“The Brutalist” is a bursting-at-the-seams saga of bold men and their equally outsized visions. Set across several decades in the aftermath of World War II, it is a grave, serious, visually sumptuous movie that puts a great many ideas into play, starting with the tension between art and commerce. It largely focuses on one man in one place, but its concerns are more expansive and touch on everything from utopia to barbarism, desire, death, form, content, immigration, assimilation and the promise and perils of modernity. Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokes, this one offers a slab.
The movie is built on a series of vivid contradictions, including those embodied by its protagonist, László Tóth (a haunting Adrien Brody). A Jewish-Hungarian architect and survivor of the Holocaust, he arrives on Ellis Island as a refugee and, in short order, travels to Philadelphia, where he finds complicated shelter amid the ghosts of America’s colonial past. There, László experiences the feverish exuberance of postwar America but also multiple, crushing defeats. He’s lonely and forlorn, becomes homeless and an addict. He’s also ambitious and finds towering success. László repeatedly suffers and rebounds; mostly, he endures.
Directed by Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist” is a period drama with the ambitions of a historical reckoning. For László, who arrives destitute in the States, history is a wasteland. Given the Nazi destruction of European Jewry (the formation of Israel becomes a winding story thread), it’s hard to know where else he would go; in America, he at least has family. Once in Philadelphia, he reunites with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who lives with his pretty Catholic wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), and runs a furniture business that carries his new name, Miller & Sons. “The folks here,” Attila explains, “like a family business.” They apparently don’t like Jews, because Attila also says he’s now Catholic.
Soon after László arrives — Attila puts him up in a small room off the showroom, like the hired help — he begins designing new furniture for Miller & Sons to replace its heavy, Colonial Revival-style pieces. His first piece, a cantilever chair with a frame made of tubular metal, looks like something that the Hungarian-born designer and architect Marcel Breuer would have designed. Breuer apparently said that he was inspired by a bicycle to make his first such chair, an association that Audrey echoes when she says László’s chair looks like a tricycle. She’s skeptical of László and his creations, maybe even suspicious.
Corbet, who wrote the script with Mona Fastvold, doesn’t explain Audrey’s attitude outright. He folds a great deal into “The Brutalist,” slipping ideas and meaning into reminiscences and privately whispered confessions, but he also lets his larger themes surface in actions and in hard, cold gazes. If Audrey never openly says why she doesn’t like László, she doesn’t have to. He’s family, so she’s polite. But he’s a stranger, a foreigner and a reminder of her husband’s heritage. When she looks at László, it’s as if she were examining a strange, somewhat distasteful creature. Soon after they first meet, she says that she knows a doctor who can fix his nose, which seems broken; she all but asks him to fix his identity.
It’s a quick, pointed scene in a movie that grabs onto you immediately and builds steadily with measured, insistent force. Corbet can be subtle, though that’s not his usual preference (his earlier movies include “Vox Lux”), but he’s going for monumentality here. He likes big, bold moments and grand, metaphorically resonant images that he often pushes to the near-breaking point. One of the first images in “The Brutalist” is an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty, a disorienting, topsy-turvy angle that conveys László’s literal point of view as he emerges from the darkened depths of the ship that has carried him to America. The statue is already heavily freighted with complex, contradictory meaning that László embodies and is a harbinger of his destabilized story. It’s also an emblem of Corbet’s ambitions.
These extend to the movie’s presentation. “The Brutalist” runs three hours and 20 minutes, not including a 15-minute break that counts down on onscreen. (The movie never drags, but the intermission is welcome; more long movies should have them!) Releases like these were known as roadshows, and they signaled a movie’s importance or at least its scale and scope; in the 1950s, when much of “The Brutalist” takes place, roadshows also indicated to audiences that these films could only be seen in theaters. Much as Corbet does throughout, with beauty and soaring camerawork, the presentation of “The Brutalist” states his intent: I imagine that he’s announcing that “The Brutalist” isn’t made for distraction. It isn’t on Netflix.
Just as László’s tenure at the furniture store proves brief, his dealings with Audrey turn out to be an easy run-up to the far more complicated relationship he forms with a wealthy patron, the amusingly named Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (a tremendous Guy Pearce). Corbet spends time on László’s other attachments, especially when his wife, Erzsébet (a strong Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), are at last allowed to enter the United States. László also makes his only real friend early when he meets another outsider, Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), at a soup kitchen. Yet even after Erzsébet and Zsófia move in with László, these relationships — and finally the movie itself — are overshadowed by Harrison.
Harrison bursts into the story in a lathering rage, shouting and storming, and immediately jolts “The Brutalist” into a more heightened, excited register. He’s an industrialist — he made his fortune during the war — with a sprawling estate, a gloomy mansion and two spoiled, vaguely debauched adult children, Harry (Joe Alwyn) and Maggie (Stacy Martin). They’ve hired László to redo their father’s study as a surprise. Harrison rejects the results, but when Look magazine publishes a glowing story on the study (“A Millionaire Amid His Moderns”), he hires László to build a huge center where the surrounding community can gather, reflect and learn. “Something boundless,” as Harrison grandly describes it, “something new.”
Having been lauded by Look as “forward-thinking,” Harrison sets out to play the role of the modern man with a vengeance. Audrey may not like László’s slight, open and simplified furniture, which, like his accent, hunger and deep melancholy, sets him apart from her settled middle-class life with Attila. But László is an avatar of an ideal that she can’t begin to understand, a conceit that the story underlines when, early on, he tells Attila that his store’s furniture isn’t “very beautiful.” László isn’t simply criticizing the pieces or making a casual judgment but instead expressing an aesthetic sensibility, a philosophy, a worldview. Harrison doesn’t understand, much less share, that worldview, but being a successful capitalist, he knows László’s value to him as a means to an end. He pays László, buying his time, buying him.
Throughout “The Brutalist,” Corbet gestures, openly and obliquely, toward ideas and history, and the movie’s intellectual scaffolding. László studied at the Bauhaus, the German art school where form followed function, and which drew artists and architects like Breuer, Kandinsky and Mies van der Rohe. In 1933, the Nazis pressured the school to close. The rest is history, although, as László’s story makes clear from the moment he lands in the United States — in a journey that takes him from the old world to the new, from fascism to capitalism, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the smiling, totalizing embrace of the American century and all it entails — it is a history that feels very present. Is it any surprise that this movie belongs to its villain?
The post ‘The Brutalist’ Review: Ambitions Unbound appeared first on New York Times.
