Christmas Box Office Bonanza!
Plus unpaywalled mini-reviews of 'The Brutalist' (yay) and 'Babygirl' (boo).
Hot Take: The Brutalist is a pretty darn good motion picture…
Forgive my tardiness, but this morning was my last, best chance to see Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s The Brutalist in time for the year-end discourse without annoying my wife and kids. Yeah, it’s as good as you’ve heard: a towering yet intimate character study that—not unlike Anora—details the extent to which the so-called American Dream has always been primarily attainable through the permission and patronage of the already wealthy. It also makes me want to rewatch James Gray’s The Immigrant.
This is not just because of surface-level similarities but also because of how the distribution system has changed. In the summer of 2014, it was neat and exciting to watch a movie like The Immigrant at home on Netflix (alongside the concurrently VOD and theatrically released Snowpiercer). Amid Christmas 2024, it’s almost a miracle that a movie like The Brutalist is still possible for what will eventually be a nationwide multiplex release.
I have no illusions about the A24 and Focus Features release making big bucks when it expands wide in January. However, the fact that Corbet reportedly brought the film in at under $10 million means it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster. And yes, it’s often clear how Corbet and friends managed to bring this 3.5-hour generational melodrama in for so little; it’s not exactly a cast-of-thousands sort of epic. But nor is it a film that feels smaller than it should be when compared to what might have been par for the course in a more theatrically friendly environment ecosystem.
It’s also another case of an A24-distributed movie (The Green Knight, Beau is Afraid, EverythingEverywhere All At Once, etc.) that offers Imax-worthy scale and old-school Hollywood scope for far less than tentpole prices. Yes, there’s an intermission, which A) feels perfectly placed and B) gave me just enough time to grab a food court sandwich instead of an AMC hot dog. Regarding the above statements, part of my relief is that The Brutalist was allowed to be a single theatrical feature film rather than a padded-out ten-part streaming series miniseries.
Cold Shower: What Babygirl is about > > How Babygirl is about it.
Concurrently, Babygirl seems to be an erotic drama for a generation stereotypically or allegedly terrified of intimacy and genuine kink. Aside from a few moments of vice, primarily via montage, there’s little that could not be shown unedited on television. While Halina Reijn’s melodrama was not obligated to be an escapist fantasy, a crowd-pleasing romp, or even a newfangled riff on Secretary, the film is a buzzkill.
Save for a few beats of gamesmanship and momentary pleasure, its protagonist (Nicole Kidman) spends most of the film in states of duress, fear, guilt, and self-loathing as a high-powered executive conducting a workplace affair with a much younger and more salaciously assertive intern (Harris Dickinson). Yes, it mostly works as a drama about a woman so conditioned to consider sex in the most conventional fashion that she is terrified of her own comparatively PG-rated fantasies. However, it isn’t very enjoyable to watch her torture herself.
Jokes about Antonio Banderas being unable to satisfy a woman notwithstanding (he’s still hot as a pirate in the second SpongeBob movie), he’s terrific as Kidman’s eager-to-please husband. Part of my discontent is the lack of mainstream films playing in this respective sandbox. If we had more movies like Babygirl, I probably wouldn’t be as frustrated at how… not erotic and how almost self-flagellating it seems.
Well, that and the differential between what it teases and what it delivers, which is the kind of missed potential that makes it so hard to convince my wife to participate in the year-end awards season marathons. I figured this one would be a layup, but… well, the sexiest part of the theatrical outing was the trailer for Stephen Soderbergh’s Black Bag. So, I guess it’s a “good news/bad news” week for A24. They are technically 2/3 since my wife didn’t believe me when I said Y2K wasn’t very good. She found out the hard way.