A reductive description of Brady Corbet’s ambitious The Brutalist is actually quite easy to conjure — in a classic immigrant tale, a Jewish Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect arrives in Philadelphia in 1947 and forges a new life for himself and his family.
The long version, however, would note that The Brutalist is a 215-minute epic, complete with an entr’acte and that it deals with themes of vision and compromise; class and privilege; the appropriation and exploitation of a worker’s creativity for corporate gain; the failure of the American Dream; and how art transcends time and place. And that’s just the beginning.
Corbet won a Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in September for the film — his third after the more-polarizing The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux. Last week the film won directing, acting (for lead Adrien Brody), score (Daniel Blumberg) and cinematography (Corbet regular Lol Crawley, The Devil All the Time) prizes at the British Academy Film Awards, and is currently awaiting the results of its ten Oscar nominations.
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In a rare stroke of living up to the hype, the accolades are entirely earned. Corbet has delivered as pure a piece of cinema as anything in the form’s history. The Brutalist is a big, sprawling, dramatic, technically brilliant showcase that’s also intensely human. Don’t put any stock in the artificial intelligence-related controversy that’s crept up. There are a total of three vowel sounds delivered with the assistance of AI in the entire film. The Brutalist is the result of hundreds of creative hands working in concert toward a cinematic symphony.
The story starts with László Tóth — a pained and proud Brody — arriving at Ellis Island as so many immigrants did in the early 1900s. We follow him in the darkness for a jostling, dislocating few minutes as László fights his way through the crowd to get his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. The view is upside down, and then it’s sideways — a hint of what America will hold for László. His first few months are spent living with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who owns a furniture and interiors store with his Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird). When Harry (Joe Alwyn) — the entitled son of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, the film’s under-the-radar standout performance) — comes into the shop one day, looking for help with renovating the family estate’s library, Attila recommends László. It’s the start of László and Harrison’s fractious relationship, one that is subject to Harrison’s moods. The architectural partnership also peels back the layers of László’s character and mirrors the forward march of American capitalism.
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The script by Corbet and regular collaborator Mona Fastvold is incredibly layered and gracefully packed with details that propel the story as it reveals who these people really are. The pacing is flawless. Broken into two chapters, The Brutalist plays like two sections of one long saga, turning inward in the second half, after László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, brilliant as a late-arriving character) and his traumatized niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) arrive in America. Erzsébet’s presence inspires László’s simmering ego to fully blossom, and her wisdom gives him the courage to find his own voice — leading to an inevitable clash with Harrison’s as it gathers more force, to devastating effect.
Shooting in VistaVision — basically, high-resolution 35mm film turned on its side, the same format used in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — Crawley’s images match the poetic scope of the script. They are warm and rich when needed and imposingly bold and weighty elsewhere but always with an emollient finish that invites viewers into a film that’s challenging, and rewarding, right up to the final discordant music notes.
