Review: THE BRUTALIST

 by Rob DiCristino

“Dreams slip away.”

If you plan to buy a ticket for The Brutalist at any point over the next few weeks, you probably already know a few things about it: You probably know that Brady Corbet’s period drama runs more than three-and-a-half hours in length, including an intermission and epilogue. You probably know that it’s the first major film in decades to be shot in VistaVision (a horizontal variant of 35mm usually used for big-budget adventure films) and that it premiered at the Venice Film Festival — where Corbet won the Silver Lion for his direction — projected on twenty-six reels of 70mm film. You might even be familiar with brutalist architecture, a school of midcentury design that molds large slabs of concrete into rough and angular shapes that give the structures they produce a cold, resolute, and oppressive look. Brutalism favors texture and substance over gloss and aesthetics, making it fitting subject matter for a devastating epic that reveals the harsh reality of the immigrant experience and the wasting rot at the heart of the American Dream.

The first of The Brutalist’s two massive acts begins in 1947, when Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) sets eyes upon America for the first time. Though we cannot imagine the horrors that have forced László to these shores — we only know that he left a wife (Felicity Jones as Erzsébet) and a niece (Raffey Cassidy as Zsófia) mired in bureaucratic red tape in Budapest — Corbet abruptly drop-kicking his camera to reveal an upside-down Statue of Liberty leaves us less than convinced that those horrors have come to an end. It’s a decidedly unsubtle bit of foreshadowing that we’re compelled to ignore, however, when László’s cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) recruits him as a partner in his fledgling furniture business. Attila is the very picture of assimilation: He’s Americanized his name — Miller, not Mueller — married a blonde shiksa (Emma Laird as Audrey), and enthusiastically surrendered to the wonders of capitalism. With László’s genius now at his disposal, Attila intends to build an American empire of his very own.

Their first opportunity comes from delightfully-WASPy Philadelphia industrialist Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants to surprise his father (Guy Pearce as Harrison) by turning his beloved study into a proper library. Though initially taken aback by the presumption of such a poorly-scrubbed immigrant, the imperious Harrison soon recognizes László’s talents and appropriates them in the design and construction of a massive multipurpose community center atop a hill in nearby Doylestown. Supposedly a memorial to his late mother, the center will actually serve as a monument to Harrison’s self-declared victory over free enterprise, a grand offering of fealty to American exceptionalism. But as László reaps the rewards of this arrangement — including sufficient political influence to secure Erzsébet and Zsófia passage to the United States — he must also endure the throes of opioid addiction, his wife’s painful osteoporosis, and the crushing weight of a traumatic past he suspects will never truly leave him in peace.

That past haunts The Brutalist as it marches through a second act paralleling the community center’s erection and the Tóths’ disillusionment with the nation it means to celebrate. “We tolerate you,” Harry Jr. boasts after too much liquor. “They don’t want us here,” László is forced to conclude. Erzsébet, for her part, sees these Americans for the opportunistic cretins they are, figurative and — eventually — literal rapists who never had any intention of welcoming László’s kind to the fold. When Harrison’s entrepreneurial vigor finally sours into paternalistic rage, László realizes that he can no longer stomach the hypocrisy of a country that claims to have earned the treasure it pilfered as the rest of the world was bleeding to death. Corbet literalizes this molestation in a clumsily-staged final sequence as blunt and obvious as his first look at Lady Liberty, and your mileage will vary on whether or not he needed have brutalized us in such bold terms just to make a self-evident point about the caustic relationship between management and labor.

Eager Letterboxd Bros shouldn’t fret, however, as The Brutalist is nonetheless an achievement worthy of both its demanding running time — if anything, it might have benefited from a few extra minutes to smooth out a needlessly hurried climax — and of Adrien Brody’s stunning lead performance. All cheekbones and sinew, Brody imbues László with the sheepish altruism we’ve seen in treacly Hollywood immigrant stories and the haunted desolation suffered by survivors of real-world atrocities. But rather than jamming these attitudes together cacophonously, Brody keeps them in conversation as László grapples with whether or not America is ultimately worth his trouble. He’s well matched by a sterling Guy Pearce, who balances Harrison’s turgid entitlement on the right side of charming up until the very moment it needs to become terrifying. It’s the best work either actor has been given the opportunity to do in many years, a pair of front-running performances poised to lead an awards season sorely lacking in any serious contenders.

And though The Brutalist is principally driven by its remarkable scale, a verticality of both form and structure that complements a decades-spanning epic about the intersection between industry and identity, Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold save its most profound revelation for a quiet epilogue that puts László’s work in a startling new context. If all art is rooted in autobiography, if the very act of artistic expression is fundamentally a personal and political exercise, then the Doylestown project is not an expression of the Van Burens’ glory but of László’s pain. It’s a prison he’s built for his trauma, a holy site at which he can exercise the demons that have plagued him since his arrival. But as he tries and fails to take hold of an American Dream held just out of his grasp, it becomes a monolith to the incompatibility of his past and present, a reminder that power and peace are not given to anyone; they are taken. Stolen. The America of The Brutalist is built on hate, fear, and jealousy, and László has more than sufficient experience with all three to know just how to memorialize them in slabs of cold, unforgiving concrete.

The Brutalist is in limited theatrical release now.