When I first saw an ad for The Brutalist, naturally, the first thing that caught my mind was the 3-and-a-half-hour running time (the second thing being that the director is that creepy guy from Funny Games [2007] who, alongside Michael Pitt, terrorises Tim Roth and Naomi Watts). The film that has been notoriously hard to find in theatres swept the top categories at the 82nd official Golden Globes last night in Los Angeles, picking up wins for best picture, best director (Brady Corbet), and best actor (Adrien Brody). But despite the slew of awards and critical acclaim, many people were found scratching their heads with the question, “I haven’t even heard of that movie.”
Whether or not you have, indeed, heard of it, the fact remains that a film from a relatively obscure director with a running time of almost four hours proved so captivating that it won best picture, and that alone deserves a round of applause. Although much has been said about the overly ambitious, if not pretentiously irritating, excessive running time of films recently (The Batman, Beau is Afraid, heck, even Killers of The Flower Moon), The Brutalist feels warranted rather than just trying to make an artistic statement, as if inviting the audience to tag along rather than forcing them to sit in their seats. And clearly, the reactions were a unanimous nod of approval.
Although many assumed that a majority of last night’s Golden Globes would find a home in the aptly deserving Anora, Brady Corbet’s drama masquerading as an obscure biopic proves that people are still keen for strange and absurdly long films (somewhere, Michael Cimino and David Lean are smiling).
The optimist in me is trying to spot the pattern of a growing desire to find longer, more captivating forms of art to entertain ourselves with. Point being that more than 300 bookstores – both independent and not – have opened in the last few years in the US alone, with this trend blossoming across most major cities all across the world (during the covid lockdown, a large portion of the novels purchased from Amazon were of the longer variety).
Although the Oxford Dictionary word of the year was ‘brain rot’ – a term that refers to the supposed negative effects of consuming low-quality online content or using digital media excessively – it appears that a light is shining through the suffocating confines of brain rotting social media content. And perhaps this will be a sign to the tech moguls that there’s a difference between art and content.
The Brutalist will soon be available to stream in the UAE on Apple TV.
