BEFORE: It's THAT anniversary again, and they're reading the names of the people who died in the WTC attacks in 2001 on TV, and it will take all morning. I don't have any movies that are specifically on the topic of that moment in history, but I think somehow my subconscious programmed films this week that collectively seem to be on point. This week I already watched "6 Days", which was about a terrorist attack, "Backtrack", about a terrible accident and a man who is haunted by the memory of it, and "Manhattan Night", which was about New York and reporters and a man whose body was found in the rubble of a demolished building. Today's film is somehow about architecture, and I think when you put all these topics together, you kind of come up with 9/11, right? Anyway that's how I look at it, I wasn't directly thinking about 9/11 when I made this chain, but there's a part of my brain that was, or else the chain itself is kind of sending me a message here.
Adrien Brody carries over again from "Manhattan Night".
THE PLOT: A visionary architect flees post-war Europe in 1947 for a brighter future in the United States and finds his life forever changed by a wealthy client.
AFTER: First off, this film is way too long, let's get that out of the way. It's THREE hours and then another 35 minutes in length, which is even longer than "Killers of the Flower Moon", which was three hours and 26 minutes, I did the math. I'll list the top ten longest movies watched this year in my wrap-up post (also the 10 shortest), this one just has to win, there's nothing longer. That's longer than either "Dune" film, that's like longer than two average-length movies combined. And they wanted people to watch this in theaters, without two bathroom breaks? Impossible. I'm glad I watched it at home where I could hit the PAUSE button and go get a snack, get a drink, feed the cats, just something so I get up every hour and thus don't develop a blood clot...
There is an "intermission", so the film's really in two chapters, plus an epilogue. Well, I guess that's handy, so if you have to split this film up and watch it over two nights (recommended) you will at least know where to stop the first night. For me to do that, I would then use up my "Free" day for September, I've only got one, and if I split this film up, then I'd have none. There are two big premieres coming up at the theater so I feel I should save the free day. But I had work the next day after this, thankfully not in the morning, I just had an orientation session for the new gig, and I took the 4 pm slot instead of the 11 am slot. (See, smart! Thinking ahead as always.). So I stayed up until 4 am watching this, then a quick run through Late Night with Seth Meyers, then a couple rounds of sudoku to tire out my brain, then sleep. But still, I had to eat lunch and be out of the house shortly after 2 pm, just because I could NOT be late for orientation, and these days if you're on time, you might as well be late. So I was 30 min. early, that's the chance you take.
Anyway, the story is too long. Even though it's spread out over YEARS of post-World War II American life, like part 1 covers 1947 to 1952, and then part 2 deals with 1953 to 1958 or so. But there just aren't too many twists and turns in the story, so it ends up somehow feeling even longer than it really is, the only way this could feel longer would be if it played out in real time, like if it took 11 years to also watch the damn thing. I have to think this film maybe got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture because some Academy viewers might have felt that voting for it was a whole lot easier than watching it, as if to say, "I don't know, thumbs up and can I please move on with my life now?"
The lead-character is Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor (Ah, there it is...so the Academy voters heard "Holocaust", up-voted it and didn't even watch it...) who is also a trained architect immigrates to the U.S., leaving behind his wife and their orphaned niece. After clearing Ellis Island, he travels to Philadelphia to live with his cousin, Attila and work in his furniture shop. He learns that Attila has become very Americanized, changed his name and converted to Catholicism, but it's all part of doing business and blending in. They get hired by the son of a wealthy man in Doylestown to re-build his father's mansion library while he's out of town. They do so - at double the price - and also work on replacing the damaged stained-glass dome over the library. However, the wealthy man comes home a day early and is shocked to find strange men working in his house, and destroying his property, so he throws them out and the son then refuses to pay them.
Toth's troubles continue when his cousin's wife accuses him of making a pass at her, so Attila is forced to throw him out, and Laszlo becomes a common laborer, living in charity housing with an African-American single father he met in the bread lines. But one day Harrison Van Buren, the wealthy man from before, tracks him down because he ended up getting a lot of compliments about that library that Laszlo designed, and a magazine even did an article on how it was a great example of modern design. So Van Buren now wants to pay Laszlo for his work, and also he invites him to a party. At the party the two men connect and get to know each other, and Van Buren announces he wants to commission Laszlo to design a building as a tribute to his late mother, it would be a community center, with a library, a theater, a gymnasium and a chapel. In addition to paying Laszlo as the architect, Van Buren agrees to getting his lawyer to work on getting Laszlo's wife and niece out of Hungary to join him in the United States.
That's the end of Part 1, so during the intermission you can reflect that so far there's been about ten minutes of actual story, and it took over an hour and a half to tell it. Sorry, but you're just never going to get those 104 minutes back again, they're gone forever so you might as well just stick around for Part 2, or, you know, pack it in for the night and start fresh tomorrow, which is a WAY better idea, it's just a luxury that I didn't have. OK, get some sleep and clear your head and prepare for the second half, but unfortunately things are only going to get worse, in that downward spiral-slash-circling the drain sort of way.
