The Brutalist (selected cinemas)
Brady Corbet’s third feature film is an all-consuming experience that contains multitudes; bursting at the seams with history, humanity, creativity, dreams, and nightmares.
László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who, on arrival in America, scrambling from the hold of the ship, first sees the Statue of Liberty upside down – a jolting portent of the dislocations to come. He is rescued from indigence in Philadelphia by the capricious interest of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) in his accomplishments as a minimalist architect and student of the Bauhaus.
So begins the relationship at the heart of The Brutalist: the complex and ultimately poisonous bond between artist and patron. Harrison wants László to build a monumental structure in honour of his late mother. “Something boundless,” he declares, “something new”.
As a gesture of friendship – and a display of power – he pulls strings to expedite the journey to America of the architect’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).
Confined to a wheelchair by agonising osteoporosis, Erzsébet is quicker than her husband to see that Harrison is a mess of psychological tinder, likely to burst into flames at any moment. He is also, as we discover in a scene of shocking brutality, capable of both despicable bigotry and sexual violence.
László has his own demons and hides his heroin addiction from his wife until a significant moment in the plot. He is formidable, driven and – perhaps – touched by genius. But he is very far from a saint.
Co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is the work of obsessive cinephiles and heaves with erudition: there is a clear debt to Bernardo Bertolucci, Andrei Tarkovsky and Paul Thomas Anderson, while one particular scene directly references Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). Its first part – “The Enigma of Arrival” – borrows the title of a 1987 V.S. Naipaul novel. As a monomaniacal architect, László naturally recalls Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943). The spirit of Saul Bellow is often apparent, too.
Corbet aspires to give us nothing less than the cinematic equivalent of the Great American Novel. Yet the director’s love of hommage is secondary to his own extraordinary aesthetic style – all achieved, remarkably, for only $10 million.
Filmed in old-fashioned VistaVision and released in 70mm, his movie is epic in form, theme and ambition: in particular, the sequence where László and Harrison visit the spectacular marble quarries of Carrara in Tuscany is breathtaking. In the first phase of construction, the mighty pillars of the edifice resemble a colossal stone circle on the crest of a hill, the site of some ancient pagan ceremony. But The Brutalist is also, at times, an exquisite chamber piece, especially in its portrayal of the relationship between László and Erzsébet.
Clocking in at 215 minutes, with an intermission, the movie meticulously constructs a world of its own, just as László (eventually) fulfils Harrison’s commission, encoding his own artistic ideas into the design. Brody, who has already scooped up a Golden Globe, has never been better, and Pearce is also superb, restored to the first rank of actors where he belongs. It will be a grave injustice if, on March 2, The Brutalist is not awarded the Oscar for best picture.
The Night Agent (Netflix)
The first season of Shawn Ryan’s superior action thriller series fast became the most-watched show on Netflix and still ranks seventh in its all-time league table. In the second, promoted from his original phone monitoring duties, FBI Special Agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is now a fully fledged operative in the top secret “Night Action” programme.
After a mission in Thailand goes wrong and his partner Alice (Brittany Snow) is killed, he returns covertly to the US, unsure if he can trust anyone – even his handler Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren). But his off-grid investigations into what happened in Bangkok lead him to a far-reaching conspiracy, involving Iranian diplomats, a criminal private espionage network, a European dictator and his family, and a classified CIA project codenamed “Foxglove”. To add to the drama in this ten-episode second season, Peter’s on-off love interest Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) – an expert coder – is back in his life.
The fun of The Night Agent is that it positively revels in the tropes of its genre. Rarely does an episode go by without Catherine warning Peter: “Do your job – or I swear to God I’ll send you straight back to the White House basement!” Likewise, the Milosevic-style tyrant Viktor Bala (Dikran Tulaine) can be relied upon to say things like: “The Western world thinks us savages, and yet they peddle the very instrument of that savagery”.
