A Smattering of Recent Releases

Tye Sheridan and Jude Law in The Order.

The Order (available on Apple+), based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground, is taut and gripping. It tells the true story of a secret white supremacist organization housed in the Pacific Northwest – the brainchild of a young man named Bob Mathews who splintered off from the Aryan Nation because he found them too weak-minded, all talk and no action – which the FBI uncovered and busted in 1985. Like other violent self-proclaimed revolutionaries (Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, for one), Mathews uses William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, as a guidebook. He prepares to declare war on the U.S. government by staging, with a small cohort, a series of robberies and bombings and the murder of Alan Berg (played in the film by Marc Maron), a confrontational Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver who has been taking on rabidly anti-Semitic callers.

Justin Kurzel’s movie is balanced equally between Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) and the efforts of an FBI team led by Terry Husk (Jude Law) and Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett) to take the Order down. His attention piqued by disparate anti-Semitic incidents in the area, Husk moves to a small Idaho town where the Aryan Nation compound sits on the outskirts; Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), its leader, is his initial point of interest. The town sheriff (Philip Granger) is both unsympathetic to Husk’s inquiries and inept, but his idealistic young deputy, Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), who is married to a native woman, allies himself with the FBI agent, first as a sort of liaison to the townsfolk – Jamie went to high school with the girlfriend of a big-talking troublemaker who has mysteriously disappeared – and then as a full-time unofficial member of Husk’s team. Mathews is slippery; it takes Husk and Carney a while just to figure out that he’s the ringleader. Meanwhile Kurzel and the screenwriter, Zach Baylin, show us how Mathews stages his break from Butler by attending one of his meetings (he presents them as religious services; his followers refer to him as their minister), rising to his feet as Butler begins his sermon and exhorting the crowd to take real action to take America back from the Jews and people of color.

The tension between Mathews and Butler is a fascinating element of the picture. Slezak, a skilled veteran character actor, accentuates Butler’s middle-class small-town civil respectability. His rhetoric is hate-filled, but he stays within the boundaries of the law; his strategy is to promote his cause through the election of senators and congressmen who share his view. He welcomes Husk’s visit to the compound and treats him graciously, distancing himself and his organization from the illegal activities of young hotheads he insists are no longer members of his congregation, though he doesn’t identify Mathews specifically and the only crimes he ascribes to them are crimes of avarice (theft, counterfeiting), not hate crimes. And he hasn’t given up on Mathews. When he lectures him – in a scene that precedes Bob’s declaration of independence against Aryan Nation – he treats him like a beloved but wayward son whom he is determined to draw back onto the righteous path.

Nicholas Hoult is a prolific actor who has been showing up with marked frequency this season. He couldn’t do much with the roles he was handed in Nosferatu and Juror #2, but he’s terrific here, and the way Kurzel and the photographer, Adam Arkapaw, underscore his uncomplicated handsomeness – he might have stepped out of a classic western from the thirties or forties – makes his ferocity even more upsetting. Hoult paints the portrait of a true fanatic, especially in the scenes leading up to his demise. Jude Law buries himself in the part of Terry Husk; it’s not just a matter of his mustache and his flawless western-American accent but of his precise inward focus and the way he moves physically through the film. Tye Sheridan has a touching quality as young Jamie, who’s untried but passionate and whose slight awkwardness seems to slip away as he begins to define himself by the mission in which he’s enlisted. I liked many of the supporting players, such as Morgan Holmstrom as Jamie’s wife, who doesn’t hold back from telling Terry that his vehemence frightens her, and Alison Oliver as Bob’s wife Debbie, whose response to him grows more unsettled as the film goes on. Matias Garrido plays the most unusual member of the Order, Tony Torres. Torres claims when he joins up that he’s Spanish – a full-blooded European, not Mexican – but we learn later that he’s lying about his heritage. The actors who play Bob’s other followers tend to clump together in our heads, but the movie gives Garrido a chance to play some complicated scenes. As the father of one of the other young men in thrall to Mathews, David LeReaney has a wonderful moment when, interviewed by Husk, he voices woeful confusion over how his son has turned out; it’s like a passage from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.

My one quarrel with The Order is with some of Baylin’s dialogue. It’s serviceable most of the time, but in the sequences involving the Feds it flattens out into that standard repetitive action-thriller language, weighed down with profanity, that always paralyzes my brain and sounds to me like the audience could have written it. Law usually manages to transcend this shortcoming of the picture; Smollett doesn’t and, good as he is, neither does Sheridan. The most eloquent piece of writing in the movie is the scene where Husk has to relay the news to Kimmy Bowen that her husband has been shot. When Terry pulls up outside her house they don’t exchange dialogue; all the emotional complexity of the moment is in the faces of the two actors.

