Three and a half hours long, an intermission, and shot on VistaVision. Director Brady Corbet’s follow up to his 2017 film Vox Lux is an independently financed movie that transports you to a time of the not so nuclear family that is post war 1950’s Philadelphia. Starring Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, The Brutalist is a lengthy epic of vast proportion and intimate scope. The Brutalist begins with László Toth (Brody), a Hungarian brutalist architect fleeing Europe after being held in a concentration camp for the majority of World War II. Entry into America, however, is incredibly hard for László. He is unable to find work and slips into heroin addiction. However, when he meets Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy war profiteer, his artistic vision begins to make its way into American architecture.
This movie is excellent. It is truly something to witness, and everything sings until it shouldn’t. Right off the bat, Adrien Brody is transcendent. The interiority he brings as a man made by trauma and war feels real and raw, and he hints at things in such subtle ways that you can only notice the amount of details within this performance stacking up. Guy Pearce, on the other hand, has a harder job and I think is the best part of this cast. Pearce is told to play a sexually repressed man fighting his instincts of corporate greed, and instead attempts to harness artistic sophistication possessed by people like László. His performance has to be one of a piece of paper floating on dark waters, where the sinister slowly creeps in through the edges of the paper before swallowing it all. And boy does he deliver. You can sense from his very first scene that he is not someone to trust, but the extent of his true evil is not known until the closing minutes of the film.
Cast alongside Brody and Pearce is Felicity Jones, who plays László’s estranged wife, Erzsébet. This is where the movie stops being wonderful, however, because it runs into a wall. As a viewer, you will probably value the content of the film more than thematic content, symbolism, or theses about the human condition. But this film is confused about that fact. Felicity Jones’ Erzsébet is there to prop up Adrien Brody and nothing else, which is why her character feels underdeveloped. As a viewer, it is very jarring to see such a well written film disservice its third-billed actor in content, even if it serves thematic purpose. The thematic reason for this is most likely that behind every man is a woman, but that theme is well explored by now, and at three and half hours, there is plenty of time to give Felicity Jones more room to maneuver. Unfortunately, due to this issue, Jones’ performance never feels very convincing. She is almost too cheery for this somber film about post war trauma. Erzsébet and László share a couple of intimate moments, and all of them seem weird and out of place due to the lack of meaningful writing on the character of Erzsébet. They feel oddly impersonal and surreal in an otherwise very grounded film, and they don’t feel totally necessary.
Other than that, this cast is great. They capture the slimy businessman, the impoverished immigrants, or the cheerful bystanders with integrity. Alongside the three leads are Joe Alwyn, who plays Van Buren Jr., and Stacey Martin, a frequent collaborator with Lars Von Triers and the actress who plays Van Buren’s daughter in this film. This movie’s superpower is sweeping you up into the world of the film, and the cast only adds to that feeling of immersion. Another cinematic technique that is employed beautifully is the cinematography. The vistas and close-ups are some of the most bracing images of 2024, and are truly breathtaking in VistaVision. The other accomplishment of photography that this movie makes is sound. And I know that that sounds odd, but these VistaVision cameras were pioneered in the 1950’s, and are some of the loudest cameras used in film productions. The clarity of sound that these filmmakers were able to achieve is nothing short of miraculous given the budget and shot selection of this film. There are really intimate moments throughout this film and you can hear a pin drop throughout all of them. This is all to say that this movie is incredibly well made, and you cannot undervalue this in a time of cheap CGI and lackluster VFX in modern Hollywood filmmaking (I’m looking at you, Disney).
