In his 2010 book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, the critic Owen Hatherley writes that, as an architectural style, brutalism was “dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people.” Crouching in the bowels of a massive transport ship, Laszlo Toth, the Hungarian Jewish architect played by Adrien Brody in Brady Corbet’s new historical drama The Brutalist, is not only ordinary, but hopelessly anonymous—one among hundreds of slumped, huddled doppelgängers yearning to breathe free.
In his native country, Laszlo was the celebrated master builder behind a set of imposing Bauhaus-style structures, edifices projecting the Utopian promise that form should follow function. Here, he’s a sunken-eyed, broken-nosed concentration camp survivor nursing a heroin habit, wracked with guilt over the people—and the legacy—he’s left behind.
The Brutalist’s much-publicized three-and-a-half-hour running time is divided precisely into two chapters and a short epilogue, each of which features a title card cryptically delineating its contents. Part one is called “The Enigma of Arrival,” and, syncing us to his protagonist’s lurching, seasick perspective, Corbet and his cinematographer Lol Crawley reconfigure his—and our—first glimpse of New York into a Rorschach test. Looming over the deck of Laszlo’s ship as the camera lists wildly from stem to stern, the Statue of Liberty becomes monstrous and inscrutable. Is she a muse testifying to the possibilities of creation on fairer shores? Or a siren singing our weary traveller to shipwreck?
“It’s not the journey, it’s the destination,” says a character later on in the movie. The line inverts the romanticism of the great American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson—whose writing helped to inspire the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright—while underlining the relentless, bottom-line aspirations of both Laszlo and his creator. The Brutalist is long, but it is not slow; it moves through its running time with the confidence of a filmmaker who knows where he’s headed and why. In Corbet’s case, he’s making a beeline straight for the canon. No other American movie released this year can compete with it as an object of potential film-cultural worship or as a high-end award magnet (the New York Film Critics Circle bestowed its prescient Best Film prize on it on December 3).
At this point it’d be easier to cite reviews of The Brutalist that don’t include the word “monumental,” and its distributor, A24, has seized on that commonality by including a row of identical pull quotes in the movie’s trailer. By choosing to utilize long-dormant, super-high-definition VistaVision widescreen format—and releasing the film in 70mm prints—Corbet has turned himself into a culture warrior of sorts; in Venice, where the director scored a Silver Lion (along with his U.S. distribution deal), journalists duly made a fetish out of The Brutalist’s laborious presentation process, inventorying the number of bulky film canisters (26) required to transport 300 pounds of celluloid into the theater. A viral video of a festival projectionist flexing ecstatically after threading the final extra-wide reel became an emblem of Corbet’s throwback showmanship, an irresistible lure for purists in search of a new-age throwback hero—an auteur with a capital A(24).
For a certain kind of cinephile, few directorial personae are as seductive as that of an analog man in a digital world: think Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, or Paul Thomas Anderson. For his part, Corbet has definitely been thinking of Anderson. If The Brutalist is a monolith, it’s one made up of partly repurposed materials. The Ellis Island overture recalls not only the opening of The Godfather Part II but also James Gray’s ingenious homage in The Immigrant, which opened with Lady Liberty giving her back to the camera. Elsewhere, the broadly dialectical, rock-and-a-hard-place dramaturgy of the screenplay (cowritten by Corbet with his partner, the Norwegian actress and filmmaker Mona Fastvold) is patterned after There Will Be Blood, while the slippery, liminal quality of certain passages is indebted to The Master, as is the material’s barely submerged themes of sadomasochism and subjugation.
Such are the potential perils of being a filmmaker trying to thrust greatness upon himself. Corbet comes by his fascination with megalomania honestly; cults of personality figured into both of his previous directorial efforts, which built on his success (and connections) as an axiomatic millennial art-house star. 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader was a mock biopic of an early 20th Century demagogue, while Vox Lux (2018) featured Natalie Portman as a globally famous, psychologically disintegrating pop star. Those films felt like attempts to wrestle with an incipiently fascist global zeitgeist; The Brutalist, which arrives right on time thematically speaking, maps the distance between aspiration and hubris, while commenting on how one inevitably bleeds into the other.
It’s been noted that Corbet’s main character is named after the Hungarian-born geologist Laszlo Toth, who (in)famously defaced a statue carved by Michelangelo while shouting, “I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead!” It’s one thing to stand on the shoulders of giants; it’s another to try to cut them down to size. The key to Brody’s performance, which carries the aura of his Oscar-winning turn in 2002’s The Pianist, lies in its furiously sublimated quality of yearning; Laszlo always seems to be looking past whatever’s in front of him, toward some future horizon. When he crashes with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture store owner who’s offered him a job in his shop, his circumspect, well-practiced gratitude is shadowed with contempt—not only for the the dilapidated basement apartment where he’s been fated to stay, but for the other man’s eager assimilation into a society that had earlier turned a blind eye to the suffering of European Jews.
Laszlo’s desire to transcend his cousin’s Waspy cosplay—and to leave his mark on the landscape instead of simply reupholstering bourgeois interiors—gradually catalyzes The Brutalist, shaping it into a parable about the literal and figurative cost of doing business. Corbet is hardly the first filmmaker to try to allegorize his own practice through a story about a driven creative visionary; it’s hard not to see The Brutalist in the context of Megalopolis, except that that film’s skyscraping architectural metaphors were erected without any kind of studio oversight (which accounts for its curious and occasionally beguiling lack of tension). Corbet’s film, which cost $10 million but looks considerably more lavish than that, is more legible as an embittered reckoning with the compromises of an industrialized artform. In interviews, the director has played the role of the aggrieved and cash-strapped visionary to the hilt. “Art and commerce are frenemies,” Corbet told The Hollywood Reporter in September. “I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals. Any filmmaker who would say otherwise is being dishonest, because whether it’s the studios or private equity, if you follow the money, it generally doesn’t come from a great place.”