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. (Photo: A24.)

I walked out on four of the films nominated for the Oscar: Anora, Emilia Perez, The Substance and Nickel Boys. (If Nickel Boys wins Best Picture, it will be the most incompetent piece of filmmaking ever to do so; it looks like it was made by a teenager who just found out what P.O.V. means but not how to contextualize it so a viewer can figure out what the hell is going on.) But I managed to get through all three and a half hours of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s saga of a gifted modernist architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor whose Americanized cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), brings him to Pennsylvania to join his furniture business. When the son of a wealthy aristocrat, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), hires the firm to convert one of the rooms in his mansion into a library as a surprise for his birthday, the Bauhaus-style design he comes up with infuriates Van Buren, who throws them out and even refuses to pay for the expensive materials. Attila fires László, who falls into menial work to keep from starving. But when Van Buren discovers that he was a lauded architect before the Nazis ended his career, he decides that the library is a masterpiece and commissions Tóth to design a memorial to his late mother.

The first part of The Brutalist, about an hour and three-quarters, rambles, but it’s always interesting – partly because of Corbet’s unconventional camerawork (Lol Crawley shot it), partly because of Brody’s intense, unpredictable performance, and partly because there aren’t many architect protagonists in the history of movies and the notion of pairing the psychology of a traumatized, self-willed artist and the development of mid-century modernism is intriguing. You can’t anticipate where the picture is going but I was inclined to wait to see if Corbet, who seems talented, will end up with a work of substance or a confusion of ideas that he hasn’t worked through.

Unfortunately, as soon as intermission is over, all bets are off. We’ve seen movies – dozens and dozens of them – that start out well and fall apart, but I don’t think I’ve ever sat through one that goes so utterly out of its mind. It’s as if Corbet had filmed The Brutalist in order and someone else had taken over in the middle – like Paul Thomas Anderson, maybe. Tóth finally succeeds in bringing his wife Erzsébet (a tirelessly hard-working Felicity Jones) and their solemn, silent niece (Raffey Cassidy) to America and the couple, who have been writing passionate, hopeful letters to each other, have a dreadful fight on their first night together that isn’t grounded in any narrative information we’ve been given except that Erzsébet hasn’t told her husband that she’s now confined to a wheelchair. (His anger seems ungenerous, to say the least.) The memorial project falls apart and then comes together again, while Van Buren’s treatment of the architect is so inconsistent it crossed my mind that he might be suffering from dementia. When the two men travel to Italy in search of a special kind of marble, they wind up together in a cave (I really lost the reins of the story at this point) where Van Buren rapes László. Is the rape an emblem of the disdain Christians have for Jews even when they claim to admire them, or is it a reflection of Van Buren’s jealousy of an artist to whom he seems to be in thrall? The last symbolic movie rape I can recall is in Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, where Debra Winger was violated as a punishment for her bourgeois values; the one in The Brutalist isn’t as offensive but it’s even nuttier. The scene is so bizarre that I honestly wondered if I was reading the image right. (It is underlit.) Poor Guy Pearce – he’s way too good an actor to be asked to play a scene as ludicrous as this one.

A lot of people are taking The Brutalist seriously, but then a lot of people took There Will Be Blood and The Master seriously: the more patently and extravagantly ridiculous a movie is, the more likely it is that it will be proclaimed a masterpiece, especially if it’s three and half hours long. It turns out that the plot glitches in the first half provide an inkling of the plot holes in the second, which are as wide as trenches. We have to wait until the last scene, set in 1980 at a retrospective of Tóth’s work, to find out that he was in Dachau and Erzsébet was in Auschwitz. (For all we’re told in Part One, we might assume he’d escaped the SS and spent the war years in hiding.) Well, I guess the less information a filmmaker gives the audience, the more creative they can be in completing the story he hasn’t bothered to tell.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin in Hard Truths. (Photo: Thin Man Pictures.)

