Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Brutalist’ on VOD, in Which Adrien Brody Plays a Visionary Architect in a Toweringly Impressive Epic

One of the etymological origins of the word “brutalism” is “art brut,” or “raw art,” and there’s no argument against Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) being precisely that. This no-other-word-for-it capital-E Epic spans decades of narrative time and asks seemingly dozens of gigantic questions as it charges toward the conclusion of its sprawling 201-minute run time (note: the movie you’ll see at home doesn’t feature the theatrical version’s 15-minute intermission). After the film managed to align Corbet with Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson in the hearts of holy-crap-did-you-see-that-oner film-bro types, it stacked up 10 Oscar nods for picture, director, screenplay and its three acting leads, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce – although it only seems like a sure thing in the musical score and cinematography categories. And now that we’ve consumed The Brutalist like a dozen-course meal, it’s time to digest it and wrap our heads around what it does and what it means.   

THE BRUTALIST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Our first impression of Laszlo Toth (Brody): Emotionally, shall we say, aggressive. Passion bursts from his every pore. A Hungarian Jew from Budapest, he managed to survive the Holocaust and make it to the United States of America. He extracts himself from the bowels of a ship and emerges into delirious natural light as the woozy camera all but blinks itself awake and tilts its head back until the Statue of Liberty wavers upside-down in the frame. After a dissatisfying encounter with a prostitute, Laszlo makes his way to Philadelphia, where he crazy-passionately embraces his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), holding his face in his hands as if it were a hyper puppy he has to pin down in order to kiss. It’s not Attila who’s effusive, mind you – Laszlo has an energy to him that just can’t be contained. It’s the eccentric and nervous and confident and brash energy of a man who has emerged from a horror and now finds himself free and hungry, in the cradle of opportunity of the American Dream.

And so Laszlo sleeps on a mattress on the floor of a dingy backroom of Attila’s furniture shop, which he runs with his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). Laszlo stands in a bread line where the shelter runs out of food before he reaches the door. But at least he makes a friend in fellow hungry man Gordon (Isaach de Bankole), a homeless widower taking care of his young son – and now they, a Jewish immigrant and a Black man, can be side-eyed by waspy Americans together. Laszlo weeps to learn that his wife, Erzsebet (Jones), and their beloved niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) also managed to survive, but a reunion is far off if not impossible thanks to the entanglements of bureaucracy. In Hungary, Laszlo was a celebrated architect who designed brilliantly minimalist buildings that became landmarks. Now, he fashions a beautiful chair from a pair of elegantly curved steel rods and places it in the shop display window. “It looks like a tricycle,” Audrey sneers. “What’s that?” Laszlo replies. “A bicycle. For children.”

That untenable situation gets worse after Attila and Laszlo are commissioned to redesign the reading room in the sprawling mansion of a rich industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Pearce). Harrison’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) has Laszlo turn the cluttered room into a sparse, open space bathed in natural light. It’s a surprise for Harrison, who returns with his dear ailing mother and, to put it gently, flies off the f—ing handle. Entitlement does that to people. He refuses to pay and Attila blames Laszlo and Laszlo ends up in a shelter and working on a construction site with Gordon, with whom he parties in clubs positively exploding with sweaty free jazz, and shoots heroin. Laszlo stands atop a mound of coal with a shovel when Harrison pulls up to greet him. Harrison apologizes and pulls out a folder full of photos and architectural journal clippings detailing Laszlo’s work. The rich and powerful man has discovered an artist of great acclaim! He invites Laszlo back to the estate and the next Sunday morning a driver picks up Laszlo after he spends the night in a porno theater so Harrison can commission Laszlo to build a massive community center in honor of Harrison’s late mother and courts him with the promise of pulling strings to get Erzsebet and Szofia untangled and on their way to America. Laszlo accepts. If this sounds like a deal with the devil, well, let it be known that Laszlo fears nothing, as it should be at this point in his life.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Oppenheimer and There Will Be Blood are the obvious ones. Less obvious: The Immigrant, Brooklyn. And Brody-wise, this role is absolutely of a piece with the one that won him his Oscar, The Pianist.

