The Brutalist is a major work of art that asks something from its audience but gives back in spades. Weighing in at a meaty 210 minutes, complete with an old-school opening overture and a 15-minute intermission, it’s like a trip to the pictures circa 1962. It’s even been compared with The Godfather, a parallel that would crush a lesser film like a tin can.
Brady Corbet’s epic can handle the hyperbole. With his long-time co-writer Mona Fastvold, the actor-turned-filmmaker has forged a monumental parable about the false promises of the American dream, as well as the act of creation and its uneasy relationship with money, all underpinned by a rich and complex love story. It’s presented in period-evoking 70mm VistaVision, each grainy frame filled with note-perfect performances and big ideas about assimilation, trauma, and architectural form and meaning.
After charting the aftermath of the Great War in The Childhood of a Leader (2015), a brooding origin story for a fictional dictator, Corbet repeats the trick with the post-World War II era.
Hungarian-Jewish modernist architect László Toth (Adrien Brody, as good as he’s been since The Pianist), his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their all-but-mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) could easily be victims of that same dictator. They’ve survived the concentration camps but only László has escaped from Europe. He stumbles from the hold of his cargo ship in a stunning opening shot that eventually fills the screen with the Statue of Liberty and the full jubilance of his new homeland.
The Godfather comparisons would crush a lesser film like a tin can
But the land of opportunity yields very few of them to a man whose pre-war prestige as an architect and disciple of the Bauhaus counts for little among Pennsylvanian’s blue bloods. A bitter interlude in Philly with his shifty cousin (Alessandro Nivola) yields a lifelong friend (Isaach De Bankolé, in a rare underwritten role here) and a taste for bebop and heroin.
When Guy Pearce, channelling Orson Welles in the best performance of his career, steps on screen as his patron-to-be, Harrison Van Buren, the film’s formidable cogs begin to crank. An industrialist who commands the room with an intimidating aura and gliding charm, he’s straight from the pages of F Scott Fitzgerald. He has everything except culture and modernity, László’s sole equity.
Their transactional relationship, blossoming when Van Buren commissions László to build a giant Xanadu-like edifice to his late mother on his vast estate, gives The Brutalist its dramatic muscle – and shades of There Will Be Blood.
The arrival of the terrific Jones as László’s ailing but full-blooded wife, meanwhile, provides a tender heart. It breaks a little when the pair slowly come to realise that, for Van Buren and his poisonous son Harry (Joe Alwyn), they’ll never be anything but inferiors, parvenus with no place in their rarefied world. So much for the land of opportunity.
Just like László overseeing Van Buren’s artisan builders, Corbet marshalls some serious talent to execute this grand vision: from cinematographer Lol Crawley’s shadowy lighting and shallow focus compositions; to costume designer Kate Forbes’ striking fabrics; to Daniel Blumberg’s electrifying modernist score.
Together, they’ve crafted a new world symphony.
The Brutalist premiered at the Venice Film Festival.