Mike Leigh is one of my favorite filmmakers, but his latest, Hard Truths, doesn’t come off. It focuses on a pair of middle-aged sisters and their families. Chantelle (Michele Austin), the younger one, runs a beauty salon where she listens with humor and enthusiasm to the stories her clients relate about their lives. It’s a cozy, convivial environment, as is her home, where she lives with her two grown-up daughters, Kaela (Ani Nelson, who lights up the screen) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), who are close. Kaela struggles with the expectations of a hard-nosed, unkind boss (Samantha Spiro), but she tries to stay upbeat. Chantelle’s sister Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who starred in Leigh’s most popular film, Secrets and Lies) is quite another story. Pansy is a profoundly anxious and unhappy woman who views the world as a series of obstacles and pitched battles and all the people she crosses paths with in the normal course of a day as enemies out to wound her or patronize her or make her suffer from their incompetence. She issues angry, unanswerable challenges to doctors, dentists, supermarket clerks. Her husband Curtley (David Webber) and their twenty-two-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) can’t do anything to please her; she treats every imagined slight or inconsideration as the final straw in an unending series of trials they’ve imposed upon her. She’s succeeded in closing both of them down, especially Moses, a soft-spoken, overweight young man, the target of neighborhood bullies, who seldom expresses a feeling or an opinion and wanders around London all day listening to music through his headphones. Chantelle loves her sister very much and has infinite patience for her, so it’s in her presence that Pansy releases other emotions besides rage – mostly a sorrow so deep that it seems to have hollowed her out.

Leigh has experimented before this with characters so buried in misery that the movies they appear in function as a kind of test of how far the filmmaker can go without alienating his audience. His 2002 movie All or Nothing, which featured one of his most remarkable casts (Timothy Spall, James Corden, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheehan, Sally Hawkins and Alison Garland), traveled very far in that regard, and it was both devastating and inspiriting. But Hard Truths wore me down, and much as I wanted to get past the barriers Pansy throws up to both family and strangers – and as intensely as Jean-Baptiste shows us the pain and existential exhaustion that have defeated her – I found the character insufferable. (The only other Mike Leigh movie I can recall with a protagonist I simply didn’t want to watch was his 1993 Naked, starring David Thewlis.) Jean-Baptiste and indeed all the actors do impeccable work typical of a Mike Leigh picture, but Hard Truths doesn’t seem to have a dramatic strategy and so doesn’t take us anywhere, though Leigh is generous enough to offer a little hope for Moses toward the end. The movie is sorely misguided.

Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in All We Imagine as Light.

Most of the delicate Indian film and Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light takes place in Mumbai, where at night the lights of the cityscape glitter like starlight. The director, Payal Kapadia (who also wrote the screenplay), has a wonderful eye and a gifted cinematographer, Ranabir Das, and they give us a marvelous sense of the dense, crowded city, where so many different Indian dialects are spoken that communication is always a sort of miracle. The movie focuses on three women who work together at a hospital: Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is head nurse, Anu (Divya Prabha) is one of her charges and also her flatmate, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is the cook. All three are in one way or another at loose ends. Prabha is married, but her husband emigrated to Germany more than a year ago to take a job; at first he telephoned her several times a week, but gradually he grew silent – though a package, an expensive-looking rice cooker, suddenly arrives for her from Germany with no card enclosed. One of the doctors has been hanging around Prabha, an émigré from a different city who has decided to leave because he doesn’t feel comfortable in Mumbai and he’s still stumbling over his Bengali, which (along with Hindi) is the most frequently language spoken here. He wants Prabha to come with him, but estranged as she and her husband have grown, she can’t let go of him. (This plotline reminded me of Visconti’s White Nights.) Parvaty, a widow, lives in an apartment building that is set for demolition; she has a son but he lives in a tiny apartment with his family so she knows he can’t take her in. Out of other options, she makes plans to return to her home village. Anu has a boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon); they’re in love, but her parents keep sending her photos of prospective bridegrooms, and she knows they won’t approve of her choice.

The movie takes hold slowly, gently, with the aid of the sometimes magical visuals and the actors (including Haroon), who capture the camera while their distinctive characters capture our imagination. Nothing here feels conventional: alone in the apartment, Prabha sits on the floor with the rice cooker between her legs and pulls it tenderly toward her. The more time we spend with these characters the more we grow to love them. About two-thirds of the way through the film, Parvaty takes the train to her village and the two younger women accompany her, helping her transport her things but also enjoying a vacation from their lives in Mumbai. Anu and Shiaz have been trying to get some time alone, but it hasn’t worked out, so he follows her into the countryside, where he finds a cave in the jungle decorated with sculptures and embellished with lovers’ graffiti; their trek through it becomes foreplay for their lovemaking. Meanwhile Prabha’s story takes an unexpected turn after she wades in the sea with the camera at her back, and the style of the film shifts from realism to magic realism. It’s as if the move from Mumbai to this seaside village has transformed the movie into a fairy tale.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.