Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable, Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic The Brutalist represents a near-perfect symbiosis of subject with film-making style. It’s a huge, uncompromising cinematic statement about the creation of a huge, uncompromising architectural statement. It’s a paean to purity of creative vision in the face of petty ignorance and tightened purse strings, of noble personal sacrifice in the name of art. The kinship between the misunderstood modernist architect who finds worlds of both opportunity and pain courtesy of the fickle whims of wealthy American philistines and Corbet, a former US child actor turned independent film-maker, is there for all who choose to see it.
The uncharitable may suggest that there’s a degree of self-lionisation at play in Corbet’s audacious third feature film (his previous pictures were The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux). But even the uncharitable would agree that The Brutalist is a remarkable achievement, the kind of immense and audacious passion project that is usually out of reach to all but a select few celebrated auteurs and veteran directors.
With The Brutalist, Corbet gains entry into the elite group of cinema’s heavy hitters who can demand – and expect to receive – creative carte blanche for their projects. That notably male group includes directors such as Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Paul Thomas Anderson. Corbet’s age – he’s 36 – and the fact that he is still early in his directing career has drawn comparisons to Orson Welles, who made his own American opus, Citizen Kane, at the age of just 26. But in terms of the film-making vision, it’s Anderson who provides the most useful reference point and whose work, one suspects, Corbet has studied avidly. There are clear parallels with the toxic power structures explored in Anderson’s The Master and in the stylistic flair and emphatic score of There Will Be Blood.
Corbet and Anderson also share a taste for utilising obscure, virtually defunct film formats. The Brutalist was almost entirely shot on VistaVision, a widescreen format that was last used in Hollywood in the early 1960s, and which Anderson has reportedly used for his currently untitled forthcoming project. The Brutalist is visually arresting, but I’m not sure that, to the untutored eye, the format makes much of a difference to the look of the picture, compared with films shot on the more widely used 35mm stock. However, the much publicised choice of VistaVision, together with the fact that a lucky few audiences will get to see the film projected on immersive 70mm, bestows a kind of arthouse event movie status on The Brutalist – a canny marketing device for a picture with such an endurance-testing running time. The film’s awards buzz should also lure in curious audiences: it picked up best picture in the drama category, director and actor at the Golden Globes earlier this month and is a strong Oscars contender after earning 10 nominations last week.
For the most part (excluding a curiously thin and superfluous coda set at the Venice architecture biennale in the 1980s), the film justifies its butt-numbing length. The story of Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody, with a goulash-thick accent), a Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect, The Brutalist is a rich, involving piece of storytelling. It’s the kind of fully furnished world-building you could almost live in. Brody is impressive – his gaunt, haunted Tóth is a man whose pain is so close to the surface you can almost see the raw nerve endings.
Newly arrived in the US, he is taken under the wing of his assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has a provincial furniture warehouse and an all-American wife. Attila’s generosity has limits – he offers Tóth a job and a bed. But the bed is in the warehouse storeroom and the job comes with the tacit understanding that if Tóth is too obviously foreign (and for foreign, read Jewish), the agreement is null and void. Antisemitism is everywhere, even within Tóth’s own family.
The first encounter with the man who will become Tóth’s patron, wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce), is not promising. An irate Van Buren chases him from his mansion, incensed by the surprise library renovation by Tóth that his children have commissioned. However, after interest in the project from an architecture journal, Van Buren reappraises Tóth’s work. On an impulse, he commissions the architect to create a multipurpose community space, monument to Van Buren benevolence, on the crest of a Pennsylvania hill.
It’s a rich man’s folly, certainly, but it’s as much a product of Tóth’s ego as Van Buren’s, something that becomes clear once Tóth’s shrewd, sharp-eyed wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), belatedly enters the story; she doesn’t appear on screen until the second half of the picture, after a built-in 15-minute intermission. The Brutalist is astute on the idea of patronage and on the cost to any artist who is bought. But Corbet fumbles a pivotal and heavy-handedly symbolic scene in which, let’s just say, the brutalist is brutalised.
Elsewhere, the screenplay dwells obsessively on certain aspects and rushes blithely past others. The craft of the film-making, though, is exemplary. The architecture of the film is not just created by Lol Crawley’s restless, questioning cinematography. Equally crucial is the complex and layered tapestry of sounds and – most of all, perhaps – Daniel Blumberg’s rousing, exultant score: music that soars to the skies and captures the hope and optimism against the odds with which Tóth builds the future.
In UK and Irish cinemas
