A-Directed by Brady Corbet Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Before The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s greatest sequence of filmmaking comes at the end of his debut, The Childhood of a Leader. By the end, the rebellious kid has grown into the titular leader, a fascist facsimile greeted by a wild crowd on his way to who knows what atrocity. The spinning, disorienting camera is part of the crowd, pushing and jostling to get a look. It’s a shocking way to end an imperfect film, and Corbet carries that same style into the beginning of The Brutalist. This time, the camera is part of a crowd in the hold of a ship headed to Ellis Island, and where it landed in an ominous place for Childhood of a Leader, here it lands on the Statue of Liberty after emerging from the literal dark of the hold and the metaphorical dark of WWII Europe. Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is overjoyed to be here, and the film is too based on the way that Daniel Blumberg’s score is building, but that camera style implies something else. The Brutalist brings titanic cinematic might to bear from its first scene, self-consciously filmed in VistaVision to evoke the grand epic road shows of the Hollywood studio system heyday. It reeks of importance and achievement, and it delivers on what it promises through Corbet’s will and ambition and his collaboration with an immensely talented cast and crew.
Laszlo is one half of a Hungarian Jewish couple that survived the Holocaust. His wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) is still stuck in an Eastern European refugee camp, and until she can get to the US and her husband, Laszlo will have to make do. A brilliant architect with major works still standing in Budapest, he’s reduced to doing whatever’s available to him in America. That’s initially shacking up with a deracinated and assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), but that ends when a remodeling contract for a Philadelphia business titan (Guy Pearce) is ill-received. It’s flop houses and manual labor after, until Pearce’s Harrison van Buren comes around on his Laszlo-designed library and seeks him out. Van Buren becomes Laszlo’s benefactor and sponsor, ultimately enlisting him in designing and building a multi-use facility in the Pennsylvania countryside in Laszlo’s preferred brutalist style. He also is able to help Laszlo bring Erzsebet to America, though their reunion is strained by their lingering injuries from the war. Her malnutrition has left her in a wheelchair, and a broken nose left him in permanent pain that he self-medicates with heroin. The mercurial and indecisive Van Buren can only alienate Laszlo over time as Laszlo’s status slowly degrades into that of one more employee.
At 215 minutes, The Brutalist is packed with so much detail and momentum that it never wears out its welcome. Its density guarantees that ten different viewers would have ten different major takeaways, and an elliptical, out-of-step ending is up for interpretation, like Corbet is firmly on the line between the straightforward epics of the 60’s and the muddy thinkers of the 70’s. For me, the film unfolded at around the 90 minute mark. Van Buren has invited Laszlo to a dinner party, and they get each other alone. Van Buren asks Laszlo why architecture, and sensing the moment, both Brady and Brady-as-Laszlo lean forward for their big speech. This scene has to work for the entire film to succeed, and it does. Laszlo’s gaze leaves Van Buren for the middle distance as he talks about what lasts, what survives the erosions of the shoreline.
Van Buren is taken with Laszlo’s description and envious of his ability to express himself, and that envy is the whole point. One can take The Brutalist as an immigrant story or a Holocaust story and be most affected by that, but what worked the most for me was the idea that for all their power, the money men are unable to express, and therefore know, themselves. Men like Van Buren lack creative or artistic instincts and have enough self-awareness to recognize it. The thing that’s missing in them might be why they have so much, but if they had it, maybe they wouldn’t have wanted so much in the first place. All that time that might’ve been spent on design and creation and general thought is replaced by consumption and accumulation, which makes them hollow and fickle and vengeful. Pearce plays all that in reaction to Laszlo’s speech, and it’s the film’s skeleton key. It’s a credible dissection of the patron-artist relationship from a director who’s talked openly about how little money he made over the course of making the film. To the extent all movies are about moviemaking, it’s not a stretch to see that onscreen here.
The film’s controversial ending can also be read as a comment about filmmaking, which is a take I prefer to the surface one that’s otherwise presented. The Brutalist is the kind of film where the viewer can construct their preferred interpretation and be right, just as the characters present at the ending might be accurate in what they’re describing or justifying their worldview through unrelated means. Along the way, Corbet packs the film with incident and memorable sequences that trumpet the film’s importance. That’s not said in a back-handed way. The Brutalist is like sitting in on a great lecture and feeling the thrill of understanding. No eroding riverbank for this work of art. A-
At 215 minutes, The Brutalist is packed with so much detail and momentum that it never wears out its welcome. Its density guarantees that ten different viewers would have ten different major takeaways, and an elliptical, out-of-step ending is up for interpretation, like Corbet is firmly on the line between the straightforward epics of the 60’s and the muddy thinkers of the 70’s. For me, the film unfolded at around the 90 minute mark. Van Buren has invited Laszlo to a dinner party, and they get each other alone. Van Buren asks Laszlo why architecture, and sensing the moment, both Brady and Brady-as-Laszlo lean forward for their big speech. This scene has to work for the entire film to succeed, and it does. Laszlo’s gaze leaves Van Buren for the middle distance as he talks about what lasts, what survives the erosions of the shoreline.
Van Buren is taken with Laszlo’s description and envious of his ability to express himself, and that envy is the whole point. One can take The Brutalist as an immigrant story or a Holocaust story and be most affected by that, but what worked the most for me was the idea that for all their power, the money men are unable to express, and therefore know, themselves. Men like Van Buren lack creative or artistic instincts and have enough self-awareness to recognize it. The thing that’s missing in them might be why they have so much, but if they had it, maybe they wouldn’t have wanted so much in the first place. All that time that might’ve been spent on design and creation and general thought is replaced by consumption and accumulation, which makes them hollow and fickle and vengeful. Pearce plays all that in reaction to Laszlo’s speech, and it’s the film’s skeleton key. It’s a credible dissection of the patron-artist relationship from a director who’s talked openly about how little money he made over the course of making the film. To the extent all movies are about moviemaking, it’s not a stretch to see that onscreen here.
The film’s controversial ending can also be read as a comment about filmmaking, which is a take I prefer to the surface one that’s otherwise presented. The Brutalist is the kind of film where the viewer can construct their preferred interpretation and be right, just as the characters present at the ending might be accurate in what they’re describing or justifying their worldview through unrelated means. Along the way, Corbet packs the film with incident and memorable sequences that trumpet the film’s importance. That’s not said in a back-handed way. The Brutalist is like sitting in on a great lecture and feeling the thrill of understanding. No eroding riverbank for this work of art. A-
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