The Brutalist (2024)

 

Brady Corbet’s opus is a strong flick within certain parameters. It is an expertly crafted, epic bit of filmmaking. There is historical sweep, beautifully executed moments of intimacy, and grand themes about capitalism, art, and humanity. I wanted to really like this film. I really did. There’s much in it worth pondering; it’s just that the film is too organized, too aware of itself, and while it is one big swing, a large part of the problem is that you feel like you’re being shown just how big a swing it is.

In some ways, The Brutalist is more about filmmaking itself - and perhaps even about this film in particular - than it is about the man at the center of the film, Lázló Tóth (Adrien Brody in yet another career-defining role…that’s so banal, his career is very well defined, and this is a way of saying that he’s predictably outstanding). 

In many ways The Brutalist feels like it is supposed to be Corbet’s Tár. However, where Field's film laid a groundwork for getting deeper into a multifaceted character from the outset - and to be sure, so does The Brutalist - we miss something critical about Tóth; there isn’t much time spent shoring up approach to his field and also, in a way that suffers by comparison, his relationships never quite feel organic. Despite a stellar turn by Felicity Jones as his wife Erzsébeth, and some nice character work by Alessandro Nivola as his cousin Attila, each person seems to be there more to serve the principal in the cast than to fill out characters who might have their own interiority. Guy Pearce has the most or second-most thankless job, ss Lâzló’s benefactor; it’s the kind of role Daniel Day-Lewis could make something out of, as underwritten as it is, and with all due respect to Pearce (whom I really do like a lot), he’s no Day-Lewis, and the movie leaves him foundering. The most thankless role might go to the great Isaach De Bankolë as Gordon, who Lázló had formed bonds with soon after arriving in Philadelphia, and indulging a heroine habit with, to boot. I won’t say that De Bankolë is reduced to playing a Magical Negro trope, but he’s given such short shrift by both the film and Lázló that he’s almost more of a plot device to show what an unconscionable asshole Laázló has become in his later career.

His career as a Bauhaus trained architect is never quite given the kind of depth of portrayal that conducting was in Tár. Comparisons are odious, and representing creative processes well on film is a hard-won and difficult element to use. It’s difficult to slight Corbet for not being Todd Field at this point or Bradley Cooper, for that matter, and let’s be sure that music and architecture are two very different disciplines. It’s also not as if Corbet doesn’t afford plenty of screen time to Tóth’s process in the sense of how he develops his plan, how he works with others, or how he negotiates with another architect brought in by Van Buren (Pearce) on developing this multipurpose building intended to put Doylestown, Pennsylvania on the map. In fact, the sequence where he demos his model of the building, with its interiors and how it uses light and space is fascinating. Pulling out from that, though, there is no similar charge between his collaborators and him and this tanks subsequent narrative momentum.

What does work is the first part of the film where we’re on board with his arrival from Hungary at the end of World War II. The confusion of pulling himself together on the ship getting ready to land at Ellis Island is a fine piece of filmmaking and we’re in the moment of the immigrant experience as we were in the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan. He is in touch with Erzxébeth and we he her voice narrating a letter she’s sent him and this adds very much to the tale we see unfolding. Corbet keeps the suspense going through his first night in New York, a visit to a brothel, a late run to catch the bus to take him to Philadelphia. There’s an urgency and a sense of purpose here that is absent from the latter part of the film.

When he meets up with Attila and goes to work for him in his furniture showroom and finds employment for his architectural design skills in “surprising” a client’s father with a new library, the rags to riches arc becomes clearer and actually works really well, particularly when Van Buren shows up and lays into Lázló and his crew. 

There is still a sense of relationships between characters in up to the point where Attila throws Lázló out, accusing him of costing him thousands in building the library, losing him a valuable client, and making a pass at his wife. Attila is fully acclimated immigrant who speaks with a Philly accent (more or less) and who has left Judaism for Catholicism. Lázló remains a practicing Jew who seeks assistance from the community to help bring his wife to America. He works a construction job and shoots up heroine in his spare time. He and Gordon lived in the same homeless shelter, Gordon with his son, and kindly disposed to Lázló since the latter had helped secure food for him and his son one day when the soup kitchen closed early due to running out of food.

Eventually, Van Buren tracks down Tóth and offers him a job designing and overseeing the construction of this cultural center. Lázló brings Gordon along with him and Van Buren offers his lawyer’s services in bringing Erszébeth to the U.S. along with Lázló’s niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) who is mute, perhaps from war-based PTSD. Once the project takes off is where the movie loses steam. There are blow-ups, betrayals, dismissive attitudes to the immigrants. To the film’s credit, Erzsëbeth is the other fully formed individual. Indeed, care has been taken to give both Brody and Jones a script to work with. Pearce, and others are working hard to make cut-outs into palpable human beings. I’ll say it again, Pearce is a fine actor, but he’s being put to use here as opposed to being given room to act or realize a character more fully.

The Van Buren center takes forever to complete; Töth finds himself fired and rehired, and towed the end, he alienates just about everyone before the film abruptly pivots to a time-jump forward to the seventies. I won’t say too much more than that if this was all the film was building up to, I really don’t understand why Corbet applied this structure to bring us to that point. The film begins sputtering at the beginning of the second half and fizzles out into an epilog that should have landed strongly but felt like an afterthought. I’ve rarely encountered a film that shot itself in the foot so strongly.

It isn’t lost on me that the other great big swing of 2024 also centered on an architect, but where Coppola’s Megalopolis is a grand, surreal folly, Corbet’s is more rooted in a relatable, historical setting. Both are about men building great visions and both films are made by filmmakers whose visions outstripped their capacities. I will say that Corbet’s film is not as messy as Coppola’s, but it’s also not as thrilling, either. If Coppola is throwing everything he knows at the screen and created a folly of the greatest proportions, Corbet seems to hedge his bets, but he also seems to have cut off his nose to spite his face. I won’t blow the ending by talking about the content of the epilog, but I left the film genuinely sad that he didn’t take a different approach, since what he was going for could have been substantial, instead of being presented as an afterthought.

I’m not willing to say that The Brutalist isn’t worth the time spent, though I was exhausted at the end off it in a way that I haven’t been for many years. The length of a film doesn’t faze me if it’s compelling and engages me. I felt outside the work much of the time, I really wanted to connect with Lázló (and yes, Brody deserves the nom), but at a certain point, I wanted to spend more time with Erzsébeth and Zsófia. 

Two other notes. The sound design and soundtrack are magnificent! Seriously, it’s a great movie to listen to. This is not mockery or sarcasm; in many ways, what you hear is as important as what you see, and for that Daniel Blumberg deserves the nod for his score. The sound design comes from Andy Neal and he and his team have done remarkable work. 

Lastly, yes, Lol Crawley has turned in stunning work; there are echoes of Gordon Willis in his work here, but that sells him short. It’s not just solid, often brilliant compositions; it’s camera movement that buttresses those images and portraiture that serves the characters more than the script sometimes. 

The tragic thing for me is that I could see keeping the first part of the film and completely rewriting the second part to shore up the humanity of what he’s going for in that epilog. The epilog didn’t derail the film, and what Corbet is trying to get across is important, really. But sometimes, in the effort to achieve some degree of subtlety (I’m assuming here), the effect is ultimately dilution.