Originally posted Sept. 1, 2024
A love letter to minimalism built on a maximalist scale, a paean to mid-century modernism dressed in old-school blockbuster biopic clothes, American auteur director Brady Corbet’s third feature is certainly a monumentally ambitious passion project. Spanning close to four hours, including an overture, an epilogue and a 15-minute intermission midway through, The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance.
The Brutalist world premieres in Venice competition this week, shortly followed by a North American launch in Toronto. It has strong prize potential on the Lido, where both of Corbet’s previous features enjoyed positive receptions, but is likely to earn polarised reviews. By wearing its self-conscious “masterpiece” signifiers so overtly, it becomes a less interesting, more conventional film than it might have been. It is certainly Corbet’s most ponderous and least playful work to date, following his striking proto-fascist allegory The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and his inventive post-modern pop-diva meta-comedy Vox Lux (2018).
Like those earlier films, The Brutalist was shot on classic 70mm celluloid, this time in the antique VistaVision format, the high-resolution widescreen system that paved the way for IMAX. Having the industry clout to work with these expensive analogue formats is certainly impressive, putting Corbet in the same rarefied league as Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan. Painted in the gorgeous, grainy, painterly tones of vintage colourised postcards, it certainly looks magnificent, even if the wordy screenplay sometimes hits the same laborious, humourless low notes as Nolan and Anderson at their worst. There are distant echoes here of Anderson’s risibly hammy There Will Be Blood (2007).
But in fairness, Corbet’s film is still a richly layered and impressively singular statement for such a young, relatively inexperienced director. Despite superficial parallels with Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly scaled architectural epic Megalopolis (2024), this palatial period piece is more sprawling neo-baroque mansion than towering grand folly. Focus Features have already signed up international rights.
Drawing on his own Hungarian heritage, Adrien Brody gives a riveting, haunted, multi-lingual, full-spectrum lead performance as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish exile who washes up in late 1940s New York City on the great wave of displacements that followed the vast geopolitical ruptures of World War II. A much-feted, Bauhaus-trained modernist architect back home in Budapest, Laszlo has now fallen on hard times as a penniless refugee. He survived terrible oppression under the Nazi and Soviet occupations, and continues to suffer, as he was forced to leave his wife and niece behind in Hungary when he fled Europe for America.
László’s bruising travails as a newly arrived immigrant in America have a raw John Steinbeck feel, with periods living on Skid Row, eating at soup kitchens and even developing a mild heroin habit. But his fortunes initially seem sunny when he joins his prosperous cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in small-town Pennsylvania. Attila, who has Americanised his Hungarian name and notionally traded Judaism for his wife’s Catholicism, puts Laszlo’s world-class design skills to humble use in his furniture shop, This leads to a more prestigious commission, remodelling the library in the nearby mansion of business tycoon, Van Buren (Guy Pearce in compelling, grandstanding mode).
A Howard Hughes-style blow-hard with loud opinions and a fiery temper, Van Buren initially rejects the library, but later comes to appreciate its forward-thinking beauty. He then enlists László for a much larger personal project, to design and build a huge community centre on the grounds of his estate, a memorial to his late mother. After agreeing on a boldly modern concrete palace incorporating a chapel and theatre, Van Buren also offers László a new home on his sprawling property, plus legal help in bringing his sickly wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, piercingly good) and mute niece Zsofia (Corbet regular Raffey Cassidy) to America.
This emotionally charged family reunion signals a shift in the story’s fragile power balances, with sexual and ethnic tensions increasingly part of the picture, especially when a major train accident puts the building project on indefinite hold. Years later, when the team finally begin breaking ground and pouring concrete, László’s megalomaniac side comes to the fore, stubbornly resisting all attempts to cut costs on his uncompromising design. “Everything that is ugly, cruel and stupid,” he tells one of his rival project managers, “is your fault.”
The Brutalist takes an indulgently long time to make some fairly banal points about clashing male egos, wealth as power, commerce versus art, and latent antisemitism in post-war America. A good 30 to 40 minutes of talk-heavy scenes featuring dry construction detail and minor dinner-party chit-chat could have been safely excised. Some plot details, notably László’s on-off heroin addiction and Zsofia’s poorly explained selective mutism, are forgotten for long periods before Corbet summons them again for dramatic convenience.
The film’s wildly swerving final act features a beautifully shot, dreamlike sequence set in an Italian alpine marble quarry. But it also includes a bizarre out-of-nowhere rape scene, too much histrionic family soap opera, and a clunky epilogue set in Venice in 1980, finally making explicit the Holocaust back story which has been oddly overlooked for most of the film’s marathon runtime. These sudden melodramatic additions almost feel like afterthoughts designed to add emotional force and sharper meaning to an otherwise opaque, undisciplined narrative.
Brilliant in parts, cumbersome in others, The Brutalist is easy to admire but hard to love. Dramatically, it veers perilously close to ponderous, preposterous and pretentious at times. But aesthetically, it scores highly, from its ravishing 70mm panoramas of Hungary (standing in for rural Pennsylvania) to Corbet’s meticulously crafted opening and closing credits sequences, which pay eye-catching homage to 20th century avant-garde graphic design.
Sound design and music are also a hugely important element here, with ambient noise woven seamlessly into an ever-present audio mix, including a score than swings fluidly between vintage be-bop jazz and contemporary classical music. A touching final dedication to the late Scott Walker, who scored Corbet’s previous films, strikes a bittersweet note. Walker began his career as a traditional pop balladeer but became an increasingly experimental modernist composer in later life, a creatively daring trajectory that might give Corbet pause for thought as he edges closer towards the middlebrow cinematic mainstream.
Director: Brady Corbet
Screenwriters: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Cast:Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
Cinematography: Lol Crawley
Editing: David Jancso
Production Designer: Judy Becker
Costume Designer: Kate Forbes
Music: Daniel Blumberg
Sound: Steve Single, Szabolcs Gáspár
Producers: Trevor Matthews, Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren, D.J. Gugenheim
Production companies: Brookstreet Pictures (UK), Kaplan Morrison (US), Andrew Lauren Productions (US
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian
215 minutes
