An architect's fight for integrity

   Few filmmakers -- Paul Thomas Anderson may be one -- make movies that seem to live and breathe in worlds of their own. The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet's three-hour and 15-minute foray into the life of a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect qualifies as such a movie. Like the architectural style for which it's named, The Brutalist can be raw and abrasive, a story blanched of sentiment.

   A movie as ambitious as The Brutalist puts a tremendous burden on the actor (Adrien Brody) who'll play architect László Toth, a refugee who arrives in the US in 1947 after being separated from his wife (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece (Raffey Cassidy).

    Stuck in an immigration limbo, Toth's wife and niece still languish in Europe, but Toth perseveres in the face of a displacement the movie makes clear with his arrival in New York City. A cockeyed shot of the Statue of Liberty signals that neither Toth nor we have reached a mythic land of liberty and justice. 

     But Toth’s not arriving in the America of historical realism, either. He lands in the world Corbet and his co-writer,  Mona Fastvoid, create, a world full of striving and duplicity, as well as opportunities for reinvention. 

     The movie, which shows with a 15-minute intermission, divides into two acts and an epilogue that allow Corbet steadily to open thematic doors. Among them:  capitalism’s inevitable perversion of art, the fierce individuality needed to protect artistic integrity, and the abiding agony of surviving events that never can be left behind. 

       Early on, Toth moves in with a cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who lives in Pennsylvania with his American wife (Emma Laird). Nivola's Attila seems to have shed his Old Country past, even converting to Catholicism. Toth designs furniture for the shop Attila owns, a dim connection to his previous life but still a creative endeavor.

     The story shifts gears when the cheerfully opportunistic Attila puts Laszlo in touch with Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the son of a wealthy tycoon (Guy Pearce). Harry wants to surprise his father by renovating the library where Dad houses his rare book collection.

   Laszlo makes the library into a design-oriented space that takes the rarity of the books into account. He designs shelves that turn to shield the books from the sun. 

    When he arrives home, Pearce's character -- an infuriated Harrison Lee Van Buren — tosses Laszlo and Attila out of his home. He hates the library, which, for him, has one only purpose: to  display his taste and purported erudition. 

    A reporter for Look magazine discovers the library and proclaims it as the masterwork of a genius whose career was disrupted by war and the Holocaust. Van Buren recants. He pays Laszlo for his work, and invites him to design a community-oriented art and spiritual center for the suburban town of Doylestown, Pa.

    The plot's density increases. Laszlo moves into quarters on Van Buren's estate. His wife and niece return to him. He continues a heroin addiction that began as a way to cope with an injury, and his relationship with Van Buren wobbles, leading to a jarring and metaphorically strained act of sexual violence during a trip the men make to Carrara to select marble for the chapel's altar. 

    I’m not sure that The Brutalist makes groundbreaking statements about art, America, or the incorporation of new populations into the American tapestry. Toth’s Judaism remains, but isn't deeply explored. Corbet introduces a Black character (Isaach De Bankole) who becomes part of Toth's orbit, but whose story proves minimal.

      Limitations aside, Corbet's characters are among the year's most vividly realized and distinctive, offering Brody, Pearce, and Jones opportunities for  major performances. Together, director and cast create moments that prove provocative, fresh, and artfully imagined. 

       You may remember the movie as if it were dream, not entirely graspable but notable for its lingering power.

   

She's growing tired of life in the cult

Say this: Polish director Malgorzata Suzumowska knows how to create a mood. In The Other Lamb, Suzumowska tells the story of a small cult in which a group of women follow the lead of a figure known as Shepherd (Michiel Huisman). It doesn't take long to realize that Huisman's character -- despite a physical resemblance to a stereotypical western Jesus -- is anything but a "good" shepherd. He tyrannizes the women, emphasizes their "impurity" and violates them sexually. The cult consists of two groups of women: Wives and daughters. When daughters begin to menstruate, Shepherd initiates them into the world of childbearing -- with him as the incestuous father. In this world, only females are allowed to survive. A movie such as The Other Lamb needs at least one character to undergo a change of consciousness. In this case, the job falls to Selah (Raffey Cassidy), a teenager who gradually awakens to the reality of her oppressive situation with help from a wife (Denise Gough) who has been shunned and tormented. Ousted from their first home by the police, the group wanders in search of a new dwelling. You know where all of this is headed. Suzumowska scores high on atmospherics and imagery but the story takes us nowhere we haven't been before. The film, by the way, marks the director's English-language debut. It might have seemed deeper and more mysterious had it been made in Polish with subtitles and not set in North America.