Though it has been compared to Homeland, its pace, melodrama and breathless action owe more to 24, with Peter Sutherland as a more restrained successor to Kiefer Sutherland’s by-any-means-necessary agent, Jack Bauer. Season 3 is already on its way.
Prime Target (Apple TV+)
Meanwhile, in Cambridge, mathematics prodigy Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall), seeks the truths encrypted in prime numbers and the patterns embedded in nature. “Computers aren’t fast enough,” he mutters irritably, scribbling in his notebook.
Invited to dinner with his supervisor Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey, always good) and his wife Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen, ditto), Ed is astonished by a photograph from a ninth-century underground chamber in Iraq – a project with which she is associated.
When he spots some sort of formula, Mallinder immediately senses that what his pupil has seen is significant, and dangerously so: “You need to drop this! You need to drop it now!” Why? What is at stake?
There are clues in the second episode. In the south of France, we meet NSA officer Taylah Sanders (Quintessa Swindell), spying remotely on mathematical scholars, looking for those whose research may upend the global digital order and whose very lives may be in jeopardy. “Right now, math nerds are probably the most dangerous people on the planet,” she explains to a new member of the team. Very promising.
A Second Act: What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living, by Matt Morgan (Simon & Schuster)
As Ernest Becker argues in his hugely influential book The Denial of Death (1973), people will do almost anything to avoid acknowledging and coming to terms with their own mortality. As an intensive care specialist – and author of the acclaimed Critical (2019) – Matt Morgan works daily in the marchlands between life and death, and, as such, has treated that unique group of patients who medically die but are resuscitated and have a second chance at life. He is, as he puts it, a “travel agent for the end of days”.
This is not, I am relieved to report, one of those books about being greeted by Jesus at the end of a long tunnel, having a quick look at Heaven – and then turning back to impart the Good News on chat shows. Morgan’s interest is physiological (he is fascinating on what happens to the body in these extreme circumstances) and practical. How do people respond to this astonishing experience? What are the lessons for the rest of us?
En route, we meet patients brought back to life after being struck by lightning (“enough to power Cardiff for a day”); buried under snow; apparently finished off by an overdose; almost killed by Covid; and a near-successful suicide attempt.
The response of these individuals to their second chance varies dramatically, of course, but a common theme is action. One establishes a basketball squad at his former rehab centre; another supports bereaved young people; the woman who tried to kill herself trains to be a mental health nurse.
The “living funeral” that Morgan is personally inspired to hold with a small group of friends – a “dress rehearsal” at which they read out for one another eulogies written by their respective loved ones, eat well and listen to music – may not be to everyone’s taste, but there is nothing sentimental about the exercise.
The point of this witty, intelligent and absorbing book is that life deserves to be celebrated in real time: “I say this not in the name of nihilism nor despair. I say this to scream at you for hope and freedom”. There is, as Morgan writes, “no such thing as an after-life crisis”
Ari Shaffir: America’s Sweetheart (Netflix)
A regular on The Joe Rogan Experience and long-time member of the loose-knit comedy rat pack that has its spiritual home in Austin, Texas, Ari Shaffir trades wittily on his image as “the least successful of all of his friends”.
Recorded in Washington DC, his sixth stand-up special is also his best to date, and ranges from the temptation to paint heroin addicts silver while they are sleeping, bad people who died of Covid, why it is funny when gymnasts mess up their dismount, to his friend Rogan blaming everything, including toe-stubs, on the Covid vaccine, ignoring the news, and the joys of shop-lifting.
Yes, Kanye West is bad, he says, but “you know what you get if you get a well-behaved artist? Jimmy Fallon”. And why do wars last so long? “Like, wrap it up, Ukraine, we’ve moved on”.
Needless to say, Shaffir has no interest in political correctness and teases his audience when he tackles yet another supposedly taboo subject (“Guys, I’m joking. I hope you understand that”). And he is absolutely right in reminding the po-faced that comedy and social piety are entirely unrelated: “respect has nothing to do with what we’re doing here. It’s not a metric in any way”.
