The American director’s first feature-length project since Vox Lux is a masterpiece in the making, as era-defining as Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
The Brutalist is an epic of a Classical persuasion, spanning decades, continents and tumultuous personal relationships over the course of one hero’s journey. Of course, Aeneas never shot heroin and Achilles wasn’t a chainsmoker, but they had the gods on their side. Brady Corbet’s first feature-length project, since his divisive faux-biopic Vox Lux—the Natalie Portman-starring pop parable in 2018—explores the life of a fictional Jewish-Hungarian architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody at the height of his powers) exiled from Budapest in the wake of The Holocaust.
The story begins in 1947, when László has just escaped internment at Buchenwald concentration camp. He boards a steamboat, spending untold days in the filthy, cramped dark, stumbling into the New World like a newborn calf—a thrilling, racing set piece scored to perfection by Daniel Blumberg—arriving headlong into a Manhattan brothel. The sex scene that transpires here is one of a number in the film where a conferral of power takes place: detractors of the form will be pleased that these are plot-driven moments, while its proponents should take strength from their complex eroticism—with one bone-chilling, non-consensual exception in the film’s final act, but I won’t say more than that.
While it is true that Corbet is an auteur “fascinated by the cyclical relationship between trauma and culture,” The Brutalist is equally a study of the parasitic dynamic between art and commercial interest, and how either force can bolster the creep of fascism. It recognises capital as a means of individual liberation, and thus a means of practising one’s craft, while also examining its intrinsically corrupting power. László is thrust into poverty again almost as fast as he is yanked out of it by the aesthetic whims of the wealthy Van Buren family, a father and son duo (Guy Pearce and a fantastically smarmy Joe Alwyn) local to the Philadelphia borough of Doylestown. Eager to impress their chosen image upon the landscape, the Van Burens—after an initial resistance—commission him to erect a gargantuan community centre.
Despite his illustrious architectural resumé and education at the revered Bauhaus school, László finds himself defined by his immigrant status. He sticks out among the Van Burens’ monied set, unused to the amenities that they barely register. László lies to explain the shape of his nose and rehearses English tongue-twisters in the hopes of smoothing out his tell-tale accent; he watches his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) convert to Catholicism and pluck the diacritics out of his name, electing to become Attila Miller over Attila Mólnar. He pines for and writes to his wife Erzébet (Felicity Jones) and worries about his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), eventually accruing a degree of status that enables their safe passage to Doylestown, too. But this is only the beginning of a separate set of troubles for the Tóth family.
The film earns comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s era-defining There Will Be Blood through its depictions of industrial America, capturing the raw animalism that can drive an exceptionally motivated worker, as well as both the human and material costs of these ambitions at scale, and the ramifications for the family unit that might be caused by the furious, fervid labour of this ilk.
Shot by Lol Crawley on almost 300 pounds of 70mm VistaVision film—notably the stock most favoured by Hitchcock—even simply screening The Brutalist is a confounding laboral effort in and of itself. In this way, its lofty physical existence makes a case for the grandiose, proving that a hassle can often be worth it; that a story can be both a page-turner and a tome; that an intermission is a welcome practical necessity, and also able to encourage discussion and heighten feeling around a work of art in a way that social media never could.
Trade critics have called The Brutalist “an edifice to the practical possibilities of cinema,” “almost nuttily ambitious” in its scope, an “American Ozymandias” tale that could easily appeal to the predilections of Academy voters. It is all these things, and somehow more. The film seems poised for an awards sweep following its Silver Lion win in Venice, where Corbet thanked his wife (Mona Fastvold, the script’s co-writer) and gave a tearful speech centred on the production’s key themes.
“The world is often cruel to artists, architects, and immigrants alike,” said Corbet. “I am only a filmmaker but for the people in this room who have, like myself, chosen this frequently painful and difficult vocation, this is our community. We have the power to support each other and tell the Goliath corporations that try and push us around.” Corbet then went on to illustrate his “vision for a better cinema” and a “better world” for future generations of creatives, “irrespective of their fucking passports.”
“They deserve the world without borders: something boundless, something new.” What a pleasure it is to feel connected to that place.