Pop, violence and an attempt to say something

Powerful moments in Vox Lux don't quite add up.

Director Brady Corbet's Vox Lux might be a case of a movie taking a bite out of a big subject but failing entirely to digest it. Filled with pretentious title cards (Act I: Genesis 2000-2001, for example), the movie begins with a school shooting and propels itself toward a portrait of a pop star who's having a bad moment, perhaps after a long series of bad moments involving sex, drugs, and alcohol and trauma dating back to her high-school years.

Corbet opens the film with a riveting display of violence that takes place in the music room of a Staten Island high school. After suffering grave wounds, high-schooler Celeste Montgomery (Raffey Cassidy) writes a mournful song with her older sister (Stacy Martin). Because she's seen as a bona fide national victim, Celeste's song becomes a sensation.

Celeste's career rises from her horrific experience -- with help from a manager, played by Jude Law with an attitude of hard-boiled pragmatism.

Cassidy does a fine job of showing how Celeste -- with help from her sister -- begins to taste the high life that accompanies stardom. Maybe the movie never should have left those teen years in which Celeste still hasn't found her footing.

Natalie Portman takes over the movie's second half as the grown Celeste, who we meet on the day she's supposed to play a concert in her hometown. Natalie is having an awful day for a variety of reasons: She's arguing with her sister, trying to come to terms with her teenage daughter Albertine (also played by Cassidy) and meeting with a press corps that's bound to ask questions about the connection between one of Celeste's videos and another violent incident, a mass shooting on a beach in Europe.

Corbet plunges violence, celebrity, and cultural degradation into a jumbo-sized package as the movie searches for hyper-meanings. But the movie feels most convincing when it isn't reaching for thematic gold but making smaller observations, like how a journalist interacts with Celeste after being warned by a record company executive to stay away from certain subjects.

In a scene between Celeste and her daughter in a Manhattan diner, Corbet's camera generates the kind of uncomfortable immediacy that makes us a third party to their conversation.

But Portman's version of Celeste -- complete with leather jacket, baggy jeans, a New York accent and tons of attitude -- seems forced. To me, her performance screamed of striving more than it suggested a believable character.

Corbet's style, which comes on like fragments from a vivid dream, can't compensate for what I saw as the movie's lack of clarifying viewpoint about the amorphous web that's woven from elements of fame, violence and pop culture.

With Celeste vying for the title of the year's most unpleasant character, Vox Lux sweats its way toward something I think we're meant to take as seriously as the intermittent narration offered by an off-screen Willem Dafoe.

All I can say is that I tried, but I also wondered if effort (a palpable sense of reaching for something) didn’t outweigh the movie’s overall achievement.

An intriguing start, but where's the payoff?

Another strange movie from the director of The Lobster.

A skilled surgeon and his anesthesiologist walk down a hospital hallway after performing open-heart surgery. Rather than talk about the operation they’ve just performed, they exchange banalities about their high-priced wristwatches. Later the surgeon, meets with a young man and gives him a gift, an expensive watch. The conversations in these two scenes are conducted without benefit of inflection or emphasis. For all the color the actors bring to their dialogue, they might as well be reciting grocery lists.

In these scenarios, relationships and motivations become blank slates, and we -- the audience -- labor to comprehend the meaning of everything we see.

Are these doctors so insensitive that they can talk about nothing more than the quality of their watches? And what is the relationship of the physician to the young man we've just seen? Could the young man be a son from some now-dissolved marriage? Is this meeting about something stranger than an awkward reunion?

