The main thing I want to say about The Brutalist is that I will be pissed off if it wins Best Picture. I have a feeling it will, so I’m going to hold off on doing a full-fledged review of it now. If it wins, it will be included in my Best Picture Blog series. If it doesn’t… well, I already spent three and a half hours sitting through it in the theater, and I’d rather not spend more time than I have to writing about it.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on this movie. I realize I am deep in the minority on this one. It’s currently got a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% from the fans. To be honest, I don’t understand those numbers at all. I thought The Brutalist was too long, too slow, and too boring. Too many things were planted that were never paid off. Too many of the characters were unlikable. Not nearly enough happened to make me care about any of the characters or anything that happened to them, other than maybe Erzebet (Felicity Jones).

Here is what I will say about The Brutalist that is positive. It’s not a film so much as it is a work of art. Every once in a while, over the last couple of decades, a movie comes out that disregards the standards of Hollywood filmmaking. These films are often very long, very deliberately paced, and take place over several years. I’m thinking about films like Boyhood, The Power of the Dog, and Killers of the Flower Moon, with the latter straddling the line between a traditional Hollywood film and this more artistic style to which I’m referring. The Brutalist fits this mode. It’s long, deliberate, and takes place over several years. Like Boyhood, the deliberate pacing makes it akin to watching a painting. It’s a painting that’s moving, but a painting, nonetheless. The earliest movie like this was probably Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. These films are largely character-driven without a clear, cohesive story in which the protagonist has a goal for the audience to root for. The movie is more a character study of the character’s life.

The Brutalist is more character study than story.

There is a story in there. It’s not much of a story, but it’s there. The story follows Lazlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a brilliant architect who escaped the Nazis and ended up in Philadelphia and was taken in by his brother, but a failed business venture causes him to move into a shelter in Philadelphia. But his talent catches the eye of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce), a wealthy industrialist who wants a community center built to honor his late mother. Van Buren hires Lazlo to design the center, and a battle of wills ensues as cost overruns and artistic differences, along with Lazlo’s continued addiction problems and issues with his family, threaten to derail the project.

The main issue I had with the story was the lack of drama. There were dramatic moments, but I found myself not caring about anyone in the movie or anything that happened to them. There were opportunities for the script to get very dramatic and a couple of jarring moments got my attention. But for the most part, this movie was one big long yawn.