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Big Time
By Michael Koresky

New York Film Festival 2024:
The Brutalist
Dir. Brady Corbet, U.S., A24

This review contains spoilers.

Leaving precious room for doubt about his film’s ambitions, Brady Corbet centers The Brutalist around a battle of wills between the pursuit of personal artistic expression and the diabolical capitalism that constrains it. Set in post–WWII U.S., the film follows the decade-long creative and moral pursuit of the psychically fractured László Toth, a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor newly resettled in Pennsylvania. But The Brutalist is also undoubtedly a film about its own construction, calling attention to its precision and scope by making architecture its literal theme, and more of a guiding narrative principle than a visual element. One doesn’t see much brutalist architecture in The Brutalist, just the teasing promise of grandiosity.

Corbet’s withholding is his most precocious quality, and it matches that of Toth, played by a never cannier Adrien Brody with a circumspect, reticent intelligence that refuses to tip over into mere victimhood. In the effective, conceptually powerful opening sequence, Corbet drops us without context into darkness as Toth and his fellow boat passengers slowly emerge from a dank claustrophobic void, the camera crammed in among the teeming crowd, the viewer disoriented enough to wonder whether the confused, frightened voices we hear are being summoned to their deaths. No Son of Saul cold open, this: instead we, Toth, and the unnamed cross-Atlantic voyagers are offered the ecstatic relief of the Statue of Liberty, however jarringly sideways she appears on-screen, portending something other than a straight-on triumph.

Toth has arrived in New York after his long ocean journey a hollow husk. After a somber welcome to lower Manhattan, replete with a grimly explicit engagement with a sex worker, this ragged soul, of whom we know little other than a diffident, untrusting facial expression, will relocate to the milder suburbs of Doylestown. Here, he reconnects with cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a fully assimilated, Catholic-converted furniture store owner who betrays only the wisp of an Eastern European accent. Toth’s stay with Attila and his wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), fraught with the newly upwardly mobile couple’s paranoia and latent wish to leave behind their Jewish past, ends quickly and poorly, yet his brief employment with Attila leads him into the fateful orbit of Harrison Lee Van Buren. Played by Guy Pearce with the kind of titanic gusto that remains agreeably on the razor’s edge of camp, the local industrialist becomes both antagonist and benefactor to Toth, whom he takes an extreme and suspicious liking to especially after discovering his Bauhaus-educated bona fides. (As far back as 2018, Corbet was name-checking Marcel Breuer as an inspiration for this long-gestating project, although the Hungarian-Jewish architect emigrated to the U.S. in the late thirties.)

Hardly the shtetl schmo the wealthy American Protestant may have assumed, Toth is engaged by Van Buren to bring his architectural genius to a mammoth vanity project, a recreation center perched atop a hill that will allegedly serve the local Doylestown community but which would more sturdily provide lasting testament to Van Buren’s own wealth and performative generosity. Perhaps most importantly to Toth, Van Buren takes an apparently sincere interest in helping to get his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), out of Hungary, giving the architect even more incentive to indulge both Van Buren’s whims and his own vision, long laid dormant.

The incremental planning and fabrication of the Van Buren community center provides the foundation for The Brutalist as it constructs its narrative brick by brick. Corbet’s pleasingly novelistic, three-and-a-half-hour film, co-written with his wife, Norwegian filmmaker and actress Mona Fastvold, initially seems to predict an expected rise-and-fall chronicle, unfolding across two large chapters and moving from stately to frenetic near-collapse. Shot on 35mm in shades of ominous gray by cinematographer Lol Crawley in the mid-century VistaVision format, the film is so gripping moment to moment that it’s almost convincing in its determination to be a definitive American epic. There’s also more than a hint of 21st-century Paul Thomas Anderson here, especially in the mix of grandiosity and willful eccentricity that defined There Will Be Blood and The Master. But whereas those films replaced the traditional masculinist angst of seventies Hollywood movies with a free-floating (but still male-centric) anxiety that set history off its hinges—critiques of men’s control over the flow of American power—Corbet’s film, with its surprising music cues and percussive visual flourishes, marries them to the narrative of a man who’s less antihero than underdog. The curious tonal shifts of The Brutalist are never clearer than in its second half, when the film goes obstinately askew, leaving behind the first movement’s trudging, cause-and-effect realism for a heightened, not entirely persuasive symbolism. Among the forbidding quarries of Carrara in central Italy, where Toth has taken Van Buren to scout the world’s finest marble, a shocking, left-field act of violence reconfigures the film into the realm of metaphor. A film of moral ambiguity shifts, and Corbet leaves all his cards on the table.

Upon the release of his previous film, Vox Lux, Corbet spoke in an interview about the “absurd maximalism” of contemporary American life, both in pop trends and politics, and it’s a useful term for both movies. Rigorously noncommittal, Vox Lux was a film of questionable taste that took dubious aesthetic judgment as its energizing central conceit. Whatever its many limitations, that film sticks in the craw for leaving it up to the viewer to untangle its threads connecting celebrity and our culture of violence. The Brutalist initially runs on a similar ambivalence, though as it reaches its lumberingly operatic—and murkily confusing—climax, we might begin to ascertain its lineage with the historical Jewish revenge narrative. Its hero, no inglourious basterd, has played the long game, using only the weapons in his personal arsenal to achieve his goals.

The full flowering—and meaning—of his building’s design, form, and structure is not revealed until a brief epilogue set at a museum gala celebrating Toth many decades hence, shot with a blurry video-like texture that both craftily obscures some iffy aging makeup and nicely situates the viewer in a mindset of modern retrospection. In these closing moments, Corbet finally confirms his film as psychological-historical treatise, with Toth’s building on the hill in Pennsylvania a trojan horse for smuggling in and repurposing his postwar trauma, an esoteric epitaph to Jewish genocide rather than a testament to the dubious, self-serving philanthropy of titans of industry like Van Buren—who took little interest in aiding Europe’s Jews until it was culturally acceptable or beneficial to their own interests. The suburban American heartland gets its very own Holocaust memorial—surreptitious enough, in the final estimation, to deflect any claims of capitalization on Jewish suffering.

Despite this provocative treatment of the unsettled nature of Jewish American identity, The Brutalist often feels generically American in its grand mythmaking, evoking the universal appeal of fiction centered on postwar Jewishness. With its overall air of imposing dignity, and with Brody performing Toth’s internalized distrust with the winding grace of an orchestra conductor, Corbet’s film doesn’t move to the rhythms of authentic Jewish-American neuroticism—like, say, Saul Bellow’s Herzog or Phillip Roth’s The Counterlife, or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, genuine diasporic works. Corbet has directly referenced W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz as a presiding influence, though it’s difficult to find echoes of that book’s digressive, serpentine, and rigorously ethical approach to narrating the 20th-century Jewish tragedy in his film. The Brutalist, as it announces in its own form and all but states in its final scene, is about the grand gesture and the moral reckoning that can reside within.

Appropriate for a film about architecture that, despite its scale, tends to tell rather than show, the most lasting image is one we never fully see. As part of his vision for Van Buren’s commissioned building, Toth has cut out a cross in the roof, which at certain times of day the sun will shine through, casting a ray of light in its cruciform shape on the atrium’s floor. Pitched to the community while the project is in its planning stages, the idea is clearly meant to flatter the God-fearing Protestant locals as well as quell doubts they may have about this curious, Ashkenazi-looking fellow. The promise of the cross and the daylight it casts—not of truth but of accusation—is the film’s ultimate emblem of simultaneous assimilation and resistance, slicing down the center of this curious, frustrating, formidable monolith of a movie.