Performance Worth Watching: Brody needs to shift into powerhouse mode more frequently than every 22 years.

Memorable Dialogue: Here are the juicy lines that help define the three core characters:

Harrison: “Dreams slip away.”

Erzsebet: “You’re right. This place is rotten.”

Laszlo: “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid, but most importantly ugly – everything – is your fault.”

Sex and Skin: Several graphic sex scenes with nudity, and a horrific rape scene.

Our Take: I’d hazard compiling a list of all the things The Brutalist is “about,” but it might test the data capacity of the entire internet. Drugs, sex, art, capitalism, religion, immigration, bigotry, postwar despair and the class struggle are the headliners in Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold’s impressively thorough indictment of the American Dream. No shortage of ambition here. Yet despite all this, the film isn’t overwhelming – we’re immediately absorbed by the doom-ridden foreshadowing of its opening sequence, and Brody’s vastly complex characterization of a (notably wholly fictional) Great Man embroiled in ideological warfare with a Man Who Thinks His Own Self Is Great. 

So the film’s most fascinating component is the juxtaposition of Laszlo and Harrison at the most frayed and wild extremes of irrationality. Laszlo is the artist driven to design megaliths to beauty and ego, and his belief that the destination is more important than the journey underscores the idea that one’s creative vision must be chased no matter where it leads. (Do the ends truly justify the means?) Harrison is the capitalist whose influence allows him to do and say as he pleases, his wealth creating something close to a moral vacuum. Between them is an assertion about the notion of freedom itself: Laszlo experienced the ghastly horror of enslavement; he may believe destiny opened the doors to freedom for him because of his talents. Harrison is a man of privilege who feels no shame in wielding it; he likely believes he has amassed enough power to control his own destiny. There are points between them on the contextual spectrum where they share common ground – Harrison truly appreciates Laszlo’s vision, and they both plumb deep wells of self-loathing.

I don’t think there’s much subtlety in brutalist architecture: Concrete foundations extend and rise up in monolithic gray blocks that are both intimidating and beautiful. Thematically, there isn’t much subtlety in The Brutalist either – Laszlo designs and pours foundations for constructions that are doomed to be compromised, which is a problem when he puts so much of his soul into his work. The symbolism doesn’t loom quietly in the background, but rather shouts directly into the lens. Lady Liberty is inverted. Pragmatists routinely try to alter Laszlo’s vision. Construction is waylaid for years due to misfortune (fate?), ego clashes and misguided ambition. America rots internally and towers, precariously top-heavy, externally. The country is broken and pushes falsehoods as its most noble traits. The glittering stars in our eyes distract from corrupt reality.

And so The Brutalist feels like a bludgeoning, and at the risk of sounding like an apologist, a bludgeoning might be necessary in a time when nuance cowers in the basement as a tornado of hyperbole wrecks the house. You can’t say the film isn’t zealous, well-thought-out and lovingly crafted – it’s lovingly shot, rich in detail, tonally dense and utterly absorbing. Three-plus hours feels like, well, about two-and-a-half. It doesn’t quite bring to fruition Jones’ characterization of Erzsebet as a driving sexual force behind Laszlo (shades of The Master in her monologue-over-a-hand-job scene), but Brody refuses to divulge a single cliche of serially obsessive characters. Corbet — who kind of takes it upon himself to devise a metaphor for filmmaking auteurs’ struggles to create in a climate rife with IP dumps and chintzy streaming fodder — couches so many fertile ideas within a picture of such massive scope, it’s hard not to feel blown away by this work. Say it with me: cinema!

Our Call: The Brutalist is a monument in itself. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Brutalist’ on VOD, in Which Adrien Brody Plays a Visionary Architect in a Toweringly Impressive Epic appeared first on Decider.