All of this occurs in the opening moments of director Yorgos Lanthimos's The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a revenge saga played out in an atmosphere of provocative obfuscation. Lanthimos, who directed the much-admired but often cryptic The Lobster (2016), has proven himself a master at holding an audience in what might be called "active suspension," a state of heightened attentiveness in which much is suggested but little is clarified.

I'm a partisan of this approach to filmmaking, the kind in which images, music, and performance continually force us to look for meaning. But such filmmaking also can prove risky. Often, it can't be maintained for a two-hour running time. Eventually, the filmmaker must get down to business and create some sort of plot.

It's at this pivotal point that Lanthimos's effort begins to crumble, and we face the slow dawning of an unfortunate realization; the keenness of observation Lanthimos has demanded of us may not yield the hoped-for payoff.

Any actor who works with Lanthimos must adapt to the director's style, something in the way that actors who appear in a David Mamet production must submit to the loaded cadences in which Mamet's characters speak.

In that regard, the actors in The Killing of a Sacred Deer do admirable work. Colin Farrell plays Steven Murphy, heart surgeon and wristwatch enthusiast. Nicole Kidman portrays his wife, Anna, an eye doctor. The Murphy's have two children: Kim (Raffey Cassidy), a teenager, and Bob (Sunny Suljic), a long-haired boy with a near-angelic look.

The mysterious young man mentioned earlier (Barry Keoghan) mixes politeness and threat, a cross between Eddie Haskell, the obnoxiously polite kid on Leave it to Beaver, and serial killer Ted Bundy.

Alicia Silverstone shows up briefly as Martin's mother, a woman who hopes Steven will assuage her loneliness by becoming her lover. Martin eggs her on in this delusion.

Now, if you don't want to know anything more, I suggest you stop here. At the risk of introducing spoilers, I must tell you that Martin poses an increasingly grave danger to the Murphy family. It seems that Martin's father died after Steven operated on the ailing man. Martin blames Steven and aims to settle the score. He informs Steven that if the good doctor doesn't kill either his wife or one of his children, each will become ill and die. How Martin intends to fulfill this malignant promise remains a mystery.

Dipping into Greek mythology and who knows what else, Lanthimos deftly keeps us inside his bubble of suspense, sometimes nudging us toward the comic absurdity of Steven's situation. The security of an affluent family suddenly is threatened, which means -- of course -- that it had no real security in the first place.

Farrell's bushy beard seems to throw his face into a perpetual scowl. Kidman manages to be a credible denizen of Lanthimos's strangely concocted world. Before Steven and Anna make love, Anna sprawls across the bed in her underwear, lies perfectly still and invites Steven to proceed by uttering the least romantic words ever heard in a sex scene; i.e., "general anesthesia." Sex becomes an operation, and Anna seems to be saying, "Have at it. I won't feel a thing."

The movie's best performance belongs to Keoghan who has the capacity simultaneously to alarm and reassure; Martin's twisted sincerity makes it seem as if perfect logic supports the young man's insane plan.

If you want to enlarge your interpretation of the movie, you can view the story as a stage in which karmic forces clash: Steven must be punished for being a successful doctor who may once have been negligent. Or maybe he's being punished for living an affluent life in the movie's unnamed city or for cutting himself off from his emotions or ... You can fill in your own blanks.

Whatever Lanthimos wants to say falls prey to the fact that the movie becomes less intriguing as it goes on, so much so that the denouement of Lanthimos's drama feels abstract and remote rather than shockingly tragic.

Augmented by the cool tones of cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis's lighting, Killing of a Sacred Deer evokes depths it's unable to plumb. In the end, the movie may amount to little more than a complex expression of a familiar adage: Payback's a bitch.

Fair enough, but this could be a case in which a movie's cruelty doesn't hurt enough because its creators can't entirely solve the problem of making the conceptional battle between an arrogant doctor and the evil he arouses into something that comes screaming to life. Lanthimos may have been defeated by his own considerable artistic impulses: Putting a movie under “general anesthesia” risks not being able to rouse it again.