I'm not going to get into ALL of the details here, but at some point in Part 1, Laszlo became a heroin addict. No judgments here, but the language of film kind of dictates that now the film has to move at least a bit into "Requiem for a Dream" territory. Like, maybe somewhere in the world there are people who manage their addictions, they manage to find some kind of balance between their work life, their relationships and their drug habit - yeah, not in movies. Once a character starts riding the heroin junkie monkey or the LSD unicorn, their days are kind of numbered. You can call it a trope or a stereotype, but I can't name too many movies where people end up getting themselves clean and then going back to being productive members of society. Just saying - and I've seen a LOT of movies. "Trainspotting", "Blow", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "The Wolf of Wall Street", "Goodfellas" and "Scarface", there are probably 10 movies like that for every "Clean and Sober".
Laszlo does get reunited with his wife and niece, however his wife Erzsebet is in a wheelchair due to osteoporosis caused by malnutrition, and his niece Zsofia can't talk, they never really say why. Perhaps the screenwriter just couldn't think of anything for her to say? So yeah, the family gets reunited but really it's a mixed bag of good things and bad things. Erzsebet is a LOT, she's got strong opinions on things and probably talks twice as much to make up for her mute niece.
The community center project is a "go", however there are many problems - clashes with contractors who want to change Laszlo's design to save money, then Laszlo agrees to take a pay cut so there will be enough money to build the building the way he wants to (you can see the downward spiral here, right?) and then there's a derailment of a train that's carrying materials for the construction, so the project is bleeding money left and right. Legal costs from the derailment on top of everything else are the last straw, Van Buren abandons the project and lays everyone off. Look, I don't know construction accounting but I know film production accounting, it's pretty much the same - if you don't keep a close eye on all of your expenses, suddenly your little indie $200K film becomes a $500K film and then you're doomed to spend the next five years pimping art and just grinding every day to try to catch up, which you never will. True story. From what I can tell, the restaurant industry works the same way, if your monthly income isn't greater than your monthly costs (food, rent, utilities, payroll, publicity) then congratulations, you're officially in the process of going out of business.
By now it's 1958, and we still have an hour of movie to get through, hopefully there's an attempt at some point to maybe come close to thinking about wrapping things up. But just don't hold your breath waiting for it. Laszlo and Erzesbet have moved to New York City, where he works at an architecture firm and she writes for a newspaper. Zsofia is married, pregnant and somehow regained her ability to speak and be somewhat interesting, only not much. Zsofia and her husband want to move to the new state of Israel, they figure it should be safe there for at least nine years. But after this Harrison Van Buren contacts Laszlo again, he's decided to restart the community center project and he's found some more money to rehire his favorite architect so he can ruin his life a little more.
Van Buren and Laszlo travel to Italy to purchase the very best Carrara marble for the chapel's altar. Well, really, at this point, why the hell not? Millions of dollars (1950's dollars!) have been spent to build this damn building and it's not built yet, so what's a few million more? Well, I'm not giving away any more of this movie's plot, let's just say all hell breaks loose in Italy and leave it at that. Yeah, this is a re-hash of "Requiem for a Dream", it doesn't really turn out well for anybody. Not until the epilogue, anyway, and even then it feels like any good news that comes is a day late and a dollar short.
It's worth noting that this is NOT based on a true story, not exactly, anyway. Brutalism was a valid post-WWII form of architecture, and though it emerged in the U.K. and not the U.S., and was characterized by minimalist construction techniques, showcasing the building materials themselves and structural elements over decorative designs. A lot of exposed concrete or brick, monochromatic palettes, angular geometric shapes and you see it in a lot of low-cost housing, ones influenced by Socialist principles perhaps, and it also evokes Eastern Europe designs, point-blank in this film they compare it to concentration camp architecture. It's definitely not "form over function", in a way it's almost like "form IS function, and function IS form".
The film's director had an uncle who was an architect, and his co-writer had a grandfather who was a mid-century designer, so Brutalism as a style became the symbol of the immigrant experience, also an expression of post-war trauma. There was no real Laszlo Toth, it's possible that he's an amalgam of the filmmaker's uncle and other real-life architects such as Miles van der Rohe, Paul Rudolph, Erno Goldfinger and others. Marcel Breuer designed a church in Minnesota (not Pennsylvania) that included a library, dormitory, science department and research center, which is part of St. John's University. It was completed in 1961, can hold 1,700 people and has an altar of white granite (not marble).
Make of that what you will, and remember also the duality of life - for all that those architects accomplished, whatever they built or designed over the years, still, they were human and they all eventually died. You can use that to motivate yourself, or you can think about that and spend a week in bed, depressed, both responses may be equally valid. But either way, if you make it all the way through this film, give yourself a pat on the back. Congratulations, you did it!
Directed by Brady Corbet (director of "Vox Lux")
Also starring Felicity Jones (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Raffey Cassidy (last seen in "White Noise"), Stacy Martin (last seen in "The Night House"), Isaach de Bankolé (last seen in "Night on Earth"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "Disobedience"), Ariane Labed (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Michael Epp (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Emma Laird (last seen in "A Haunting in Venice"), Jonathan Hyde (last seen in "Breathe"), Peter Polycarpou (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Maria Sand, Salvatore Sansone, Zephan Hanson Amissah, Charlie Esoko, Benett Vilmanyi, Peter Deutsch,
RATING: 6 out of 10 letters from Budapest
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