So what is wrong with this picture? This is a complicated question to answer, because I am just as conflicted about this film as it seems everyone else is. And I think that the fact that this movie is evoking such a sharp response in me means that it is doing exactly what it wants to do: subvert cinematic expectations. As I said previously, this film hits a wall when deciding whether to focus on ideas or people. It ultimately chooses the former, and that doesn’t sit great with me. I understand that the characters depicted in this film are as complex as they are arrogant, and those two things combined should lead to some sort of cinematic tension. However, the tensions it chooses to bring in feel strangely underdeveloped for such an otherwise well crafted script. Early into Van Buren and László’s relationship, Van Buren reveals that he once had a wife. However, when he is asked by László why they separated, Van Buren says the awkward “different paths” reasoning for their divorce. However, what is lying just under the surface is this contempt for the idea of a wife, which leads to further thoughts about Van Buren as a man who needs control and cannot be a partner, but rather the one with the power. This is seen further in his unwillingness to be a partner to László and instead go behind László’s back in order to oversee the building of a community center.
Returning to the conversation about the wife, Van Buren seems like he was never satisfied by his wife, and some sprinklings of a sort of sexual repression rise to the surface. About an hour and a half go by until this seemingly out of place detail comes into play. During a trip to Italy to visit a marble quarry, László and Van Buren go to an outdoor bar, where László does heroin. László is consistently relapsing into addiction throughout the film, which is also weirdly played off as not a huge deal. The movie is three and half hours long because everything bad that could happen to someone, happens. With László debilitated, sleeping in an abandoned tunnel on his trip to Italy with Van Buren (I know, what a weird situation to put a wealthy war profiteer and a genius architect in), Van Buren sexually assaults László. This is a really icky thing to put in a movie like this, especially because László is already so brutally mistreated by Van Buren throughout the film via emotional torment and Van Buren’s feelings of ownership over László. This sexual repression that was hinted at earlier, which just seemed like a quirk of the character to make him more despicable, comes back into the picture in a way that feels unnecessary. The need to literalize a metaphor is never going to be necessary for a movie. It is also not mentioned or brought up again until the final scene before the epilogue, in a sloppily written but very well staged mini set piece. The second half of this film feels like pure shock value with little regard for the emotional endurance of the audience. You could compare parts of this film to Saltburn and it would be annoyingly fair.
The first half of this film is truly transcendent, and is riddled with complex themes of immigration, loyalty, class, and intellectualism. The second half just rubbed me the wrong way. A good comparison for this film is The Substance. Both movies are so infatuated with their ideas that they fail to think about the audience. I like both of these movies, but for the average moviegoer, these films will feel alienating. Another possibly alienating force of The Brutalist is its last ten minutes.There is an epilogue in this film, and it states what happens after Van Buren is outed by Erzsébet as being a rapist. László has become a decorated American architect, Erzsébet has died of supposedly osteoporosis, as she is diagnosed with the disease early in the film, and their niece, who is a recurring character named Zsófia who I failed to mention earlier, played by an observant and passive Raffey Cassidy, pushes László’s aged body in a wheelchair as they walk through an exhibit of László’s work in Venice. An older Zsófia, no longer played by Raffey Cassidy, delivers a speech about her uncle and then the film cuts to the credits with Italian Disco music playing over them. What? After a grueling final two hours, the film has the gall to play La Bionda’s, One For You, One For Me, evoking a sense of humor akin to that of Paul Thomas Anderson or Tarantino. I sat in the theatre, absolutely floored. I might not have liked certain decisions made along the way, but this movie got me.
And yes, I know. I just spent the past 500 words ranting about grievances, but the truth of the matter is that those grievances are about creative decisions. Film is an art form,and as long as there is a possibility of something happening in a movie, I feel bad about criticizing it for occurring. It may be an unnecessary half hour of runtime like in The Substance or it may be shock inducing scenes that don’t line up with the rest of the film’s grounded nature like in The Brutalist, but either way, it is all about preference. I haven’t been able to get The Brutalist out of my head, and if you are a person who loves to think deeply about movies, your cinematic messiah is here. If not, you will hate this movie. Subjectivity is always what you have to battle when making a movie. The era of the four quadrant film is over, but go watch The Brutalist because it truly is a sight to behold.
