here). It looks, sounds and smells like a Best Picture movie. And so, it is.
Here’s what that insane runtime buys you — other than a 15-minute intermission in the middle, which frankly I kind of loved, because it gave people a chance to mingle and talk about the first half the way you would a Broadway show.
It allows a story to be complex. When I sit down to write a long magazine story (and I’m sure this has parallels in a lot of professions), staring at the blank page, the opportunities are limitless. There are so many different moments, ideas, or threads you could choose to highlight. But due to the constraints of space and editing, those ancillary details get hacked away until the central, straightforward narrative is all that remains. In the name of clarity! And you know, in most cases the simplest way is probably best.
This movie doesn’t have the same constraints, allowing for something that’s sprawling and multi-faceted. The movie opens in 1947 and ends in 1980, telling a sweeping portrait of a Jewish Hungarian architect who survives a concentration camp and immigrates to the United States only to find a racial hostility that’s more hidden but equally menacing.
Or you might say it’s a movie about how much one man is willing to sacrifice for his art. Or it’s a love story against all odds. Or it’s a condemnation of rich people who see those below them as expendable toys to play with.
It is of course all of those things, and more. That means it’s also not clear what it’s about at all, which I think will trip many people up at the end.
The ambition is to be a true American epic, containing all the multitudes of ambition, capitalism and idealism that our country holds most dear, underscored by luscious settings, beautiful cinematography and a propulsive score.
But all that grandeur also gives the movie a kind of unapproachable quality at the same time. I saw all of the moments, even the emotional and intimate ones, like a museum piece — from a distance and behind a metaphorical pane of glass.
The remove protected me from some of the ugliest parts of the movie (believe me, it gets a lot darker that you’d guess), but it also stopped me from connecting in the way that all my favorite movies do. I never put myself in the shoes of our protagonist.
Still, Adrien Brody is perfect in the lead role, an actor who has filled an entire trophy case playing mid-century Jewish artists and is a first ballot hall of fame cigarette smoker (he houses several hundred in this movie). Guy Pearce is excellent as his foil, a rich Northeastern WASP who commissions the building. Felicity Jones is, as ever, aggressively okay as his wife.
By the end, you do feel like you know these people. The movie is so long that it kind of wrestles you into submission to, if not its story, at least its themes and its characters. I’m unclear what I’m supposed to be feeling at the end, but I was definitely feeling something as a late reveal puts the rest of the story into sharper focus.
It’s not a movie I’m clamoring to see again or have a huge attachment to going forward, but it’s got huge ambitious and fantastic execution, which is why I think it’ll be taking the top prize at the Academy Awards in March.
Something New
Babygirl (Theaters): It truly baffles me that this movie was made by the same director as Bodies Bodies Bodies, a movie I praised for being so in touch with the culture and Gen-Z (in retrospect that credit maybe should’ve gone to its writers), because of just how insanely out of touch this movie feels to me.
I guess I can understand the buzz — 57-year-old Nicole Kidman in sex scenes with 27-year-old Harris Dickinson have quite a bit of sticker appeal, for several reasons — but having now seen the movie I just can’t imagine anyone finishing that script and going, “yep, we did it” or reading it and thinking “we definitely have to make that.”
Now, I am far from the morality police in this newsletter (if you’re looking for that, check out Megyn Kelly’s outrage over Conclave), but there isn’t hardly a shred of redeemable material in this movie. Kidman’s CEO begins a torrid and kinky affair with Dickinson’s intern at her company, turning her back on a comfortable home life that mostly consists of…less torrid, less kinky sex between her and her husband, played by Antonio Banderas.
Surely the message here has to be something more than “woman shouldn’t have to have it all together” or “boss lady who tells people what to do at work likes being told what to do in the bedroom” because those seems too obvious. And yet for the life of me I can’t put anything else together that would give meaning to the downward slide of bad decisions that comprises this plot, all of which don’t amount to any significant consequences in the end.
Kidman’s performance is “brave,” in a performative sort of way. She’s a powerful screen presence and able to convey some subtly and humor that few else could’ve in the role. My audience was laughing, more appropriate to say chortling, like it was an X-rated Magic Mike.
But I can’t wait to get all traces of this movie out of my memory as quickly as possible.
Something Old
Owning Mahowny (2003, Amazon Prime): One of my informal New Year’s resolutions is no gambling in 2025. And this movie is quite possibly the most effective anti-gambling advertisement I’ve ever encountered. I would almost recommend it based solely on the fact that anyone you show this to will not want to gamble anymore — if you know anyone like that…
Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars as a real life assistant bank manager in Toronto with a severe gambling addiction. When he gets in deep debt, he begins writing fake business loans in other people’s names to cover it, a system he then abuses to pull out massive amounts of money and play like a high roller. The double life torpedoes his relationship (with Good Will Hunting’s Minnie Driver!) and winds him up on the wrong side of the largest single-man fraud case in U.S. history — over $10 million.
It’s more of a melancholic character study than a rollicking thriller, but Hoffman is one of the greatest actors of his or any generation and makes the movie watchable. This movie reminds me a lot of the Soderbergh-Matt Damon movie The Informant!, not as good but if you liked that one you’d probably enjoy.
Something To Stream
War Game (Amazon Prime): What if during the Jan. 6 insurrection, members of the military had backed Trump against the government? That’s the premise of this documentary, a “war game” conducted with real politicians, national security and intelligence professionals, gaming out the scenario for six hours as if it was real. Yes, there are cameras, but nothing about the experience is scripted, and at first I had an uneasy feeling watching it because it was just so…real.
As the documentary points out, extremism in the military is a growing problem, and the fine line between peace and a literal civil war breaking out is a handful of people in a crisis room somewhere making decisions based on very limited and imperfect information.
The unfolding developments were as tense and action-packed as any movie could be (more than the fictional Civil War, to be honest), and the speech given by the “president” — played by the governor of Montana — at the end of the movie is better than ANY presidential speech given in any movie I’ve ever seen (eat your heart out, Bill Pullman in Independence Day).
This doc is absolutely worth checking out, if you’re up for it.
Trailer Watch: A Working Man
You’re not going to believe this, but Jason Statham is playing an ex-military, blue collar worker who unwittingly goes on a violent rampage to avenge his innocent colleagues, but along the way discovers a powerful criminal conspiracy! Who could’ve guessed?! You might be wondering what’s different about this movie from his last … dozen? Two dozen? And the answer is…nothing.
But I’ll be darned if it’s not a formula that works every. single. time.