Brady Corbet’s (Vox Lux) The Brutalist was recently named winner of the Golden Globe for Best Picture - Drama, Best Director, and Best Actor. The film is about a fictional Hungarian architect, László Toth (Adrien Brody), who manages to survive the Holocaust and come to America to start a new life, leaving his beloved wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (played by a few different actresses depending on her age at the time), back in Hungary until he’s successful enough to bring them over.
Shot on VistaVision (a film stock that hasn’t been used in an American film since the early 1960s) and presented with a built-in, 15-minute intermission, the movie is, at its core, about rebuilding a life through creative work, which just happens to be the building of visionary structures that overtly or secretly carry personal messages of their own.
Even with its 3.5-hour running time (not including the intermission), The Brutalist manages to be both ambitious (sometimes to a fault) and sweeping in the most epic and ostentatious ways imaginable. I found the entire experience breathtaking and occasionally exhausting, but in ways that resemble a passionate yet troubled existence. Toth’s initial years (captured in the film’s first chapter “The Enigma of Arrival”) are overrun with guilt, loneliness, abuse, and addiction. He arrives in 1947 and stays with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in Philadelphia, working in his furniture shop. But the relationship sours when the team is commissioned to renovate a room in the home of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), at the behest of his grown son Harry (Joe Alwyn). Harrison arrives back from a trip before the work is done and is infuriated, firing the builders without pay.
A few years later, Toth is destitute, living in a homeless shelter and addicted to heroin, when Harrison tracks him down and invites him to a party in his honor where it comes out that Toth was a celebrated Brutalist architect in Europe. Harrison not only offers Toth a place to stay but a massive, years-long commission to build a project in honor of his late mother—a community center that also includes a library, theater, gymnasium, and a chapel. Toth is overwhelmed by the offer and eventually accepts when Harrison also offers to bring over his wife and orphaned niece.
For those who know little to nothing about architecture (I count myself among you), Brutalist buildings are minimalist structures that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements rather than something more decorative. That definition could also describe Toth, who has simple needs and wears all of his emotions on his tattered coat. Brody has played characters like this before, impressively most of the time. And when placed in contrast to Harrison, with Pearce’s booming, radio-ready voice (I couldn’t help being reminded of Charles Foster Kane), Toth looks small, pathetic, and ready to be taken full advantage of, in more ways than one.
In the second half of the film (“The Hard Core of Beauty”), Toth’s family is now reunited, but upon hearing about their suffering during and after the war, something breaks in his heart so much that he is more distraught than ever. Erzsébet is in a wheelchair and Zsófia has become mute, but somehow this also fuels Toth’s idea for the community center. He’s forced to work with people who don’t share his vision for the project, and this constant interference, coupled with a traumatic event with Harrison to buy marble in Italy, Toth does eventually breakdown and almost kills his wife in the process.
Simply watching a tortured artist go through the paces of getting a project completed as close to his vision as possible isn’t especially exciting; we’ve seen biopics about artists, musicians, and other creative types that cover this territory for decades. But The Brutalist, co-written by Corbet and partner (both professionally and personally) Mona Fastvold, actually shows the work being done in great detail. We watch Toth manifest this massive structure from his tormented psyche (many of the elements on display we aren’t even aware of until a revealing 1980 epilogue involving a retrospective of his work).
The word “pretentious” has been thrown around by a few critics of the film, and I think some of the boldest works of art are just that. I’ve never considered that comment about anything an inherently negative one, and I don’t see how you could make a work like The Brutalist without being the most ambitious filmmaker you can be.
The film certainly has its flaws, although the running time isn’t one of them; I never felt restless or bored watching it. The movie feels like something people might say “They don’t make films like that anymore” about, and they’d be right for all of the positive and negative connotations. I was drawn in by the story, kept engaged by the performances, and viewed the film as one of the better ones about the creative mind and its process that I’ve seen in quite a long time.
The film is now playing in theaters, including 70mm screenings at the Music Box Theatre.
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