The Review: 'The Brutalist' Doesn't Live Up to Its Epic Design
Brady Corbet's third feature is undoubtedly his most ambitious, bound for awards season glory. But the longer this breathtaking epic runs, the more it reveals its frustrating, unmistakable flaws.
Welcome back to Top Shelf, Low Brow. This is The Review, a regular edition that looks closer at movies, music, and television. This time, it’s Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a NYFF favorite that adorns its thin ideas with awe-inspiring direction, hoping beauty will disguise the banality.
The American dream is dead. Housing crises have stricken every major metropolitan area, the job market is beyond brutal, and inflation is so crippling that you have to donate sperm to afford a box of cereal. Suppose you’re not already acutely aware of this great decay. In that case, the testimonies of mobile homeowners being displaced from their residences by private equity firms are all it will take to persuade you. A recent investigation by the non-profit news organization More Perfect Union detailed how capital investors buy manufactured housing parks for low-income residents and jack up the land rent. The increased cost of rent forces people who have owned their homes for decades to choose between paying an exorbitant cost to move their home to a different park or become unhoused. “I worked my whole life, and this is what it comes down to, some greedy person wanting his big chunk out of what little bit I had?” asked Madalyn Beckett, a homeowner who could only afford one more month of her newly upped rent. “There is no American dream anymore,” Beckett continued, “all it is is survival.”
When the dream of living is reduced to the hope for survival, grieving the loss of a decent existence is an endless process. It’s no surprise that director Brady Corbet has been trying to work out how he feels about living and working in the ruins of America for some time. Corbet’s work is enamored by the beauty, violence, and intimacy spawned by trying to achieve success on the country’s soil. His films telegraph these conflicting feelings with stories equally as complex and confrontational to emphasize the bleak dissonance of being a human in the land of opportunity. Corbet’s third feature, the sprawling American epic The Brutalist—which is screening at the New York Film Festival and will have a limited theatrical release beginning Dec. 20—finds the director working through his anxieties on a scale large enough to contend with the weight of a country’s dashed hopes.
The Brutalist is a sumptuous sight. Shot in retro VistaVision and presented in 70mm screenings that properly evoke the film’s midcentury period, the movie is a 215-minute exercise in cinematic style, complete with a 15-minute intermission built into the film’s print. Its visual landscape dazzles so well and so often that it lulls the viewer into reverie, allowing Corbet’s colossal film to feel far shorter than it is—and encouraging audiences to disregard the banalities within its bloated story. As a tale of an ingenious immigrant’s desperation to craft his legacy through his architecture, The Brutalist nails the sickly feeling of trying to build success from the ground up. Corbet is concerned with the perils of being enterprising in a world where most are only allowed to survive, but the film itself is far too easy to grab hold of. It’s thematically dense yet narratively compact, too clean to reflect the pungent stench of rotting Americana it submerges itself in. That conflict doesn’t negate The Brutalist’s merits, it simply dulls their shine, making a film that stresses the deceptively intimate power of stone structures into an ironically cold edifice.
That friction is most plainly spotted in The Brutalist’s first two sequences. The film opens with László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish man, as he emigrates to the United States after surviving World War II. László’s arduous travels call static memories of the past to his mind, and we glimpse abstract visions of his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) and wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) amid the war in Budapest. Eventually, László reaches New York City and peers into the daylight from the hold of the ship, greeted by the sight of the Statue of Liberty, shot upside-down to reflect László’s precise vantage point on the boat. It’s a stunning but wildly literal shot, an unapologetically on-the-nose way for Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote the film with Corbet, to pose a thesis about the American dream turned on its head that he spends the rest of the film working through. Soon after, a magnificent opening credits sequence scrolls through the frame horizontally, with each word perfectly kerned to look as stylish as it does precise. From its start, The Brutalist poses a conflict between its conventional narrative and its more radical aesthetic decisions, hoping the discord will allow the film to feel like its own singular experience. It’s a clash that only works a little more than half the time, not stellar math for a film that’s already pushing four hours.
But for the fraction of the film that works best—its first half, entitled “The Enigma of Arrival, 1947-1952”—Corbet fires on all cylinders, making a familiar immigrant story into something warm and truly distinct. László’s cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), himself an immigrant who has converted to Catholicism, sets up his relative with a room in the back of his Philadelphia furniture shop, where László will work. Before long, his unique designs attract the patronage of Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the son of Pennsylvania industrial magnate Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who brokers a working relationship between László and his father that becomes the movie’s central thrust.