Disney sci-fi with George Clooney

Tomorrowland tries to save humanity from itself.

Among the many things I had hoped never to see in life was George Clooney flying through the air with a jet pack strapped to his movie-star back. In Gravity, Clooney floated over the earth as an astronaut. But in Tomorrowland, his late-picture airborne antics seem almost cartoonish.

And as much as I support efforts to save the planet, I had no desire to hear an Imax-scaled lecture about it, which is pretty much what happens at the end of Tomorrowland, an ambitious but not entirely satisfying addition to summer's box-office sweepstakes.

There's a good deal of anticipation about Tomorrowland, not only because of Clooney, but because Tomorrowland was directed by Brad Bird, a Pixar veteran who has acquired avid followers for his animated work in The Incredibles and The Iron Giant. In addition, the screenplay for Tomorrowland was co-written by Bird and Damon Lindelof, best known as the show runner of the popular TV series Lost.

Bird certainly hasn't made life easy for himself with Tomorrowland a large-scale production that demands lots of heavy imaginative lifting, particularly when it comes to the movie's vividly realized production design.

Bird and his team try hard to keep the visual environment stimulating, but it's the movie's foreground -- a somewhat confounding story -- that troubles.

Clooney plays Frank Walker, a disillusioned guy who opens the movie talking directly to the camera while being interrupted by an unseen character who's trying to give him directions about how he should tell his story.

We later learn that Walker's off-screen tormenter is none other than Athena (Raffey Cassidy), who appears to be a girl of about 12. I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that Athena is a highly developed child robot, another striking example of how far artificial intelligence has progressed -- at least in the movies.

As it turns out, Walker's telling a story about how, as a boy, he visited the 1964 Worlds Fair in New York and was transported to another dimension. That would be Tomorrowland, the alternate universe where young Frank cemented his relationship with Athena.

At that point, Clooney goes on sabbatical for a while, and another plot development takes over. A perpetually avid young woman (Britt Robertson) also travels to Tomorrowland.

As it turns out, these young people don't get to Tomorrowland by accident. They're chosen when they receive a pin that as a "T" embossed on it. For a time, they don't know exactly where they are or why they're shifting back and forth between two realities.

If you've passed the age of 10 and still are paying attention, I'll tell you that the movie's two plot strands eventually merge. Robertson's Casey Newton joins a reluctant Walker on a visit to Tomorrowland, where they trip out on manufactured wonder, run from evil androids and try to convince us that the world is worth saving.

Bird has no trouble being visually creative as he spins a scenario in which he pays increasing homage to "special" people, the chosen few who presumably will save the rest of us from extinction. At one point, a rocket blasts off from inside the Eiffel Tower. A visit to a toy shop provides amusement.

But the story isn't exactly gripping, and it's odd to see Clooney running around with kids in what sometimes looks like a massive hunk of children's theater.

Of course, there's a villain: Hugh Laurie plays Nix, one of the more benign bad guys in recent movie history.

At times, I wondered if Bird -- who first forayed into live action with 2011's Mission Impossible -- Ghost Protocol -- might have had an easier time had he made Tomorrowland as animated feature rather than as a live-action movie that sometimes feels like an animated feature.

And I never entirely found an answer to a question that bothered me throughout: What the hell is Clooney doing in a sci-fi movie with a Tinker Bell heart.

Perhaps as an act of self-protection against those critics who aren't impressed, Tomorrowland takes a stance against cynicism and negativity. It goes something like this: If you think the future will be a dystopian disaster, it probably will be. And aren't big movies already propagandizing us for a horrible "destiny"?

Sorry, I didn't buy it. I'm not unduly cynical, but Tomorrowland didn't do much for my today, although I have to confess that some days I wouldn't mind getting a pin that could transport me to another dimension.

But wait. I already have such a device. It's called my imagination.