Having previously tackled the formative years of a fascist leader (The Childhood of a Leader) and America’s insatiable appetite for celebrity (Vox Lux), filmmaker Brady Corbet turns his attention to the immigrant experience in America in The Brutalist. Directed by Corbet and co-written by him and Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist depicts roughly twenty years in the life of architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who emigrates to America after surviving the Holocaust. The Brutalist is at once Corbet’s most accessible work—immigrant stories are ingrained in American cinema—and yet it is consciously Not For Everyone.
Running an epic 215 minutes (with a 15-minute intermission), The Brutalist begins in 1947 as László arrives in America, where his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola) lets him sleep in a storeroom at his furniture business. Attila builds ugly but functional furniture for the ascendant middle class who can’t quite afford the pricey stuff downtown, and at first, it seems that Attila and László will make a dynamic duo, especially when László designs a modern library for a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). But Van Buren is infuriated by the work done on his house, and his feckless son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), refuses to pay László for the renovation. Shortly thereafter, László is told to leave Attila’s home and business when Attila’s wife accuses him of unwanted advances—American xenophobia is often represented with a predatory edge throughout the film.
Eventually, Harrison finds László working at a shipyard and he engages László in a large-scale building project, to leave his mark on his home in Pennsylvania. László’s renovation of his library has become an architectural centerpiece, and upon learning that László was an esteemed architect in Europe before the war, Harrison pledges to be his patron, leading to a revitalization of László’s reputation and career. In the midst of all this, László works to bring his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and orphaned niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), to America, a process aided by Harrison’s money and connections.
The second half of The Brutalist follows the arduous process of building László’s grand project, a library cum theater cum gymnasium cum community center cum chapel—forcing a Jew to build a Christian chapel is an irony lost on no one, least of all László, who understands he must prove to the WASPs of Pennsylvania that he is an outsider they can trust, even embrace. But his vision for the building is “ugly”, a large, blocky structure of concrete, with few windows, long, narrow rooms, and an alter that only reveals itself once a day, when the sun crosses two windows just so. László is a brutalist, one of a school of architects who favors structural form over decorative design, and he clashes frequently with other builders involved in the project who don’t understand his vision.
Corbet’s film is as structural as László’s work within, The Brutalist is formal and austere, with flashes of beauty strewn between much ugliness and muck. It is a grandiose film, epic in its scope and scale, but intimate in its storytelling. It’s a film about building and ideas and the rot at the center of the American dream, which only embraces men like Harrison, a blowhard without a creative thought of his own (Guy Pearce’s braying laugh is a perfect encapsulation of Harrison’s desiccated inner life). Visionaries like László, an outsider by every metric, are only grist for the mill, to be chewed up and spit out by the likes of Harrison. Corbet illustrates their parasitic, rapacious relationship in the most, well, brutal way possible, as Harrison is a leech who consumes the gifts of others, he can create nothing of his own. To Harrison, though, László is the leech, sucking him dry via their grand building project, but that is just his rich man’s justification to keep strip-mining László for his own aggrandizement.
The Brutalist is a film of stark, hard beauty, lensed by cinematographer Lol Crawley, and with a sweeping score from Daniel Blumberg. It is a towering work, as grand and ambitious as László’s building, and equally as elusive in nature. László’s chapel depends on precise movements of the sun to reveal its beauty; Corbet’s film depends on the audience’s acceptance of his layered, methodical storytelling, and having the patience to wait for the sun to reach its apex and reveal the beauty within the gloom.
László’s architecture is the architecture of grief, loneliness, and revolution. Corbet’s film is the cinema of failure, regret, and survival, and continues a theme raised in Vox Lux, of America as a ravenous land that devours those who fall for her gilded lies. Like brutalist architecture itself, the film is structured and layered in deliberately oblique ways, it is only beautiful from certain angles, at times it seems designed to disgust, but when the elements line up just so, a grand illumination occurs, and The Brutalist transcends material space.
The Brutalist will play exclusively in theaters from December 20, 2024.
