Professionals are again complaining about how their discipline is portrayed in movies. Time to ignore them (if, indeed, that’s what they’re really doing).
Back in September, reporting from Venice International Film Festival, I made a prediction about responses to Pablo Larraín’s Maria. I suspected an expert would soon pop up to explain how the study of Maria Callas, who is played by Angelina Jolie, misrepresented the world of opera. Sure enough, shortly before Christmas, Mark Swed, classical-music critic with the Los Angeles Times, arrived to explain “what Netflix’s ‘Maria’ gets so wrong about Maria Callas”.
No doubt the US Society of Campanologists was, in 1923, commissioned to deliver an article on Lon Chaney’s substandard rope work in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “Call that a forward-resting clang-double? My Airedale could do better,” nobody actually wrote.
The current argument is about architects allegedly taking against Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated film. A column in the Guardian sets out to explain “why the architecture world hates The Brutalist”.
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It is true that the epic drama, starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian émigré designing a utopian community centre in Pennsylvania, conforms to the stereotype of the blinkered architectural obsessive.
“Architects may groan at the depiction of their profession in The Brutalist,” Philip Kennicott writes in the Washington Post, noting that the protagonist’s “flaws neatly align with a popular caricature of architects as megalomaniacs”. (Kennicott does, however, note that The Brutalist “gets genius right”.)
Oliver Wainwright’s piece in Guardian points us towards a podcast in which various architecture critics explain “why the Brutalist is a terrible movie”. The article notes that, at one screening, a “leading figure from the 20th-century heritage movement” declared “It’s just utter tosh!”. We are left to assume this is an architectural rather than a cinematic complaint.
Does the entire “architecture world” hate The Brutalist? Writing in the Conversation, Phevos Kallitsis, associate head academic at the University of Portsmouth’s school of architecture, art and design, sounded far more positive than the Guardian’s heritage enthusiast.
He felt it “demonstrates the intrinsic role the client plays and how the architect is beholden to them”. The film made him “nostalgic for paper, charcoal drawings and physical models”. So some in the profession clearly are open to the persuasions of Corbet’s fine film.
No doubt those architects raising objections to The Brutalist are sincere. But the truth is that any film about any profession will, for understandable reasons, cause those who know which nuts go on which bolts to roll their eyes in disapproval.
In 2014 Vulture magazine consulted Mark Sherman, a jazz faculty member at the Juilliard School, in New York, about the techniques used in Damien Chazelle’s Oscar-winning Whiplash. Sherman didn’t like how JK Simmons’s character taught Miles Teller’s young musician. “Some of the things the drummer was practising were not really things you’d want to practise,” he said, before going on to admit he found the ending “real and raw”.
In 2018 Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, set in the world of 1950s London haute couture, caused Alexandra Shulman, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, some mild distress. “A scene where they snatch back a dress from a bulky, comatose Barbara Hutton-type is ridiculous and would have finished off his business,” she says of Daniel Day-Lewis’s designer. Does that really matter?
The supreme example of this professional nitpicking is, however, to be found in a (partly tongue-in-cheek, to be fair) article by Adam Woodward for the film magazine Little White Lies in 2020. Chris Foulds, lighthouse keeper for nearly 20 years, had words to say about the behaviour of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers’s deranged The Lighthouse.
“When the two fellas first come ashore and they pass the outgoing keepers, there’s no way you’d get keepers not acknowledging each other like that,” Foulds, who largely appreciated the film, told Woodward. This in a film with frantic violence and conspicuous masturbation.
Some part of me feels suspicious of any film that gains unqualified approval from the profession portrayed. I’d like to avoid the phrase “this is not a documentary” – but, you know what, this is not a documentary (unless it’s a documentary).
Knoll’s Law, named for the US journalist Erwin Knoll, argues that “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge”.
The same is true of movies. That explains why Ireland gets so unreasonably het up about Micksploitation films such as Lindsay Lohan’s Irish Wish last year. It explains why (ahem) critics get sour about depictions of their tribe as jealous, talentless cucks in films such as Ratatouille, Lady in the Water and All About Eve.
Ignore them. Ignore all the whingers. Go to see the excellent The Brutalist. Take along an architect you hate. The film is 3½ hours long. They might actually explode with fury.
