And Just Like That… 2024 Goes Straight to Hellions

By Harlan Jacobson – December 31, 2024

DD: 2023 was hailed as such a good year for film, a year that seemed to benefit from films held up in the pipeline from the wipeout years. So did 2024 hold up? Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson thinks it did.

HJ: What I’ve loved about 2024 films is how many difficult personalities, often artists, got slowly unpeeled to see who was there, what they did to themselves, the world and the ones who stood in the way.

The Brutalist, 4 stars here, directed by Brady Corbett, seems like this year’s Oppenheimer to Barbie’s Wicked, enormously serious and accomplished. As a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Laszlo Toth is an architect whose experience translates into the Brutalism of mid-century modern reconstruction architecture — foreshadowed by Le Corbusier, Louis Khan, and Mies Van der Rohe– that is elemental, sometimes in glass and steel, often expressed in concrete planes, cuts and curves. The Brutalist is a story about art versus capital, standing Ayn Rand’s classic Fountainhead on its political head, from its early shot of immigrant architect Laszlo Toth emerging from steerage to see an upside down Statue of Liberty. In following Toth’s journey to the home of industrialist Harrison Van Buren, The Brutalist is an ambitious immigrant vision of American schizophrenia: we are forward talking, backward acting. Here are Adrien Brody, in another sure to be Oscar nominated performance, as the architect hired to build his vision of a cultural center commissioned by the ever watchable Guy Pearce, as a PA moneybags.

The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody

The Brutalist is 3.5 hours long. it’s a leading example of a trend in long films made possible by all the binge-watching of extended narrative TV during the pandemic years. It even comes with its own 15-minute intermission embedded in the film. 1:55

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown traces the arrival from the Minnesota Range of 20 year-old Bob Dylan in Morris Plains, NJ to sing “Song to Woody” at Woody Guthrie’s hospital bed, attended by Pete Seeger in 1961—all the way to the infamous day Dylan would have blown the doors off the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, if it had doors, by going electric on “Maggie’s Farm.” Phelan Papamichael’s cinematography subtly puts an aura around Dylan every time the film stops to close in on Timothée Chalemet as baby Dylan. With a little help from Makeup and Wardrobe and some good homework on his part, Chalamet shyly trots out the likes of “North Country Fair or “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and lets the grownups—the major suits and the others artists –fall silent, as if they are thinking, “One day this kid with the glaring yes and potato nose is going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Which the crawl at the end of the two hours and 21 minutes reminds us in fact happened.

Former Time Magazine critic and screenwriter Jay Cocks constructs a narrative that shows Dylan as the asshole he is duly reported to be without saying as much, except that Joan Baez calls him one, and so, it seems, does everyone else in the film. Yet those same folks share the notion that he can afford to be, he’s a frickin’ genius in a year in which the difficult artistic personality sits at the center of discussions in film about authenticity.

Timothée Chalamet stars as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown

I can’t tell if I loved A Complete Unknown because it’s a good film, a smart film, or because I’m close to the period and the people. I loved seeing them all up there onscreen: Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), Woody (Scoot McNairy), Ed Norton a standout as Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, all the suits, John Hammond, Albert Grossman, Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) mad as a bull at Newport on the night Dylan went electric, the whole parade. And Timothée Chalamet, not one of my favorites, credibly lets Ballad of A Thin Man seemingly fall out of his mouth in a Greenwich Village dive. “Something is happening in here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” And in so doing puts across the obituary of the country that had just won WWII without thinking twice, it’s all right. It opens Christmas Day, and depending on your grandmother, its good wholesome entertainment.

Oh, the problems of being powerful. Now that we seem to be in the era of the visible female CEO, we have films with women who deal not so much with the power that they don’t have but with the power that they do. Think back two years ago to Tar and Cate Blanchett, and it’s not that big a leap to a quartet of first-rate films about women grappling with power:

Maria, with Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, a stunning piece of casting of a powerful woman who knows her worth and reels from her vulnerabilities. Jolie has found the perfect vehicle to bring her career back, first at the Venice FF, then at Toronto and NY. And at Netflix at a couch near you.

Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas in Maria

Anora by Sean Baker, written and directed by Baker, starts when a Russian playboy of the western world wanders into a West Side Manhattan strip club and takes an Uzbeki American lap dancer and the audience for a wild ride. That it won the Palme D’Or 2024 is not entirely a surprise in that the jury was chaired by Greta Gerwig, who is in regular touch with the Goddess and therefore was clearly pre-positioned to take the measure of a film with a lap dancer as its central character. What Baker did in Anora has roots in romantic comedy all the way back to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) with Gable and Colbert falling in love over the class divide in the high Depression, and the breathtaking truth-telling of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973), a generational touch stone of the Sexual Revolution.

Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard, maybe the trickiest film of the year. Manitas Del Monte, is a vicious Mexican gang lord. He has a plan to exit his gang lord life: he engineers his televised murder, hijacks and hires a sharp woman attorney (Zoe Saldana) to engage an Israeli surgeon on the sly to make his lifelong secret come true. He wants to transition from male felon to female socialite.

He re-emerges as Emilia Perez, a socially prominent head of a foundation ironically dedicated to aiding families of the murdered of Mexico City. Selena Gomez plays the wife and mother of his children whom he leaves behind—for a time. The dual role of gang lord Manitas and NGO crusading Emilia Perez is played by trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón, who slips back into male tiger mode (the actor was born Juan Carlos Gascón) to play the pre-surgery gangster. Of course, it’s a tragedy. Oh, and it’s a musical. Which skitters between opera and soap opera. It’s like watching the afternoon TV shows in a taco dive bar. Couldn’t’ take my eyes off the screen, pass the salsa verde.

Audiard, who has written and directed some of the best French films of his generation about life on the margins, won a jury prize at Cannes, and the cast won an ensemble award as best female actor.

A word about Baby Girl, with Nicole Kidman as Romy Mathis, the CEO of an Amazon-like company with its HQ in Manhattan, knocked off her considerably spikey heels by Samuel, a baby male intern played by Harris Dickinson. Samuel knows what women need, particularly those who control empires and also prep lunches at home for their young family and theatre director husband, Jacob, Antonio Banderas: someone else to take control when the clothes come off. And that’s a lot. That can include erotic milk drinking, either from a glass or lapping from a saucer on the floor.

Nicole Kidman stars in Babygirl

Directed by Dutch actress turned writer-director Halina Reijn, Babygirl is a button presser. When the two dudes, husband and lover, inevitably come to blows over the switched-on CEO who links them, young Samuel dismisses old Jacob’s concept of sexuality as dated. Which is the line that reveals Babygirl’s intent: It may or may not be about the new woman’s psyche, that’s up to the viewer, although I think it’s definitely in the film; it’s definitely a tour of what the kids are doing now I would say in bed, but anywhere but. Bed is for people with rigor mortis. A24 released Babygirl on ummm Christmas day.

Hey kids, why don’t you and Grammy wait on seeing The Brutalist, Anora, Emilia Perez, and Maria, and go see Babygirl instead this afternoon? That sounds nice.