Best movies of 2024 in the US: No 2 – Nickel Boys

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Despite the necessity of filling in the gaps of Black American history, viewers could be forgiven for feeling a little fatigued, after a decade of highly worthy but often gruelling stories of slavery, civil rights abuses and institutional racism, from 12 Years a Slave to Till to The Hate U Give to Get Out, and many more besides.Nickel Boys is something very different: rather than more “trauma porn”, it gives us direct emotion, poetic imagery and radical invention. It owes more to Terrence Malick and Gaspar Noé than Ava DuVernay.On one level, you could categorise it as another missing piece of the historical puzzle. The setting is a segregated reform school in remote 1960s Florida, based on the real-life Arthur G Dozier school, where past abuses and unmarked graves were uncovered in the early 2000s.We follow doe-eyed Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a promising young student who’s cruelly condemned by association before he even gets to college, and thrown into what amounts to a juvenile prison, with its own rules and hierarchies and horrors. He falls in with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a more seasoned, more jaded inmate, and their fates intersect in ways we never quite understand until the final frames. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel, the story is a bracing blend of historical fiction, character drama and even prison-break thriller.Not only does Nickel Boys have a powerful story to tell, it has an audacious way of telling it: the entire movie is shot in first person. We see everything through the eyes of either Elwood or Turner – the landscape, the minutiae of life, the characters’ own bodies or the faces of other characters (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as Elwood’s grandmother, makes a particularly powerful impression). The experience is vividly immersive and intimate. We’re not watching these people; we are them. Things aren’t happening to them; they’re happening to us.As a technical feat, it’s almost unfathomable; as a viewing experience, it’s unforgettable; and as a way out of serving up yet more trauma porn, it’s ingenious.Director RaMell Ross is a multidisciplinary artist more than a film-maker, and he seems to have approached this, his first feature film, with no baggage, let alone film-school training. Ross achieved a similar mix of lyricism and earthiness in his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, following ordinary Black life in rural Alabama. Nickel Boys goes even further: the point-of-view imagery becomes a collage of present-tense experience, gorgeous or ugly landscapes, fleeting impressions, details, memories, snatches of television and other media – something closer, perhaps, to waking life than conventional cinema.As well as being floored by the feeling and the ambition of Nickel Boys, you’re left wondering why more movies aren’t made this way.

