Kimber Myers
At 3 hours and 35 minutes, The Brutalist is a towering achievement, the kind of epic American drama that rarely exists anymore — especially since it includes a much-appreciated 15-minute intermission. From its opening overture and starkly designed credits, this feels like a film made in the Golden Age of Hollywood, including the faces of the actors on screen, who each look like they would wrinkle their noses in confusion if you said the word “Google.” Yet while The Brutalist is largely set in the ‘40s and ‘50s and reflects the societal attitudes of those more regressive times, it’s depressingly relevant for 2024 (as so many historically set movies are).
Writer-director Brady Corbet takes a wildly ambitious approach, dealing with ideas on the scale of a Brutalist building, sometimes with just as little subtlety in its designs — but not necessarily to the film’s detriment. Its complicated protagonist, the Brutalist of the title, is an uncompromising Hungarian-Jew architect who escaped the Holocaust but not its lingering trauma or the continued prejudice in America for both Jews and foreigners. The Brutalist raises questions about America itself and how class, power, and immigration threaten the so-called American dream.
Yet for all its heavy themes and that lengthy running time, The Brutalist is absolutely thrilling. There’s a sense of pure wonder and astonishment throughout; you hit the halfway mark at the intermission and feel like no time has passed. Corbet has made a visionary film about an equally visionary subject, and it’s just a marvel to behold at every moment. It’s almost too much, but I could not get enough.
The face of architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody, aiming for a second Oscar) looks like it could’ve been drawn by one of his fellow devotees of the Brutalist style; it’s all harsh angles and isn’t agreed on by everyone to be beautiful. “Your face is ugly,” says a sex worker on his first night after arriving in America in 1947. “I know it is,” László replies. He leaves the shadow of the Statue of Liberty behind, embarking on a bus trip to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has put down roots, obscured his family’s Hungarian origins, and started a furniture business called Miller and Sons.
László begins working in his cousin’s business as a furniture designer with striking sensibilities. His job soon introduces him to the wealthy Van Buren family, led by Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce, just perfect) whose modern tastes give the two vastly different men common ground. Yet even as László begins to find success in his career, he faces xenophobia and anti-Semitism from the white, Protestant population of Pennsylvania.
László is a complex character, but the film doesn’t debate his talent as an architect. His creative output is stunning, drawing gasps for both its beauty and invention. Vox Lux and The Childhood of a Leader director Corbet is as impressive an artist himself here, both in the themes he tackles and in the filmmaking techniques he uses to express them. It seems lazy to argue that a film should be seen on the big screen (because most should be), but it’s impossible to overstate how seeing The Brutalist in a theater is essential given the scale of, well, everything in Lol Crawley’s cinematography. It isn’t just the buildings, both Brutalist and otherwise; it’s the scope of natural vistas and the tiniest emotions betrayed on these characters’ faces as they try to steel themselves. The cast also includes Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Isaach De Bankolé, and Raffey Cassidy, and each actor plays their roles with precision and vitality.
“It’s the destination, not the journey,” says a character at the story’s end, and while there is much value to the journey in The Brutalist, its epilogue is only when its true aims become clear. Like the spire mounted atop the Chrysler Building at the last minute to vault the Art Deco skyscraper ahead of a rival building, the final scene (and the song that plays over the end credits) push The Brutalist into the stratosphere. This is masterful filmmaking and a joy to watch, despite its often heavy subject matter.
A
“The Brutalist” opens this weekend in limited release.