The money in The Brutalist comes from one Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a blue-blooded industrialist whose name ominously mashes together two different U.S. presidents; not only does he believe in America, but America believes in him. The first time Harrison meets Laszlo, it’s to forcibly eject him and his construction crew from his family’s palatial country home, where he perceives the unkempt emigre (who’s been hired surreptitiously by his son to remodel the library) as an intruder. After realizing that Laszlo is a former media darling—and that he can wow his society friends by showing them glossy magazine layouts of his gorgeously designed new reading room—he decides to welcome him into his inner circle as an exotic, foreign-accented pet and potential collaborator.
Pearce always has been a resourceful actor, with the ability to weaponize his own suavity, and he makes Harrison repulsive in direct proportion to his reptilian poise. He inhabits the part to the point where he seems to be acting with his pores; it’s as if there’s a thin film of resentment spreading across the character’s forehead. The more that Laszlo works to build his grand commission—a community hub honoring the memory of Harrison’s sainted adoptive mother and her successor’s self-image as a pious good Samaritan—the more that his benefactor crumbles into resentment and insecurity. Harrison wants to live in proximity to genius but can’t stand being swallowed up in its shadow, and his inability to reconcile the contradiction is suggestive of something larger: The covetous impulse directing several generations of dynasty-minded all-American psychos to outsource and erect cathedrals in their own dubiously well-bred honor.
For most of its magisterial first half, The Brutalist successfully mines the tensions inherent to this artist-patron relationship and occasionally hits paydirt, as in the hushed, quietly unhinged sequence in which Harrison recruits a gobsmacked Laszlo to construct a proverbial shining city on a hill—an offer the architect can’t refuse. That Laszlo is being asked to essentially enfold four distinct structures in one, the largest of which is a church, underlines the complexity of Corbet’s own act of project management, which attempts nothing less than the compartmentalization and deconstruction of American exceptionalism itself.
The Brutalist has been blueprinted as a movie narratively and interpretively spacious enough to work simultaneously as history, sociology, satire, and psychodrama. That’s a tall order for any filmmaker, and as the movie goes along, it collapses—first gradually, then all at once—beneath its own weight, squishing ambiguity into obviousness and archetypes into clichés. The most egregious of these is the character of Laszlo’s wife, Erzsébet, a frail concentration camp survivor who’s more effective (and affecting) as a structuring absence than as embodied by a game but disastrously miscast Felicity Jones, whose arrival sends the action spinning off its axis. Her performance, which mostly keeps her confined to a wheelchair, is a pileup of physical tics topped off with an almost wilfully artificial Eastern European accent; she doesn’t so much seem like a refugee from Hungary as an asylum seeker fleeing a less scrupulously controlled period piece.
It’s surely intentional that Erzsébet’s watchful, skeptical presence punctures the film’s masculinist metaphysics, but she’s never a fully realized character, and neither is her teenaged niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), a full-on cipher defined by a blunt literary conceit. The girl is so tight-lipped about her wartime experiences as to appear functionally mute, and so becomes an emblem of all the difficult things going unsaid between the other characters. The schematism keeps deepening from there: not only does Erzsébet and Laszlo’s first sexual encounter mirror the latter’s fresh-off-the-boat solicitation of a sex worker in New York, but both sequences exist in stylistic thrall to, again, The Master, which at least had the sense of humor to frame its centerpiece handjob sequence as a virtuoso sight gag-slash-dirty joke.
What makes Anderson a great filmmaker is his elastic mastery of tone, which allows him to stretch anxiety and aggression into unexpected directions. Corbet has a similar interest in historical research and world-building from the ground up, but he isn’t nearly as dexterous a dramatist, and he keeps betraying his heavy hand. The film’s show-stopping aerial point of view shot that renders an explosive tragedy at a clinical distance is meant to charge the story with cosmic significance, but it merely heralds The Brutalist’s unfortunate slide into detached and desultory abstraction, the telltale sign of a director aiming so high that he ends up hovering above the material as well as the audience. A grim narrative detour during Laszlo and Harrison’s second-act visit to Italy pays off the section’s title—“The Hard Core of Beauty”—while piling on shock tactics. Corbet’s metaphors become veritable meta-fives. (Or, to put it another way, The Brutalist’s pale, pachyderm aspects trample all over the termite-like tenacity of its production.)
Because so much of The Brutalist is impressive—alive and tactile in ways that many movies made at its level have all but given up on—it’s hard to completely write it off for its flaws. At the same time, the general quality of its craftsmanship can’t quite obviate the hollowness of the entire enterprise—not even when hollowness itself becomes a metaphor, as integrated into Laszlo’s most subversive architectural flourish, which reconfigures his adventures in project management as an act of revenge, served as cold as concrete. The film’s final scene ostensibly complicates our (anti?) hero’s ultimate legacy, as well as the links between postwar Jewish identity and nation-building—the aforementioned and ambivalent (and, in context, devastating) relationship between journey and destination. But it’s difficult not to think that the subtext of the coda—which depicts the bestowal of a lifetime achievement—may have more to do with Corbet himself.