Review: The Brutalist

Director:  Brady Corbet

Stars:  Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Isaach de Bankolé

In keeping with the architectural style favoured by its fictional protagonist, Brady Corbet’s third narrative feature is a stern, monolithic fixed object. Running to a cool 215 minutes (inclusive of a built-in 15-minute interval around the 100 minute mark), it feels like the work Corbet has been moving inexorably toward his entire career. Prior features The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux were both wantonly pretentious, self-serious offerings that – for better and for worse – boasted an exposed intent toward lofty auteurism. As though their maker were fashioning himself a legacy and baring befitting of the masters of the medium’s youth. The Brutalist makes good on much of that ambition and ostentation. If the confidence was there already, here the craft comes forward to meet it.

Co-written with his partner (creative and otherwise) Mona Fastvold (The World to Come) who takes second unit duties here and is co-credited above the film, The Brutalist brings to America a beleaguered and penniless architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), from decimated Budapest in the aftermath of WWII. The film’s grandiose overture – set to Daniel Blumberg’s anthemic score – travels the intestines of a ship through near darkness before we’re pointed to the heavens and the looming grace of Liberty herself. The promise of the New World hasn’t felt so seismic in cinema for years. What follows is Corbet’s reckoning with that promise. It comes with all the subtlety of concrete (Tóth’s favoured material), but like the grand designs within the man, it also brings uncompromising scale and power that demands attention.

New York isn’t Corbet’s setting, it transpires. Tóth travels inland, to Pennsylvania, and the taciturn hospitality of his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a furniture store under the name Miller & Sons (as it appeals to American values). Through a commission Tóth comes to meet industrial tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who appreciates the artistic value of Tóth’s European works and requests of him an ego-stroking memorial to his grandmother; a multi-purpose community centre to sit proudly atop the local landscape like the proverbial ‘city on a hill’. Tóth’s vision for the building is singular, his specifications precise and immovable. The project will take years to complete, and take tolls on Tóth he could not have foreseen.

The Brutalist asks about the challenging spaces between American Values and the things Americans value, reflecting – with timely precision – on the country’s often hypocritical relationship with the immigrant. A project that has undergone a long gestation, it feels like a discussion of American politics spurred by the galling mandates of Trump 1 that has – via staggering, impossible-to-predict coincidence – made it to fruition in time for Trump 2. Lee Van Buren is an impassioned, square-jawed American capitalist and a patron to Tóth, but from the very beginning their relationship is transactional and weighted by class and privilege.

Bit-by-bit the veneer slips until it becomes embittered, abusive and destructive. Faith plays a role, too, as does prejudice. By the time Lee Van Buren’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) delivers the curtly hateful “We tolerate you” all pretense is over. Sticking to the dynamic between the industrialist and the artist for a moment, The Brutalist invites (and bares) comparison to two of Paul Thomas Anderson’s compelling works on the dynamics between men of largess – There Will Be Blood and The Master – and can feel like a fever-dream merging of the two. Ego and conflicted sexuality seethe between rams clashing horns in a barely articulated power struggle anchored in hatred.

Both roles are meaty, requiring much from actors who deliver in spades. Flirting throughout the timeline with heroin addiction, Brody’s Tóth is often aquiver with the traumas of holocaust survival and there’s a roiling exploration of Jewish self-hatred nestled in that character that mutates perpetually as the years pass. It may well be Brody’s finest screen performance to date. Pearce matches him on that score, making Lee Van Buren charismatic and terrifying, often at the same time. Pearce goes at it like Daniel Day Lewis might and it often feels like the two men are inspired to greater heights by one another. Seasoned actors evolving to a newfound maturity before our eyes.

Felicity Jones is a relative late-comer to the picture as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet, not appearing properly until the film’s combative second half. Jones more than makes up for lost time, however, and is the driving force behind the film’s eventual cathartic outburst. Here – and in the aftermath – the sizeable running time and accompanying weight of the picture comes through. The film’s ’80s-set epilogue is anything but immaterial, closing the film out on a revelation with a spritely and quotable flourish that I wouldn’t dare spoil here. Nevertheless, the final words – delivered by special-guest Ariane Labed – feel like they’re delivered to us directly from Corbet and Fastvold themselves, making for a coda as exposed and exposing as the one proffered by Scorsese at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon.

There’s a deep, deep conflict within The Brutalist. At it’s most romantic it swoons for the pride and possibilities of America. In conversation with prior masterworks, it sees beauty in the pioneering spirit of engineering and construction. The calloused fingers, the sweat on brows, the excitement felt at the architect’s drawing board. Few images are as iconic to America as laborers traversing sky-scraping scaffolds, lunching between the rivets. Corbet taps that sense of promise but abuts it with the frailties of man. Petty shortcomings and great evils. Both The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux considered working in the shadows of pronounced evils. The Brutalist sees the shadow of the Third Reich as it looms over both Europe and America in those years following the end of the war. Who escaped it, what it took from them, but also who else it may have touched.

As we watch America fall into a new darkness, Corbet’s film takes on the appearance of a dour, flabbergasting requiem. And if it comes within a hair’s breadth of lasting greatness, the gumption to get so close is laudable and stirring to behold.