Initially resistant to his style, Harrison ultimately contracts László for a massive project: a community center that’s part gymnasium, part library, part auditorium, and part chapel. László’s hesitation forecasts one of The Brutalist’s later attempts to navigate the differences between art made for passion and art made for money, and how the two personalities overseeing this grand undertaking will war. László’s buildings aren’t made to reflect the whims of others, they’re constructed to evoke a feeling, some murky reminiscence felt deeply within the soul. Harrison’s need to chase that dragon and coopt it as the foundation of an extraordinary building in otherwise cookie-cutter American architecture tees up a propulsive (if predictable) second half as the film nestles nicely into its intermission.
At this point, Corbet’s film practically glows with a Hollywood sheen. It’s soaring among the great industrial epics of the studio era, prized to become a contemporary version on par with Citizen Kane and The Fountainhead, the two films The Brutalist most closely resembles. But if Part 1 introduced something recognizable, Part 2 (“The Hard Core of Beauty, 1953-1960”) puts perceptibility into the shredder, unspooling too many new threads with a limited window to sew them up. Corbet seems torn between whether he wants his film to be theoretical or have an old-fashioned cinematic ending. His compromise is to call back to Part 1 when it’s most dramatically convenient, hindering the movie’s momentum in service of a neat denouement. In a film so imposing as The Brutalist, open-ended questions would have been more than welcome.
But Part 2 has its saving graces, most notably Jones’ Erzsébet, who arrives in America with Zsófia after Harrison and his lawyers organize the logistics of their emigration. Jones brings a steady emotional foundation to the film, which only makes it more evident how desperately this story needs some feature to ground its sprawling ideas. Erzsébet’s amiable nature conflicts with her husband’s more socially withdrawn personality, adding rich complexity to The Brutalist’s otherwise flimsy characters. When László and Erzsébet climb into bed together for the first time in years, the film arrives at its most stirring moment, one that blessedly tightens its myriad of themes into a single perspective.
That scene would be enough to sharpen The Brutalist in its dull, meandering second half. Instead, the film swerves again, leading us to foggy mountain towns and Carera cave parties. Here, Corbet once again spotlights questions about wealth, power, and ego while emphasizing the natural beauty he’s capturing on film, asking us to marvel at how good it looks. And while the sights are undeniably stunning, going through these motions for the umpteenth time has an air of self-indulgence that lessens The Brutalist’s impact, exacerbated by a final act and an epilogue that explains everything for the viewer in the back row who may have nodded off during intermission.
The Brutalist is so careful not to divert from the formula of other masterpieces that it keeps itself from becoming one in its own right. Corbet’s previous film, 2018’s brilliant Vox Lux, was not afraid to be polarizing. It forced its audience to examine the difficult truths of complicity and violence, refusing to present any plot detail that could be considered a solution. In The Brutalist, fascinating forays about how persecution feeds Zionism, and in turn leads to more oppression and tyranny, are dropped. There are riveting parallels between Americans feeling owed the dream promised to them and the rise of Zionism through Jewish repatriation, but they remain frustratingly out of reach.
The film doesn’t get too prickly because it doesn’t need to—its awe-inspiring visual terrain and protracted runtime will be enough to get audiences talking. Gesturing to important, relevant topics does not equate to pertinence. And in the case of The Brutalist, Corbet is so intent on making a movie so classically timeless that he forgets debate is immortal. His film might be bold in form, but its story lacks the guts that its titular style of design demands. The American dream once promised success as a reward for ambition, and The Brutalist is sure to prosper thanks to its director’s vision. But the achievement is constructed on the mangled corpse of that dream’s dilapidated husk, and anything built atop an unstable foundation will reveal its cracks if you only peer closer.
Hmm. I thought this was one-half of a classic film. But it sputters and dies at the end. It's like they ran out of money and ideas at the three-and-a-half-hour mark. I thought maybe they were hamstrung by the facts of real life characters and legally couldn't fully tell what happened. When I found out it was all fiction I decided that they owed us a comprehensible finale.
“the film itself is far too easy to grab hold of. It’s thematically dense yet narratively compact”
“Part 2 puts perceptibility into the shredder”
You could say these ideas conflict, but great call I felt that way too. There’s a simultaneous richness and superficiality at work. It’s like the movie has idea-blue-balls. A grandiose convalescence of high and low brows, themes, plots, moments, all swelling up…and then staying that way. And we are left with a (pretty impressive) lure to give interpretation and impart some meaning unto a text which might be in need of it.