The Brutalist

Movie title: The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)
Movie description: Perhaps fittingly for a film of such immensity and ambition, The Brutalist is a very good film that ultimately falls short of genuine greatness. In the watching, however, one can only relish in director Brady Corbet’s giant achievement, a film that so evokes an older, grander era of cinema as to make its aesthetics feel new again.
Date published: January 29, 2025
Country: United States, United Kingdom, Hungary
Author: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Director(s): Brady Corbet
Actor(s): Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce
Genre: Epic, Drama
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Movie Rating
Written by Tom Augustine.
‘Is there a better description of a cube than its construction?,’ waxes Lászlo Tóth, Adrien Brody’s war-ravaged architectural genius when discussing what draws him to his chosen form of expression. It is by this token that director Brady Corbet has constructed his own film around Tóth, The Brutalist, one of the most hotly discussed and broadly celebrated films of the year. Ambitious to a fault, one of the stranger claims I’ve seen about this film is that its sweeping immensity – which has been the core of much of the film’s discourse – has somehow produced a work that is cold, hollow and severe, perhaps a misconception shared by the architectural movement that gives the film its title, which from the outside probably appears the same. Brutalism, as a movement, is a response to and rebuke of fascism, an idea which is very much on The Brutalist’s mind. The heat of feeling that forges a movement like that is present in the film’s DNA. Corbet’s grandiloquence is matched by his overwhelming, even overbearing passion, crafting a film which is about many things but most rewardingly about the pain, difficulty and compromise of being an artist in a capitalist society that values art only as far as it can be used for the purpose of economics. Corbet has been very vocal about just how hard it was to make The Brutalist, a film that took seven years to produce and was somehow made for just ten million dollars, despite looking better and grander than almost anything else in cinema this year. By that token, this story about a postwar Hungarian Holocaust survivor trying to express his artistic vision under the grinding wheels of predatory commerce is, in a sense, standing in for the making of The Brutalist itself. It is a cube describing its own construction.
There is so much to discuss with The Brutalist, a nearly four-hour film shot in VistaVision, a classic film format not seen since the days of Mary Poppins, more than I could hope to cover here. At its heart, it is the story of the making of a masterpiece – not The Brutalist itself mind you, which is too overburdened by all it attempts to do to ascend to such a sphere – but the enormous structure that Tóth, a recent émigré to Pennsylvania, has been plucked from obscurity to spearhead for the mysterious business magnate Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who aims to build a multi-faceted community centre in the name of his recently deceased mother. The film has many other things on its mind, and many pathways to tread on the road to completion, but the building is the thing, as the film always is the thing for true filmmakers. Along the way, Tóth, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), all concentration camp survivors – face any number of abuses, self-inflicted and otherwise, in order to achieve Tóth’s majestic vision. For those who wish to make great works of art but don’t come from families of means – myself included – this is a story close to home. With the recent death of David Lynch, the finest filmmaker of his generation and one of the most important cinema artists to ever live, such ideas are doubly impactful – like architecture, so much of cinema is hobbled by the necessity of money, and artists like Lynch, who struggled to get work made right up until his death (thanks Netflix) are so often laid low by philistines whose wealth is their means of control. It’s a positive mark in The Brutalist’s column that it can be read as a film as much about the filmmaking process as the many weightier themes that the film’s scale eagerly implies, whether that be immigration, assimilation, Jewish identity, or America itself.
Corbet, known initially as an actor in films such as Martha Marcy May Marlene, Force Majeure and Haneke’s Funny Games remake, is very clearly a cinema purist, a self-styled auteur in the mode of the great filmmakers he’s worked with like Haneke, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, Gregg Araki, Bertrand Bonello and Lars Von Trier. With his three films thus far – The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux and The Brutalist – he’s clearly walking the walk, even if he hasn’t quite mastered the talk. These are handsome, provocative works with a clear eye on impressing the highest-minded cinema intellectuals among us. The see-saw pulled the wrong way with Vox Lux, an odious and painfully obvious film about a popstar who rose to fame after surviving a school shooting, most notable for its terrible original songs and a career-worst turn from Natalie Portman in the lead role. Thankfully, The Brutalist is far more successful, even if some of the tendencies that hobbled Vox Lux rear their head in the later stages of this film’s extensive runtime. You’ll see time and again the sentiment that Corbet doesn’t lack for ambition, a damning-with-faint-praise kind of remark which belies the fact that Corbet can be assured that the film he’s made is very good indeed. He has remarked on his intention to try and make work that lives up to the imposing oeuvre of Kubrick and the like, a mission statement that our Tall Poppy echo chamber will gladly deride as laughably pretentious. Personally, I’d always rather watch someone shoot for the very top and miss than glide comfortably into the middle ground.
Across two mammoth halves, a (very welcome) intermission, and an enigmatic epilogue, Corbet traces the lives of the Tóth survivors across several decades in the middle of the twentieth century. Its scope and largesse aligns it with the likes of The Godfather and Heaven’s Gate, as does its predilections with questions of America’s legacy and identity. Corbet and his team, which includes writer Mona Fastvold, composer Daniel Blumberg and cinematographer Lol Crawley, have wrought a genuinely astonishing feat from their threadbare budget. The mid-century production design by Judy Becker is immaculate, and Crawley’s VistaVision images carry a regality that aligns closely with the aforementioned works, while still having moments of twitchy character that vault The Brutalist into the modern day. Corbet’s assured direction is not content to simply craft an ode to the epics of yore, layering in weighty implications for where America (and, compellingly, Israel) are to go in the years following the events of this story, and that are paralleled by Corbet’s clever and economical workarounds to budgetary restrictions. Case and point – a late-breaking train derailment is rendered not with CGI and bombast, but from a dizzying height, the ghostly steam the train emits mostly clouding our vision of the disaster beyond the haunting flicker of distant flames.
