The Childhood of a Leader (2015, Brady Corbet)

50/100

Title's final word does a lot of load-bearing work here. To be fair, so does Tom Sweet's presence (more than his performance per se; he mostly just looks absolutely perfect, a real casting coup) as the pre-pubescent despot-to-be. And Leader's magnificently led by Scott Walker's almost unbearably intense, keening orchestral score, which I've owned for a decade despite not having watched the film until just now—if you wouldn't at least entertain the idea of our walking together down the aisle to this theme, alarming all who attend, I do not want you for wife. (Gee, why am I still single?) But the title, the music, the kid actor, and eventually the coda are all working overtime to add disturbing weight to what's fundamentally a pretty banal portrait of your standard discipline case. Hell, I myself apparently threw one of little Prescott's three tantrums! Don't remember it at all, but have no reason to doubt my mother, who's many times told the story of a dinner at which maybe six- or seven-year-old me refused to eat some hated vegetable (I'd guess Brussels sprouts) and, informed that I couldn't leave the table until my plate was clean, proceeded to just sit there silently staring into space for something like four or five hours, alone in the kitchen while everyone else watched TV or whatever, until my then-stepfather finally gave up and let me go to bed. Which, okay, maybe I'm abnormally stubborn in certain respects. But nobody feared I'd turn into ersatz Hitler, and my response to most of this movie amounted to "All tyrants may once have been brats, but precious few brats become tyrants." Only when Prescott devotes himself to studying French for the express purpose of getting his tutor dismissed (because he believes Dad is cheating with her and/or as revenge for not being permitted to touch her breast)—when he makes achievement a weapon—did Childhood briefly get interesting for me.

Meanwhile, I was reminded that Corbet and Fastvold are addicted to bloat. This film runs less than two hours, rather than The Brutalist's nearly four, but still manages to spend about 45 minutes on tantrum #1, which consists simply of Prescott throwing rocks at people and eventually apologizing for doing so. Some of that time's devoted to establishing his recalcitrance (and of course the era, dramatis personæ, etc.), but we also get lengthy political discussions among the adults (one played by Robert Pattinson, whose appearance seems distractingly pointless until the very end, when it becomes first confusing and then really dumb), hashing out the Treaty of Versailles' conditions and possible effects, serving no narrative function whatsoever and thus practically begging to be read thematically. (You can't even consider them influences on an impressionable young mind, as Prescott definitely isn't present or nearby during most of them. It's just further blunt insistence that there's more to this than a kid who acts out.) Ostensibly a cautionary tale, The Childhood of a Leader announces its intentions up front and then just keeps repeating the same note again and again, without much in the way of variation or counterpoint. And then, lest anyone fail to grasp the import, we leap forward two decades or so into an alternate future that tweaks Nazi iconography so little that the comparison's impossible for even current Democratic leadership to miss. (Though, again, I was initially thrown by Pattinson, thinking that he was still playing the same character. Then: "Ohhhh, that's so stupid.") Formally, the end of this film leads right into The Brutalist's equally chaotic opening, which I have to think was deliberate and trust that others caught at the time. I admire the hell out of Corbet and Fastvold's ambition, which stands in stark contrast to general indie timidity, but so far their reach exceeds their grasp.