REVIEW. THE BRUTALIST lives up to its name... but not in ways you might think.

I remember the first time I saw Gone With the Wind. I must have been ten or twelve years old and the movie was returning to theaters for its thirtieth anniversary. Margaret Mitchell's popular Civil War novel-turned-epic movie was my mom's favorite, and I remember how excited she was for me to see it. I knew it was long going in but somehow the time passed fairly quickly for me, amidst the film's iconic antebellum settings, the burning of Atlanta, the swirling hoop skirts and, of course, Scarlett and Rhett's tumultuous love story. The Tivoli Theater in downtown Lorain, OH took on a new luster for me in showing such a timeless classic.

Twenty years later, I took my mom to see the restored Gone With the Wind, re-released in theaters to celebrate it's fiftieth anniversary. It was 1989, and I recall a sold-out Sunday matinee at the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights, OH (I'd made the great migration from Cleveland's west side to the east by then) of mostly sixty-something women squealing with delight when the camera first zooms in on a dapper Clark Gable. It was a Beatle-esque moment for the Depression-Era audience. The restored version brought back all the stunning imagery of its the technicolor, and I must say I was impressed.

Though I wouldn't count Gone With the Wind among my own personal favorites, I did learn something about epic films: ones are "better" than others and why. Today, "epic" is synonymous with "long" (re: more than two-and-a-half hours), big in story and scope, largely filled with CGI-imagery and special effects OR being the very idiosyncratic vision of a specific director (re: a self-indulgent vanity project). For me, though, "epic" also defines a movie that will stand the test of time, one that, like Gone With the Wind, will continue to conjure up powerful, emotional memories long after its release date.

Unfortunately, despite two very fine performances from Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce (though Pearce's bordered on being over-the-top), and a potentially interesting look at the creative and artistic process involved in design and architecture, The Brutalist - the title refers to a style of minimalist architecture popular in the United Kingdom after World War II - seemed mostly self-indulgent with respect to co-writer/director Brady Corbet's magnum opus. Though hailed by some critics as a "towering tribute to the immigrant experience," I found most of Corbet's narrative to be a mash-up of other films, novels and historic events woven into what is really Corbet's own tale (in his head) of being a creative genius up against the forces of the Hollywood film industry.

Corbet has been vocal about the challenges he faced making this film, which was shot in classic 70 mm Vista Vision typically reserved for epics like Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. Today, 70 mm is rarely used by filmmakers (IMAX is probably the most common substitute for BIG movies like the Marvel franchise). The last time a major Hollywood film was shot in 70 mm Panorama was Quentin Tarantino's 2015 western epic, The Hateful Eight. You get the idea.

Corbet wasn't satisfied to make a good movie with a compelling story. He wanted to make sure we understood how important his subject was in every way, from the way it was filmed to the ponderous Wagnerian score composed by Daniel Blumberg that punctuates every important moment in the story, though usually those moments are transitional for the plot and filled with faux 1940s-style newsreels narrated in the style of Westbrook Van Voorhis' "March of Time." There isn't a soliloquy that doesn't hit you over the head with the film's message: "No matter what others try and sell you, it's the destination, not the journey."

Guess I was wrong. I've always thought the journey was the thing, but here the journey is a pompously-stitched patchwork of clichés and stereotypes we've seen before: from themes of individualism v. collectivism in books like Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead to the failure of the American Dream (see works by, among others, Bernard Malamud) to themes of love, guilt and trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors in countless novels and films. Corbet tries to integrate all of these ideas here and the result is kind of a hodgepodge of big ideas that are never fully developed.

The movie is divided into two parts (a 15-minute intermission separates them), and concludes with an epilogue. Part One: "The Enigma of Arrival" (1947-1952) follows protagonist László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect who fled a German concentration camp, to America where he struggles to survive before an American businessman named Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) recognizes his talent and hires him to build a lavish community center in Doylestown. Tilted views of the Statue of Liberty from László's spot on the ship is an early signal that the beacon of liberty does not promise fulfillment of the American dream. László has left a wife and niece in Europe, and Van Buren offers to help bring them to America which encourages Tóth, though he has by then already succumbed to heroin addiction and a defiant sense of his own talent.

In an early conversation between the two, László is moved when Harrison brings a portfolio of photos showing his stark, concrete-sided architectural designs still standing in Budapest, again highlighting László fascination with his own (brutalist) talent and the notion that it's the product of his work that matters, not the process. His buildings live on even though he has left his homeland. Corbet will come back to this theme during the movie's epilogue.

