The Brutalist Is Half Of A Great Movie

A terrific Adrien Brody anchors this three-and-a-half-hour American saga whose ambitions end up exceeding its grasp. Photo: Focus Features, Universal Pictures

This article originally ran after The Brutalist premiered at the Venice Film Festival. We’re republishing it on the occasion of Brady Corbet winning the Silver Lion for Best Director.

If you told me that Brady Corbet possessed the ability to walk on water, repel bullets, or phase through walls, I’d believe it. To make a movie like The Brutalist requires such a superhuman level of self-confidence that it might as well be accompanied by other preternatural powers. The Brutalist spans 33 years on screen and over three and a half hours of runtime, including a 15-minute intermission at its midpoint. It’s the first film in decades to be fully shot in VistaVision, and at the Venice Film Festival, where it had its premiere, it was projected on 70mm. It’s a sweeping work about a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and diasporic trauma in the wake of World War II from a filmmaker who’s not himself Jewish, but who hurls himself into details of his main character’s journey from a ravaged Europe to a booming Pennsylvania with such specificity that you’ll find yourself googling whether this is another Tár situation, or whether László Tóth was a real person (he wasn’t). It’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of The Brutalist’s existence, even if the finished product doesn’t end up matching its ambitions. Set aside all its film geek specs, and it still feels willed into existence to be the kind of movie that isn’t made anymore, a grand American saga that’s openly intent on telling a big story with big ideas. And at its center is Adrien Brody, doing better work than he’s done in years or possibly ever as László, who in 1947 washes up in Philadelphia at the doorstep of a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), sure he’s lost everything.

Brody won an Oscar for The Pianist, the movie that served as his breakthrough, and despite working steadily since (and becoming a regular in Wes Anderson’s ensembles), never reached that level of work again. But he’s remarkable in The Brutalist, in a way that makes you feel like you’re seeing him afresh, with his open parenthesis of a body and that handsome, hangdog face that’s always ruefully giving away a little more than his characters want. We only gradually learn what a big deal László was in Budapest before the war, but Brody offers glimpses of the respected architect the man used to be in his blunt assessment of the furniture Attila sells in his store, in the care he takes when crafting his own designs, and in his indifference to anyone who doesn’t appreciate the value of his work. László has lost the love of his life, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) — not to death, as he initially thought, but to the snarls of bureaucracy and legal whims that keep his wife stuck at the Austrian border with his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who’s so traumatized by what she went through that she’s stopped speaking. Without her, he’s half a ghost, living in storage closets and shoveling coal and only sparking to life when his friend, Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), takes him to a jazz club, or when he and Attila get a commission to rework the library of a wealthy industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a job that will alter the course of László’s life for years to come.

The Brutalist is a movie about desperation and anguish, though its willingness to keep that element below the surface of all of its dramas is gratifying. László and Attila and Erzsébet don’t discuss what they went through, though it informs everything about their sometimes erratic, electrified behavior — like the way Attila has shed all traces of his Jewishness, or how Erzsébet, when she eventually reunites with her husband, requests sex from him in a way that suggests they should be able to use it as a shortcut to sealing up their psychic wounds. László himself is a man in pieces who can barely pretend to hold himself together, and he teeters on the edge of falling apart so often in the film’s first half that it feels like a miracle when he slips into the blustering Harrison’s good graces, and gets chosen to design a community center on a hill in Doylestown. Harrison is a self-made man who collects first editions and madeira like he can rack up a high score in being cultured — Pierce is menacing and funny in the role, especially when Harrison informs László, more than once, that he finds their conversations “intellectually stimulating.� Having Harrison as a patron is like holding a tiger by the tail, but managing him and his slimy little shit of a son Harry (Joe Alwyn) offers László a chance to not just return to architecture, but to be the author of a wildly ambitious project that, if he can fend off all other forces, will represent a vision that is purely his.

It fits that The Brutalist is about architectural auteurism. Corbet, who writes all of his scripts with his wife, fellow filmmaker Mona Fastvold, is a former actor who got his start as a teenager on features like Thirteen and Mysterious Skin before moving into directing, and each of his now three features is an individual campaign in establishing his seriousness (and self-seriousness) as a filmmaker and laying out his as a major creative voice. He has a particular interest in placing his characters against a backdrop of tumultuous historical moments. His directorial debut, 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, depicted the coming-of-age of a future dictator in post-World War I France, while his caustic Natalie Portman-lead pop star drama Vox Lux spanned a Columbine-like school shooting and September 11. This desire to ground his films in the weight of momentous events has previously struck me as hopelessly thirsty, in the same way that his critiques of American culture have felt a little glib. The Brutalist is the first feature of his that’s actually lead by his characters rather than pinning those characters onto major milestones like display butterflies, and even then, it loses its focus by the end, rushing toward a conclusion that’s presented as a hasty reveal rather than something you really want the movie to dwell on. Still, there’s half a great movie here, and in the high ceilings of László’s community center, the swell of the score, and those wide shots of columns going up on a green hillside, there’s plenty of room to grow.