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5 hours ago
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There’s a lot to like about The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s newly minted Oscar best picture frontrunner. The tale of a Hungarian architect’s early years in postwar America and tortured quest to build a vast modernist community centre, it’s the sort of grand, decades-spanning epic that we complain Hollywood doesn’t make any more. It is full of chewy ideas around art, patronage, assimilation and America’s complex cultural relationship with Europe.
Despite a (by modern standards) tight $10m budget, it looks astonishing (one scene filmed in a cavernous Italian marble quarry will set your eyes on stalks). The performances – Brody as its lead, Guy Pearce as his controlling, blue-blooded benefactor and Felicity Jones as his steely, principled wife – are layered and striking, as is its relentless score, by former Cajun Dance Party and Yuck guitarist Daniel Blumberg. But along with those qualities, one of my favourite things about The Brutalist might sound like an insult. I really enjoyed the bit when it wasn’t showing: its interval.
Halfway through the film’s whopping 215-minute runtime, a black-and-white photograph of lead character László Tóth’s wedding day flashes up on screen and stays there for 15 minutes. It’s accompanied by a countdown clock indicating how long viewers have to stretch their legs, buy snacks, chat with companions, doomscroll or, as one of the film’s stars Alessandro Nivola charmingly put it, “take a piss”. For me, the effect of this quarter-of-an-hour pause was slightly revelatory. It gave me time to puzzle over what I had just watched (and yes, OK, I did eat a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels too). It stopped a very long film from feeling like some sort of endurance test. And crucially there was no need to duck to go to the loo midway through and miss a crucial plot point. In fact it was so successful it made me wonder: why did we get rid of intervals again? While we ponder that, let’s take a little break.
Welcome back, I hope you’re nicely refreshed and your bladders are emptied. The simple answer to the above question is, of course, money! The interval/intermission was introduced to cinemas out of necessity: back in the days of 35mm, projectionists needed time to change the multiple reels a film was printed on. Helpfully this mid-film break also allowed cinemas a second bite at snack sales, hawked by talking hotdogs and popcorn bags (I’ve been enjoying this mesmerising playlist of old American intermission adverts on YouTube). But technological advances would make intervals inessential, and the extended run times that they brought with them were a burden to cinemas hoping to cram as many screenings as possible in a day. Some cinemas would still plug intervals into the odd film – kids movies where the audience’s attention spans might be more likely to waver – but by and large they had become a relic of cinema-going’s past.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Corbet is the man on a mission to resurrect the intermission. The Brutalist suggests he is a director who reveres, even fetishises, cinematic history, from the film’s obvious influences – Welles, Huston, the New Hollywood – right down to the way it was shot: on VistaVision, a defunct 35mm format last used in the 1960s and so restrictive that its print had to be carted around the autumn festivals in 26 presumably very heavy canisters.
If some of Corbet’s film history cosplaying borders on the masochistic, it’s hard to see his decision to revive the interval as anything other than a shrewd decision. It bifurcates the film tidily: separating the first half, concerning Tóth’s attempts to assimilate and rise in American life, from a second that sees him confronting the darker currents that flow through his new homeland. Cinemas were forbidden from including an interval in Scorsese’s three-hour-plus American epic: Killers of the Flower Moon (and the ones who did were threatened with fines) but it might have helped viewers digest a knotty and at times ferociously intense film.
It’s hard to imagine many other film-makers following Corbet’s lead. An interval would only serve as impediment to the sense of cinematic wonder that someone like Denis Villeneuve or James Cameron are trying to achieve. (“Imagine being immersed in the world of Avatar and having a sudden break. It would be hard to get back into the movie,” one studio exec told the Hollywood Reporter .) And for the rest of us, the novelty of The Brutalist’s interval could wear off if applied to every film going: those 15-minute pauses might start to add up when it comes to, say, babysitting costs.
Of course, some might suggest another solution for any film-makers worried about audience members’ concentration faltering: make shorter films … only that would mean fewer films like The Brutalist.
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