‘The Brutalist’ is an epic tale of American building and belonging
The title of “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s big swing of an American epic, refers to many things. Any builder who works in the imposing minimalist school of post-World War II architecture known as brutalism. The movie’s architect hero, László Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who comes to the United States after the war and through force of personality battles to complete his vision of a masterpiece on a hill. László’s patron and opposite number Harrison Lee Van Buren Jr. (Guy Pearce), an aristocratic Philadelphia businessman who represents everything the Land of Freedom means to László and everyone who wants to keep him out.
Clocking in at three hours and 35 minutes (which graciously includes a 15-minute intermission), “The Brutalist” might seem from the outside as forbidding as the colossi for which it’s named – an entertainment poured in concrete. Yet it’s a surprisingly fleet and involving saga, maybe not a masterpiece but a good, meaty, provocative story with complicated characters and tricks up its sleeve. Corbet is an actor turned writer-director who, at 36, has ambition to burn (and, as of Sunday, multiple Golden Globes on his shelf), but you can feel the movie love coursing through his veins.
Even better, he knows how to bring out the strengths in his collaborators, who include co-writer and life partner Mona Fastvold and the film’s cast and crew. Having already won an Academy Award for Roman Polanski’s 2002 war drama “The Pianist,” Brody might seem in danger of forever being typecast as a woebegone Mitteleuropean survivor, except that László Toth is anything but woebegone. Emerging from the steerage of a steamship entering New York Harbor at the start of “The Brutalist” – to an annunciation of horns courtesy of Daniel Blumberg’s sweepingly innovative score – László already has a perfectionist’s gleam in his eye. He’s an artist and an uncompromising one, which causes initial static with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a happily Americanized furniture builder with a blond wife (Emma Laird) who’s unsure about László’s designs for modernist chrome chairs and maybe for her.
The hero’s true talents are realized when he and Attila are hired to refurbish Van Buren’s home library as a surprise from his son Harry (Joe Alwyn), and László delivers a stunning renovation in which the wall shelves open up like the gills of a fish or the wings of an angel. Van Buren is surprised, all right – and outraged until his new library gets raves as a triumph of design and he learns of László’s prewar work for the Bauhaus. A self-made success anxious to prove himself as “a forward-thinking man,” Van Buren commissions László to build an immense community center near his mansion in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, dedicated to his beloved late mother. And so the games begin.
“The Brutalist” piles a lot on its plate, but at bottom it’s a story of an irresistible object – László – meeting the immovable forces of American caste, capitalism, aesthetics and exclusion. The antisemitism of Van Buren’s world isn’t obvious, but it’s always there like a background hum, even when the architect agrees to add a chapel to his building and comes up with an ingenious design that casts sunlight on the altar in the shape of a cross. Elsewhere, László defends his vision in the face of budget trims, paid consultants, racists and other kibitzers with the arrogance of a true believer.
At first, he struggles alone, except for Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), a friend from his first flophouse days in America and a partner in construction and the occasional heroin jag – whatever horrors László saw during the war, they’ve left him with a drug habit. After the film’s intermission, he’s joined by his wheelchair-using wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), war refugees allowed at last to emigrate, and “The Brutalist” slowly tightens its stranglehold on László’s dreams.
This does not play out as an innocent sacrificed, because László isn’t an innocent and he’s certainly nobody’s pushover. The final hour of “The Brutalist” shows the wife, an Oxford-educated journalist, proving herself an ally in the face of a great crime while her husband is buffeted by betrayals and Van Buren shows the limits of his patronage and even humanity. Early in the movie, Van Buren’s son makes sure to remind the architect, “László? We tolerateyou,” and the warning is a bear trap “The Brutalist” sets and leaves standing, waiting to snap shut.
Arguably miscast, Jones brings as much ferocity to her role as she can, but she’s not quite the stricken dreadnought the script requires her to be. By contrast, Brody’s László has a spark of insolence and assurance that his beleaguered keyboard player in “The Pianist” never possessed, and Pearce has never been better as a mid-20th-century Great Man with a smaller, meaner man inside him – a wreck of the F. Scott Fitzgerald.
More curiously, “The Brutalist” comes to a close not with the thunder appropriate to its length but with a muted settling of scores and a revelation regarding the architect’s larger design that detonates more in the head than in the heart, though it lodges there, too. You finish the meal well-fed but wondering why there had to be so many courses and why they don’t add up to a wholly memorable feast.
Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning. Struggling in one scene to explain why he became an architect, László provides Van Buren with a manifesto for brutalism itself: “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its own construction?”
For Corbet, a film – this film – is its own reward. It offers more than enough rewards for us as well.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.