Magnificent and massive, The Brutalist is the best film of 2024

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Open this photo in gallery:Adrien Brody, left, and Felicity Jones in a scene from The Brutalist.The Associated PressThe BrutalistDirected by Brady CorbetWritten by Brady Corbet and Mona FastvoldStarring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy PearceClassification N/A; 215 minutesOpens in select theatres, including the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, Dec. 25; expands to other cities Jan. 10Critic’s Pick“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its own construction?”This question is posed roughly a third of the way through The Brutalist, and is not so much the skeleton key to unlocking director Brady Corbet’s gigantic new touchstone of American cinema as it is a crowbar.How The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet made the most monumental film of the yearAs uttered by a Hungarian-Jewish architect named Laszlo Toth, the cube query intentionally confounds the person at the other end of the conversation, a brash American industrialist who has neither the intellectual nor spiritual capacity to separate form from function, ideas from meaning. Laszlo’s line isn’t quite a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but it does sharply and poetically define the grand stakes of Corbet’s achievement, the very best best film of the year: The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.There is nothing coy about Corbet’s confidence here, which makes the ambition all the more brazenly enveloping. Divided across two parts plus an epilogue, the 215-minute film announces its gargantuaness immediately, when Laszlo (Adrien Brody) emerges from the pitch-black belly of a ship’s hull in New York Harbor to glimpse the Statue of Liberty, the monument captured in a canted angle to mirror both the sea-sick reality of cross-Atlantic immigration and the inverted nightmare of the American Dream. With composer Daniel Blumberg’s thunderous score swelling and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camera tilting and swirling, Corbet gets to play the unabashedly proud maximalist, sweeping his audience out of the dark and into the bright, blistering, blinding light. Welcome to the West.It is 1947 when Laszlo arrives on America’s shores, our hero having survived the concentration camp of Buchenwald but losing contact with his wife, Erzebet, and his young niece, Zsofia, in the horrifying process. A Bauhaus-trained architect back in Budapest before the Nazis deemed his concrete-strong creations “not Germanic in character,” Laszlo is now a rattled man, lost but not broken. Not yet, any way.At first, he finds refuge in Philadelphia, where his well-assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has married a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Catholic girl and set up a furniture shop where thrifty newlyweds can point to pictures in Better Homes and Gardens magazine and request cut-rate imitations. But Laszlo is too ambitious – or too restless – to sit back and build coffee tables. And a few months into this new life, his artistic spirit gets to be finally unleashed after Attila’s crew is commissioned to build a home library for a wealthy captain of industry, who is given the illustriously WASP name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).Initially, Harrison is enraged by Laszlo’s ultra-modern design for the space, with bookshelves masked by diagonally unfolding wooden slats and a lounge chair imagined with a spare Mies van der Rohe-esque beauty. But after researching Laszlo’s work back in Hungary – and receiving a splashy photo spread in Look magazine that lavishes praise on the unique room – the millionaire becomes enamoured with the impoverished architect, introducing him into his circle of power brokers and gatekeepers.Soon, Harrison asks – well, assigns, really – Laszlo to design a massive community centre near his estate in the borough of Doylestown, just north of Philadelphia. Combining a theatre, gymnasium, library and chapel, the hillside structure – which Harrison intends to name after his late mother – will be a monument to stand the test of time. But as Laszlo begins the years-long process of erecting the structure – a journey that is both aided and complicated by the eventual arrivals of Erzebet (Felicity Jones) and Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) – tensions surface between the conflicting worlds of the artist and the benefactor. Between the persecuted “other” and the blue-blood elite. Between those who have a soul, and those who have long ago sold theirs.Co-written with Corbet’s partner in art and life, Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist’s screenplay is a wonderfully layered, knotty creation. On the surface, its narrative is a straight line, pointing away from Laszlo’s traumatic past and toward his promising but clouded postwar future. Yet trap doors abound, compelling audiences to constantly reassess the journey the filmmakers are taking us on. And once Erzebet enters the picture, the perspective doesn’t quite so much flip as it does deepen, beautifully and painfully.A former actor who has worked with some of the Europe’s finest filmmakers – for a stretch of time in the 2010s, Corbet was cast as the go-to American dude in the films of Mia Hansen-Løve, Olivier Assayas, and Bertrand Bonello – Corbet wrests remarkably deep performances from his cast, which is all the more impressive given that he was shooting at a rapid clip, sometimes upwards of 10 pages of script a day.Brody, perfectly wounded as Laszlo, has not been given such a meaty opportunity since Roman Polanski’s similarly themed The Pianist. Jones, who has already and regrettably been pounced upon by some critics as an inferior substitute to Corbet’s original choice of Marion Cotillard, matches her on-screen husband nearly beat for beat, especially during a pivotal bedroom scene that generously evokes memories of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. (P.T.A. fans will need to give themselves a hand when they spot it.) And Pearce has never been better as Harrison, barking out dialogue like a rabid Charles Foster Kane. “I find our conversations … intellectually stimulating,” Harrison tells Laszlo, the compliment arriving with a threatening purr.Of course, Harrison’s idea of stimulation would be crushed by what Corbet and Fastvold create here, with every element of their film serving a distinct, sometimes conflicting purpose. Up to and including the 15-minute intermission that separates the film’s two halves. The audience-breather tactic is not only exceedingly rare to see these days – the last time I can recall a movie deploying one was the 2015 “roadshow” release of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight – but also laced in this case with deep, sorrowful meaning. As a countdown clock ticks by on-screen, audiences are shown a static image of Laszlo and Erzebet’s wedding, the couple photographed in front of a Budapest synagogue. Is the timer reminding us how many seconds we have left before the movie resumes, or establishing an expiration date for the pre-war life of European Jews?The in-your-face ambiguity extends to the film’s epilogue, a decades-later flash-forward that at once answers the grand mysteries of Laszlo’s earlier cube proposition while upending assumptions of how anyone’s life – including our own – will be remembered, honoured, or re-contextualized.And yet, in a film filled with moments designed to stir, there may be no more haunting and ultimately provocative sequence than the one that lands late in the second half, in which Laszlo and Harrison descend into a maze of marble in the Italian town of Carrara, with only one of the men confident of the way out.The Brutalist is its own labyrinth. Lose yourself in its construction as soon as you can.

How The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet made the most monumental film of the year

