The things Guy Pearce makes me watch. Before this I would've said I'd be up for anything, even a Matt Damon or Brad Pitt impression. Now I'm not so sure.
Co-written and directed by Brady Corbet. He acted in Melancholia but there's no sign he learnt much from Lars von Trier. Mona Fastvold shared responsibility for the script. I was happy to recognise Isaach De Bankolé from The Limits of Control. Adrien Brody (Oscared) lead as (fictional) Jewish Hungarian Bauhaus-educated architect László Tóth transplanted by way of a concentration camp to Pennsylvania. (I wonder if the Hungarian-born Australian geologist of the same name is enjoying his new fame.) There he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce) while waiting for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) to join him. When great talent met vast piles of American money in the post-WWII years, brutalism was apparently inevitable.
I didn't understand what the point of it all was, and at 3hr 30min it had plenty of opportunity to make a case. (Some of it reached for There Will Be Blood but neither of leads got anywhere close to what Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano achieved.) Brody is very good and quite amusing at times. There's far too much talking and not enough showing. Heroin is used without glamour or judgement. I did not like any of the characters. I did not enjoy Lol Crawley's cinematography (Oscared).
Why this guy? Why architecture? They could've gone for any number of other Hungarian geniuses; von Neumann for instance.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She just summarised the plot. Dana Stevens sounded bereft, at length. The ending somewhat fits with the interstitial advertisements for the great state of Pennsylvania but does not add to what came before. Glenn Kenny at Venice: "the most exciting consideration of non-atomic American mutation and madness since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master". Stephanie Zacharek. And so on.