Part Two: "The Hard Core of Beauty" (1953-1958) finds László successfully working for Van Buren and welcoming to America his now near-invalid wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned teenage niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who has become mute because of post-war trauma, to America. Here is where we witness László's personal and professional decline, motivated by Van Buren's abuse as well as his own demons. Before long, László and Harrison part ways, only to be reunited years later, determined to reach their planned architectural destination.

In Part Two, the movie really broke down for me, even though Part One sets up László's inevitable downfall and hints at Van Buren's deep-seated anti-semitism and racism, his obsession with financial domination and control. Perhaps it was Corbet's formulaic narrative that fell short, sabotaged by his determination to sensationalize the plight of American immigration, and his fixation on showing off his use of 70 mm filmmaking. It's one thing to magnify a physical landscape or use lighting and camera angles to accentuate a point of view. It's another to bombard the narrative with so much imagery that there's nothing left to the viewer's imagination. In this case, no theme is left unexplained, no idea abandoned without showing it over and over.

It's too bad that Corbet couldn't get over himself or his visionary camera work because two very strong performances almost get lost in the noise: Blumberg's score is overpowering, sometimes to the point where it's so loud the dialogue isn't always clear. And then there is the dialogue which is more like soliloquies strung together than real conversation. In this way, characters repeat their thoughts (and Corbet's theme) over and over without really connecting with each other. Sharing their individual stories and ideas, Harrison and László talk at each other more than to each other, and it's this kind of pontificating that ultimately made The Brutalist difficult for me to watch. I felt like I was being lectured at, rather than invited to empathize with the characters, as Mike Leigh so effectively invited me into Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantelle's (Michelle Austin) family drama in Hard Truths.

In any case, if you've got three and a half hours to spare (actually 215 minutes w/intermission), you might want to see The Brutalist for its scenes that wax rhapsodic on the art of architecture, though such scenes are few, or to marvel at the tangled pas de deux that Adrien Brody's László and Guy Pearce's Harrison dance. Pearce's is a more showy performance, but Brody brings the necessarily restrained emotion and tortured internal conflicts to László in much the same way that he breathed life and compassion into another Holocaust survivor, Polish-Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman in 2002's The Pianist, for which he received the Best Actor Oscar.

Right now, The Brutalist appears to be the favorite to win Best Picture and Brody Best Actor, but I'm hopeful that between now and the Oscars ceremony (if it's held this year), there will be a renewed interest among this years' other fine film and performances, especially those that are more innovative (Emilia Pérez and Nickel Boys), emotionally rich (A Real Pain and Hard Truths), or most importantly for me: those that remind me why I love going to movies in the first place, like A Complete Unknown. Of course, Corbet's truly awful acceptance speech at the Golden Globes a few weeks ago may turn out to be his undoing and open the door for other movies to be recognized.

Meantime, maybe I should revisit a few epics that are still on my short list of favorites: Pulp Fiction, Amadeus, and Out of Africa. The Brutalist, for all its cinematic bravado and sense of self-importance, never connected with me on an emotional level, as I just couldn't feel any sense of empathy or concern for László, Harrison, their families, or their situation. There was nothing "epic" in terms of a memorable cinematic experience, or a stay-with-me afterward sense of attachment. After 215 minutes, I was mostly eager to get home and leave László & Co. behind because, in many ways, The Brutalist is a movie filled with more hate than hope.

I'll probably be an outlier here as movie reviews go. I really wanted to like The Brutalist given the hype and critical praise, but if you're going to be epic at three and a half hours, then do something to get the audience invested in the characters. The last thing we need is another director (are you listening, Martin Scorsese?) who thinks that an overlong treatise on white men jockeying for power is time well spent. On and on it went, leading to an epilogue that was superfluous, especially given we already know what the theme was in the first half hour.

In Corbet's landscape, women are depicted as weak, mere decorations with little more to do than serve as subplot drivers (if that) and obstacles to the men vying for power and domination. With all of the progress Hollywood has made exploring women's issues, The Brutalist winning Best Picture would seem like another slap in the face from the Academy (AMPAS) and the film industry on what it values as art and entertainment.

Besides, as lengthy movies go, you'll never convince me that the efficiency of Woody Allen in creating Manhattan at 96 minutes is anything short of epic.. and a real masterpiece.

The Brutalist is now playing in limited release in theaters. It is not scheduled to stream until later this year.