The Brutalist
One of the many things that makes Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist so essential is how it defies easy categorization. It is about so many things without specifically hammering, highlighting, or bullet-pointing them. Sure, it’s impossible to miss the commentary on capitalism embedded in the script by Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Still, it’s also a story of immigration, addiction, Zionism, architecture, inequity, class, violence, and even filmmaking. The word ambitious is overused in modern criticism, but the very existence of The Brutalist feels like a miracle: An original story shot on VistaVision cameras, released in 70mm, complete with overture and intermission. It’s a film that turns inward into itself, winding its themes around its characters like a great American novel.
Adrien Brody does the best work of his career as Laszlo Toth, who is introduced in an essential, tone-setting sequence. At first, it’s hard to tell where he is, surrounded by people in an overcrowded space with the cacophony of conversations around him and the booming score from Daniel Blumberg starting to make itself known. As he moves through the crowd, he pushes himself through doors and into sunlight, his face bursting with happiness at the site of the Statue of Liberty, but Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley warp the moment by presenting the iconic structure upside down, at the top of the frame. The statue shifts to the side, but it’s never upright, a warped symbol of the American dream, an overture of the film’s main theme to follow in the form of an unforgettable image. This prologue also includes a quote from Goethe that feels like the most pronounced Corbet & Fastvold get in how to read what follows:
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves free.”
Toth believes himself free, getting a job at his cousin Attila’s (Alessandro Nivola) furniture shop, notably named Miller & Sons despite there being no Miller and no sons. Like that floating statue, Corbet & Fastvold are seeding themes that will grow later, playing with the artifice of capitalism, a structure that sells the comfort of a family business over actual artistry. When Toth designs a chair to be put in the front window, Attila’s wife Audrey (Emma Laird) tells him it looks like a tricycle. This is a film that experiments with form while also being about how people exploit artistry and value function over expression. It will eventually become a story of a hollow monument, a building with a benefactor who wants to make something for everyone but has no creative passion of his own to put in this empty structure.
Laszlo’s life changes when Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) comes to Miller & Sons to hire them to remodel his father Harrison’s library while he’s away from home. The project falls apart when Harrison (Guy Pearce) returns home in a fury, angry that his house is being torn apart by people he’s never met, and refusing to pay. The drama leads to an emotional decision by Attila, who kicks Laszlo out of his home, sending him into an addiction spiral with his friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), until Harrison returns with an apology. He brings Laszlo into his world of upper-class snobs, people who display their wealth like it has any meaning, even to a Holocaust survivor, who they see as another object to own.
Harrison offers to help Laszlo bring his wife Erzebet (Felicity Jones) and their niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe, but it’s a prelude to what he really wants: The design of a community center that will serve as a tribute to Harrison’s recently deceased mother. It’s a place to gather, but also a place that he controls, and one that he claims will look forward but is anchored in the past by being a monument to his mother. There’s a key scene in the film just before Harrison makes this public proposal in which he asks Laszlo why he’s an architect, and the survivor speaks about how his structures have reportedly survived the war and how they will speak for generations after the conflict. “My buildings were designed to endure such erosion,” he says. Kind of like film. It’s not hard to read The Brutalist, a work with technical ambition like no other this year, as a commentary on its own existence, a monument to the art of filmmaking as much as anything.
Harrison seeks to control Laszlo from the very beginning. He will eventually cross all lines of physical and moral righteousness, a clear parallel to how capitalism destroys art, taking from it what it wants and needs before disposing of it. The turn that the film takes with Harrison and Laszlo is sharp, but Corbet makes sure that kind of brutal ownership is there from the very beginning.
Of course, an American epic like The Brutalist only works if the cast is on the same page as the creator, and the performers here deliver. Brody’s performance is one of broad expressiveness, the overflowing emotion of seeing the Statue of Liberty or the tears that roll down his face on hugging his cousin, and then watching that joy leave his countenance as the world around him erodes it away. It’s a strong contender for the best performance of the year. Pearce balances him perfectly, playing Harrison as a force of selfish nature, giving the film a much-needed jolt from his very first moment on-screen, and perfectly capturing the kind of wealthy monster who discards anyone around him once he’s used them up.
The Brutalist is also a technical marvel, most notably in Crawley’s fluid cinematography, crafting compositions that look gorgeous in 70mm without ever feeling overly showy. His work is organic and beautiful, and it’s anchored by excellent editing from Dávid Jancsó and an effective score by Blumberg. The sound design as a whole is a load-bearing beam in this film’s construction, from the hum of that first scene to the many sequences of men at work, the background noise of the “American Dream” after World War II.
Some will look at the 215-minute runtime of The Brutalist and bring out that dreaded word when it comes to serious, long movies: pretentious. Of course, it’s pretentious. You couldn’t make this movie effectively without pretension. But one person’s pretentious is another’s ambitious, and I wish we had more movies this pretentious, this unapologetic, this willing to do more with film than so many even consider.
The Brutalist is a work that incorporates well-known world history into two of the definitive forms of expression of the 20th century in architecture and filmmaking, becoming a commentary on both capitalism and art. Both are essential to the story of the human experience. Both can be beautiful. Both can be brutal.