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Open this photo in gallery:Director Brady Corbet, here in Toronto on Dec. 17, says all of his films are virtual histories: ‘It’s to free myself of the responsibility to quote-unquote the truth.’Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and MailThe math behind Brady Corbet’s new film The Brutalist should not add up. You simply cannot shoot a 168-page screenplay over just 34 days with a budget under $10-million, and expect anything less than a mess. And yet the 36-year-old Corbet has made the impossible numbers work in his favour, delivering the very best film of the year, the kind of sweeping cinema that makes you believe in the power of the big screen.Magnificent and massive, The Brutalist is a new touchstone of American cinema Tracing the postwar struggles of a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect named Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) as he builds a massive community centre for a Philadelphia industrialist (Guy Pearce), Corbet’s film – only the director’s third – is a 215-minute epic that takes giant, gnashing chomps on such meaty themes as the tensions between art and commerce, the illusion of legacy, and the nightmare behind the American Dream.Ahead of the film’s Dec. 25 release, Corbet sat down in Toronto with The Globe and Mail to discuss the making of a new cinematic classic.Around the time of your second film Vox Lux, you told me that you were exhausted by everyone reaching for hyperbole when describing movies. Everything was a “masterpiece.” Now, “monumental” is plastered across your film’s trailer, quoting five critics who use that same adjective. How do you feel about this instantaneous lionization?I know to not try to anticipate a response from an audience. It clouds your judgment. No one is above wanting to be well-liked, seen, appreciated. But that said, I always want to do what’s right for the project, and sometimes that is deliberately alienating viewers at times. I try not to concern myself too much with what anyone might think. I’m just thrilled that the movie exists.You mentioned at last night’s screening that this movie was made for every sadist that you’ve encountered in the industry – patrons who want to finance art, but control the artist. How many safe harbours are there for filmmakers now, aside from the fine folks behind this movie?There’s not many. It’s been a real joy for me to be working with A24 the last few months because the corporate culture is good over there, it’s been a soft landing for me. But the problem is in Hollywood, everyone is afraid to lose their job. A lot of people operate from a place of powerlessness as opposed to power, and what’s funny is that it seems so obvious that doing the same old, same old is not working. It seems the only films that are breaking through are pretty radical movies: Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest. Any time we’re able to smuggle a baby across the border, which is how it feels to make these things, you’re facing a lot of adversity. And there’s the other issue, which is that you are getting notes from people who only read other screenplays. They don’t spend their time reading books or anything else – and most screenplays are trash. I mean, 99 per cent of them. It’s bad for the culture, it becomes this ouroboros of trash.This is one of the more complex movies in recent memory to explore Judaism – the Jewish immigrant experience, contextualized against the founding of Israel. But you and your cowriter and partner, Mona Fastvold, are not Jewish. Why approach the material?The characters were written to their circumstance. It was predominantly Central and Eastern European Jews that studied at the Bauhaus, so these characters were always Jewish because it was historically accurate. And I had read an extraordinary book called Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church, which is a memoir written from the perspective of a monk at Saint John’s Abbey who observed a lot of the adversity that Breuer faced in creating that cathedral, when he was in fact an Eastern European Jew. I feel a responsibility to getting all of my characters right.I was also very interested in stories of assimilation – the fact that Laszlo’s wife, Erzsebet, who has converted to Judaism, is actually more devoted than he is. Because with most artists, there just isn’t enough space for them and a deity. I said to Adrien, ‘I think your character only goes to synagogue at the High Holidays.’ Faith and faithlessness, these are things I’ve struggled with throughout my entire life. My mother’s family is also all from Apatin, which was Hungary but is now part of Serbia, so I do have familial connections. But it was less because of that and more because I’ve made movies in Hungary for over a decade and feel very connected to the people there. And I mean, Judy Becker, my production designer, is the quintessential New York Jew. And Daniel Blumberg, my composer. If there was anything I had a question about in regards to something like the vidui [the Yom Kippur prayer] I said, please everyone chime in if there’s something that feels clumsy.The film comes with an intermission, during which there is a photo on-screen of Laszlo and Erzsebet’s wedding in front of a Budapest synagogue, with a clock superimposed on it, ticking down the 15-minute break. I took that to double as a countdown to the end of pre-war life in Europe for Jews. What was the process like in choosing that image?The original screenplay, like a W.G. Sebald novel, had pictures throughout the entire draft, and the intermission photo is something that we recreated. It was an image of a Jewish wedding outside of a synagogue in Hungary circa 1934, and there was something so beautiful about the way that this husband and wife were holding each other. This ecstasy. We then recreated with the actors in a totally analogue process, shooting it on a camera from the 1930s.When I’ve told people about the film, they assume Laszlo was a real architect that they hadn’t heard about before. Why go the fictional route, and not base the film on a real-life figure such as Breuer?All of my films are virtual histories, and it’s to free myself of the responsibility to quote-unquote the truth. It removes everyone’s internal detective. Most of my favourite novels are virtual histories. Part One of the film is named after V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, about moving from Trinidad to the U.K. It becomes something representational as opposed to presentational. The realm of virtual history allows me to express that which cannot be easily expressed verbally. It’s about a feeling for history. It’s one thing to say and hear, “History repeats itself” and another thing to feel that history repeats itself.[Editor’s Note: This portion of the interview details the film’s ending] Laszlo not having room for a deity in his life brings us to the film’s flash-forward, which I found similar to the finale in your first film, The Childhood of a Leader. Now, the presence of a deity is in fact being put into Laszlo’s work. His niece is defining his legacy, perhaps putting words into his mouth, when he himself cannot speak …For me, the end of the movie is about a lot of things, but one thing is that here he is at the end of his life, being celebrated and he is physically present, but not really mentally. His wife is dead. The tone of that sequence is incredibly melancholic, in a way. But on the subject of legacy, I don’t think that when I’m in my late seventies I will look back on my body of work as my legacy. My legacy is my child, and she comes before everything. At the end of the film, you’re left with his niece because he and Erzsebet have inadvertently paved a route for her, and so there is something sentimental there. Or as sentimental as I get. But her analysis of the project may or may not be what it was that Laszlo was trying to communicate. We project and imbue meaning into various works of public art. The intention was that it’s absolutely true for her.The Brutalist opens in select theatres Dec. 25, expanding to cities across the country in January.This interview has been condensed and edited.