Perhaps fittingly for a film of such immensity and ambition, The Brutalist is a very good film that ultimately falls short of genuine greatness. In the watching, however, one can only relish in director Brady Corbet’s giant achievement, a film that so evokes an older, grander era of cinema as to make its aesthetics feel new again.
Throughout the film, we are most often with Adrien Brody’s Lászlo, and the actor channels a fierceness and magnetism that glues us to the screen. It is a performance in knowing conversation with Brody’s last award-winning turn as another Holocaust survivor in Polanski’s The Pianist back in 2002. His Lászlo is a bracingly complex creation; frustratingly noble, haunted and bedraggled by his suffering, prone to vices innumerable, sometimes servile and cringing, other times puffed up with artistic braggadocio. A vast cast that includes fine work from Emma Laird, Nymphomaniac’s Stacy Martin, Alessandro Nivola and a very welcome Isaach de Bankolé provide ample support as Brody chews up the screen. He is matched blow-for-blow, however, by Guy Pearce as Tóth’s shadowy financier Van Buren. Suggestively named, it is a role that is so utterly transcended by Pearce’s astonishing work that what the character is actually written to do in the film feels less than the energy the actor is bringing to it. Felicity Jones, meanwhile, has a less glamorous role as the long-suffering wife of the genius. Jones’ performance has been dinged by some for its proximity to the film’s second-half downturn – to me, those faults do not lie with Jones, who is a necessary firebomb thrown headlong into proceedings when she finally appears midway through the film.
The Brutalist works best when it is tackling that question of artistic integrity head-on. In the first half of the film, Corbet and his team rarely set a foot wrong, tracing the eventual meeting of Tóth and Van Buren across a number of years in thrilling fashion. A sequence where Tóth is engaged in a restoration of Van Buren’s library, finally free to flex his artistic muscles, is profoundly moving. In a later monologue, Tóth explains to Van Buren that his buildings are a kind of artistic vengeance, a strident monument to the survival of the artistic (and Jewish) spirit. So dazzling is the film’s command of pacing, so muscular are Corbet’s directorial choices throughout, that runtime agnostics needn’t fret. If anything, the film could be longer – so many of its ideas are so massive as to warrant their own film, which means that some shortcuts down more obvious pathways must be taken. The film is less successful in its dissection of the long shadow of the holocaust, or the many evils of the American project, or the sadistic perversity of the rich. In these thematic reservoirs, Corbet loses his edge, opting in the later half for blunt – and, in one particular instance, clumsy – narrative turns that weaken the overall impact of the experience. The Brutalist takes on so much weight that it at times feels like it is drowning under its own intentions. Corbet so consciously seeks to place his work in the company of the greatest artists of many different forms that their glow diminishes Corbet’s, particularly when such allusions and nods feel decorative rather than substantive.
As for the way the film handles Zionism, a sinister thread that pokes its head out at different moments in the film’s narrative, the film’s intentionally ambiguous final scene feels telling, but in which direction it is pointing is unclear. Corbet himself has been less than useful in this regard, too – advocating for the distribution of Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land in one moment, asserting that he agrees with the words spoken by Raffey Cassidy’s Israeli expat the next – and ultimately the jury is out on whether to be generous enough to Corbet to see the film’s use of Zionism as an intentionally muddied symbol or a simple plot device. Extrapolate hard enough, and one can see the way in which The Brutalist presents America as a proto-Israel; a place supposedly full of promise for the traumatised Jewish diaspora that belies a rotten core, but one must make a few significant leaps to get to that place. In another light, I doubt the Zionist viewer would necessarily come away from The Brutalist feeling that it took a negative stance. Is Corbet attempting to generate genuine debate, or is he simply employing an artsy but vague posture in order to prop up the film’s aura of ‘complexity’? Ultimately, such ambiguity has the hollow ring of punch-pulling, particularly in a film so stridently loud in its discussion of all other matters.
With all the caveats in mind, it is frankly a staggering achievement that, in spite or even because of these flaws, The Brutalist just works. Make no mistake – it is a genuinely thrilling, frequently inspiring watch, stretching desperately for a kind of intellectual and artistic greatness that other films, even (and especially) those joining The Brutalist in this year’s Oscar lineup, wouldn’t dare to attempt. I emerged from the film with my head racing, energised. I didn’t sleep for hours. How rare that a film of such a commanding length and heft leave the viewer not exhausted but elated. Likewise, the success of The Brutalist, with its strong award chances and heavy buzz, is a joy to behold. A good film can be forged of anything, come out of nowhere. Corbet’s film is one that advocates for the days of the event movie, an event that compels, troubles, provokes and moves. It’s a film that utilises (mostly) traditional methods not to frolic in the past but to suggest a future where our cinema, this young art form, strives to meet the greatness of its forebears. That’s something to celebrate.
The Brutalist is in cinemas now.