The Brutalist screens at the New York Film Festival on 28 September & 11-12 October.
Brady Corbet’s mammoth rise-and-fall-in-America saga The Brutalist has stirred more talk of its meticulous and miraculously inexpensive production than of its premise or ideas—and that’s appropriate. “Is there a better description of a cube than its own construction?” muses Hungarian-born architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody). Indeed, the fact that The Brutalist was shot on 35mm VistaVision and is being projected on 70mm is as germane to the film’s core as the thirty-year journey its protagonist undertakes.
The opening moments boom Big Movie energy, overwhelming Tóth with Manhattan’s ironclad immensity and us with the scope of Corbet’s vision (a rotated frame of Ellis Island blueprints the sort of muscularly analog experience that awaits). Disembarking from a transatlantic voyage that’s gotten him hooked on heroin, Tóth makes way to Pennsylvania and begins building furniture at a furniture shop his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) owns. Attila bemoans the New York grind but unwittingly hints with an Anglicized surname and misleadingly family-oriented business title that he’s running a hustle of his own. Tóth is commissioned by scion to local wealth Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to renovate his father’s study into a library. The surprise, though, isn’t well received by the mercurial elder Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who boots Tóth from his estate only to later enlist him for a sprawling project that will come to define, and undo, both men.
The two wax poetically about form, function, and urban topography—not since Paula Beer entranced Franz Rogowski on a balcony overlooking Berlin in Christian Petzold’s Undine has the subject been this dialectically explored on film—but lively parlor banter earns Tóth only so many privileges. During a trip to Italy for marble that will grace the megalithic civic institute’s centerpiece chapel, Van Buren’s patronizing attitude toward his prized livestock becomes abundantly, disturbingly clear.
In line with the thematic focus of The Childhood of a Leader, Corbet’s debut, The Brutalist is about a new society rising from the ashes of an old world order. Reports of Israel’s inception play over a montage of heavy machinery at work; Tóth uses the back of a letter from his wife (Felicity Jones) to begin sketching his first visions of a new, minimalist architecture that will survive the kind of mass destruction that’s stranded them on opposite sides of the world; in a stained-glass skylight that shatters while being replaced by one of Tóth’s modern design, we can easily see the decimated opulence of pre-war Europe.
Corbet’s formalist austerity makes one wish his screenplay were as temperamentally disciplined. The third act’s high-flying emotions lend The Brutalist to the kind of awards buzz it’s excited since premiering in Venice, but they also reduce the proceedings to the stuff of pure soap opera. Gone is the restraint Corbet showed in The Childhood of a Leader. His first film may not be as entertaining as his latest, but it’s at least confident enough to leave certain things unsaid.
The Brutalist has been compared to Once Upon a Time in America, The Godfather, There Will Be Blood, and 12 Years a Slave, all of which are regarded as forces of nature not for how well they simulated epics of the past, but for their continuing to refine the medium into something cleaner, more precise, and therefore, per Tóth’s theory, indelible. The Brutalist, on the other hand, is too decorated in the cerebral exterior of the Great American Film to fulfill its aspirations. Or perhaps there’s a point to be gleaned from the contradiction between the philosophy of the film’s protagonist and that of its director, despite the clear parallel between a school of architecture that emphasizes raw materials and a piece of art defined by the process of its own creation.
Whether the filmmaking is a metaphor for the story or vise versa will make for, as Tóth’s benefactor calls their bull sessions with a disquieting hint of lust in his voice, an intellectually ss-timulating pastime—and Lol Crawley’s painterly compositions, evocative of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper, are never less than majestic—but the movie’s ultimate message about the flipside of the American Dream belongs to a well-populated genre of social commentary rather than the sort of complex thesis a 35mm VistaVision epic demands critics identify.
The Brutalist traffics in one too many New Hollywood affectations to be a true modern classic.
Director: Brady Corbet
Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce
Writers: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Producers: Nick Gordon, D.J. Gugenheim, Andrew Lauren, Andrew Morrison, Brian Young
Music: Daniel Blumberg
Cinematography: Lol Crawley
Editor: Dávid Jancsó
Streaming Availability:
