Brady Corbet’s odyssey into the artistic realms of the 20th century promises, on paper, to be a time-spanning epic. But though the running time is a whopping 3hrs 35 minutes — with a 15-minute interval whether you want it or not — The Brutalist is, surprisingly, much more intimate than that. The type of 70mm he uses, shot by regular collaborator Lol Crawley, is not the epic canvas of Lean or Kubrick but a way to propose a sense of scale. It’s the story of a man who thinks big, from a director who also has a vision that doesn’t fit easily into the modest confines of American independent cinema. It falls somewhat short of its lofty target, but it casts a strange spell and often swells with imagination.
Taking his cue from Lars Von Trier, for who he worked as an actor on Melancholia, Brady (with co-writer Mona Fastvold) parses his film into four sections, the first being the Overture. All is chaos as László Roth (Adrien Brody) makes his way from Hungary to the United States at the end of the Second World War. His journey is a scrappy montage of handheld camerawork, overlaid with the voice of his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he has been forcibly parted. Erzsébet quotes Goethe, which will come into play in the second half of the film, and László clings to the hope that they will be reunited.
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Surprisingly, almost nothing of the film depicts László’s life up to this point; before you know it, an upside-down Lady Liberty informs us that we’re in New York and László is going through immigration at Ellis Island. In Manhattan, László goes a little wild and joins his friend Atilla (Alessandro Nivola) in a whorehouse. “We have boys if you prefer,” says the madame, something else that will take on a intriguing new resonance by the end.
Part One is catchily titled “The Enigma of Arrival, 1947-52,” and sees László set off to join Attila in Pennsylvania, where he runs a furniture store and has taken the name Miller (“Folks here, they like a family business”). The range they’re selling is already antiquated, and the Millers know it. “It’s not very beautiful,” says László. “That’s what you’re here for, maestro,” says Atilla, and the so post-war furniture boom begins.
László moves into a storage space, and things take a turn for the unexpected when an important client, Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), comes to the shop. His father, rich businessman Harrison Lee Van Buren, is away, and Harry wants to surprise him on his return with a brand new library (“Keep it below $1,000”). It’s at this point we learn that László was a licensed architect back in Budapest, and he is more that qualified for the job.
On his return Van Buren Snr. (Guy Pearce) is mortified by their streamlined designs and throws László and Atilla out on their ears, screaming, “You have turned it all inside out!” Harry refuses to pay them, and Atilla evicts László, falsely accusing him of flirting with his wife. He winds up doing manual labor, and is shocked when Van Buren turns up at his workplace. Like many of the nouveau riche, it turns out that Van Buren believes his own publicity, never more so than when a society magazine features him and his spanking new library with the headline, “A MILLIONAIRE AMID HIS MODERNS.” Van Buren has done his homework too. “Why is an acclaimed foreign architect shoveling coal in Philly?” he wonders.
Van Buren takes László off the breadline and charges him with executing his dream: a community center — called The Institute — in honor of his late wife Margaret. The building must be a multi-faith space, which rankles with László’s purist sensibilities, but he accepts the challenge while bristling at Van Buren’s attempts to rein in his vision (a not-too opaque metaphor for any director’s relationship with their producers).
This opening half is surprisingly light — a hangout movie, almost — but the second half becomes a lot more heavy going while, oddly, never really expanding the focus (for arthouse audiences, 3hrs 15 minutes is nothing, making the intermission more of an adornment than a necessity). Titled “The Hardcore of Beauty, 1955-60”, Part Two sees Erzsébet joining him, together with their niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) at the Van Buren house. Erzsébet is something of a buzz-kill, and she detests the phoniness of her new surroundings; she doesn’t say it, but Goethe’s famous phrase must surely be on her mind as she watches her husband being used and abused: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Things take some dark and unexpected, not to mention entirely unbelievable turns, notably when Erzsébet confronts the Van Buren family with a doozy of bombshell that is nigh-impossible to see coming. And though Guy Pearce is simply terrific as Van Buren, his character makes a very sudden exit, which rather derails the flow of the movie. Add to this the fact that much of the film’s detail is in the epilogue, in which we find out more in 10 minutes or so about László, his art, his love for Erzsébet, and the profundity of their experiences in Dachau than we have in the actual movie.
Like László, however, Corbet is saying it as he sees it, and there’s a perverse charm to his hardcore aesthetic, just as there was in Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux. The Brutalist reprises some of those film’s themes, and vast chunks of cast (Stacy Martin is a fixture now), but somehow it doesn’t quite feel as finished. Then again, as Frank Lloyd Wright might say, does any architect every really finish? Shot with an impressively European veneer that recalls Sunset by Hungarian director László Nemes, Corbet’s film is both an edifice to the practical possibilities of cinema and, more notionally, a memorial to the late, much-missed Scott Walker. Goddammit it, he would have written a hell of a score.
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