The Brutalist announces itself with a bombast befitting its title. In a single take, the camera follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody) through a dark and crowded space, shoving between shoulders, working his way forward and upward toward some unseen goal. It begins to dawn on us that he’s in the hold of a ship. When he finally emerges onto the deck, with the camera spinning unsteadily, an iconic landmark welcomes him: the Statue of Liberty, appearing at turns sideways and upside-down.
That visual subversion is purposeful, for The Brutalist—a fictionalized biopic of sorts, tracing Tóth’s 1947 escape from Europe, where he was once a celebrated Hungarian-Jewish architect, to a new life in the United States—presents the American dream as a false promise. Tóth may have survived the Holocaust, but surviving this capitalist country, dominated by wealthy, intolerant WASPs, will come with its own costs.
Directed by Brady Corbet, who wrote the screenplay with Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is a bold behemoth: filmed in widescreen VistaVision, running three hours and 35 minutes, with an overture and an intermission. (The swelling score, by Daniel Blumberg, evokes an appropriate sense of striving.) The movie could certainly have been pared down, considering some scenes seem unnecessary or are even confusing, while others appear to have been included to show off, rather than add anything to the themes or plot. There are also times when the movie visually presses its points harder than necessary (a frantic jazz club sequence dominated by low-angle shots, a Christmas dinner where the rich guests are captured in grotesque close-ups).
Yet other sequences in The Brutalist will make you glad to be alive while we still have movie theaters with giant screens. Tóth is eventually hired by a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce, doing his best to keep his mustache from twirling) to design and build an enormous chapel in honor of his late mother. Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley frame this grand endeavor—with its massive walls and materials, all employed in the brutalism architectural style—in stark, staggering, psychologically evocative ways, evoking Tóth’s desire to make as massive a mark on this land as possible (even if the project represents a compromise, considering he’s an observant Jew and the central feature is a skylight in the shape of a cross). Altogether, then, The Brutalist is a momentous movie, if not quite as momentous as it thinks it is.
As Tóth, Brody draws out his long features in a performance defined by stoic suffering—even more so than his turn in 2002’s The Pianist, where he played another man haunted by Nazi atrocity. Brody may lean a bit too hard into miserablism, at times, but there is no denying the rawness he brings to the scene in which Tóth is finally reunited with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and is shocked to discover that her own ordeal has left her in a wheelchair. This occurs in the second half of the movie, during which Jones brings a life force that is essential—to both Tóth and the film. Her Erzsébet, though physically feeble, has the resilient spirit that is seeping, slowly, from her husband. Together, they try to form a new life that makes space for their separate traumas.
Politically, The Brutalist is a tricky proposition—especially in a moment when Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at a renewed, awful inflection point. Parallel to the movie’s critique of American capitalism and intolerance are occasional references to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. During an early montage of Tóth designing and building furniture for his cousin in Philadelphia, we hear news reports about the country’s formation. Far later in the film, Tóth and Erzsébet debate with other family members who are trying to persuade them to move to Israel. “Does it make us less Jewish that we are here?” Erzsébet asks. Then there are the film’s final words, delivered in a speech that could be interpreted as authoritatively Zionist. I’ll leave it to others with more personal investment in that debate to make the final call. But certainly The Brutalist ends the way it began: with boldness.
(11/27/2024)
