NYFF Review: 'The Brutalist' Proves Size Does Matter

By Jason Adams | Film | October 10, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | October 10, 2024 |

Less Great Man Biopic than Grand Man Guignol, Brady Corbet’s massively scaled but sneakily intimate 3.5 hour epic The Brutalist sets up the American Dream only to dash it to pieces against the cement walls of its formalist structures. Somehow, bewilderingly, made for around six million dollars—although Corbet’s made it clear that this was accomplished by himself and his people working for bupkis for several years—this movie does indeed throw down the gauntlet to what’s possible independently, working outside of the broken Hollywood system. It certainly feels bigger and grander than nearly anything any major studio has put out in years, most especially as far as its ideas are concerned. In the end it might not all land, but you do nevertheless have to gape in true, experiential awe at what he’s accomplished here. This movie is what the word “awesome” was invented for.

Taking us through several decades of the life of architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody)—who was not a real person in the same way that Charles Foster Kane and Daniel Plainview weren’t technically “real people” but were based on enough “real people” to get at the essence of real—The Brutalist begins with a staggering shot of László emerging up out of a black murk. Surrounded by cries and screams and the hard churning sounds of machinery, it feels as if he’s emerging from Hell, although I think it wouldn’t be far off-base to say Corbet’s also purposefully evoking Hell’s modern equivalent, the Holocaust—both László Nemes’ 2015 film Son of Saul and last year’s Jonathan Glazer masterpiece The Zone of Interest used this sort of horrible industrial noise as that nightmare’s sonic shorthand.

(It should also be noted right upfront that Daniel Blumberg’s hulking and tremendous score is doing some very heavy lifting here, as it will across the entire film—I don’t prognosticate awards-season often, but give this score a damn Oscar. It is monumental stuff.)

It turns out that Tóth is emerging up from the belly of a ship, but through sound and disorientation Corbet has already given us a shorthand hint of this character’s backstory—Tóth is indeed a Hungarian Jew coming to America after surviving one of the Nazi’s death camps, which we’ll realize fully once he does emerge from the darkness to the top deck and sees the Statue of Liberty (notably seen upside down—save that implication for later!) waving its lopsided welcome. This sequence, which feels enormous but which is really accomplished by very meager means when you sort out the details of it, is as good a delineation of the film’s huge aims as any—in a few short minutes Corbet has staged the Holocaust and Tóth’s migration experience through nothing but his smart use of light and sound.

It’s hard not to get lost in such minutiae of The Brutalist’s improbable and meritorious structural achievements—watching the ways in which Corbet and the people he’s gathered around him to create this epic achievement, moment by moment, shot by shot, is only matched in sheer scope by the number of times I am going to have to look up synonyms of “epic” while writing this review. This will and should be a movie studied in film schools for as long as such things exist—Corbet, a noted cineaste (I’ve been bumping into him at New York Film Festival screenings for going on two decades), has been doing the work and man alive it shows. This film is an artist going for broke, pushing his beautiful plumage out to its breaking point. It’s absolutely dizzying.

After a short NC-17-ish interlude in the brothels of ass-end 1940s New York City, Tóth hops a bus to rural Pennsylvania where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has been living for several years, assimilating with a shiksa wife (Emma Laird), an Americanized name, and a small furniture business where he happily gives László the backroom to live. Attila also has even better news—László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who he got separated from in the camps and has had no word of since, has written a letter. She’s alive, ecstatically alive, and with her niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy from Vox Lux and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). But they’re trapped at the Austrian border, caught up in governmental red tape.

The film then begins its forward march toward László trying to establish himself in this new country and to get Erzsébet to his side safely—each strand feeding and clashing with the other as László’s artistic brilliance (and eventually that too of his wife) is misunderstood, misappropriated, devalued, abused, pillaged, ignored, and too too scarcely celebrated. Basically the entire history of Brutlist architecture in a nutshell then! And it’s obvious Corbet adores the form (as I should note do I) because this film makes a soaring case for how one person’s cold cement box is another’s grand cathedral. We don’t see a lot of the actual work here—this film is a paean to the calculated improbability of realized artistic achievement in a land cast in cold hard indifferent cash—but what we do, wow.

The battle between form and function, between beauty and horror, is baked into every corner and crevice of Corbet’s monumental picture. Ultimately the American Dream seems the nightmare machine itself, one which chews up immigrants and spits out their corpses as rich delicious nutrients for its soil. Those mountains majesty were purpled by blood. We never appreciate the visionaries while we have them—only years later, when their backs and their spirits are broken, do we appreciate the ways their visions have infiltrated every aspect of our lives. It’s Meryl’s famous Cerulean speech in The Devil Wears Prada—one person dreams in blue and a decade later we’re awash with it with no inkling or appreciation of whence it came.

All of that is very very good. But I will admit to some disappointment with some of the smaller pieces that Corbet builds this mammoth beast of a movie up with. The performances in particular are hit and miss. I’m not as enamored with Brody’s work as others seem to be—he lands the big swings (he’s very good at playing The Artist Maligned) but he keeps leaning into melodrama with the small bits too. It’s a performance as wobbly as the accent work, which is to say very, but then I’ll admit he’s an actor who only seems to truly work in the hyper-stylization of Wes Anderson movies for me. Otherwise I don’t always buy him. And I found myself left cold by Felicity Jones as well, whose wig left me with more of an impression. And that adds up to a lot of wobble, given those two actors and their relationship is the focal point of the piece.

Thankfully Corbet surrounds those two with a murderer’s row of character actors giving us ten bangs for every single buck—in particular, well I already said once in this very review that I don’t like predicting awards, but there has been no Supporting Actor more worthy in a film this year than Guy Pearce’s turn here as the wealthy benefactor Harrison Lee Van Buren. Lee falls hard and fast for László’s work and starts funding an outlandish monument on a Pennsylvania hilltop dedicated to his dearly departed mother, and once László is ensnared in his nets it’s a descent straight to indecency. Like snake-oil given mid-Atlantic sentience, Pearce’s work is fall-over funny and unyieldingly horrifying—Lee is obviously a stand-in for America itself, an ego with legs, a capitalist devourer of souls. But Pearce makes him odd and particular, precise, human, and absolutely impossible to look away from. It’s career best work from a long underappreciated actor.

Nivola also casts a long shadow over the film, detailing in a few short scenes the insidious ways the venom of this place can corrode our souls; I also really liked Joe Alwyn and Stacy Martin as Lee’s terrible twins Harry and Maggie, who embody two different but still implacable walls of wealthy vacuity that close in on the Tóths like concrete tombs. Clean suits, shined shoes, sharp haircuts, a Pennsylvania Steel surface ice cold to the touch. Like our industrious skyscrapers they strain toward heaven as wielded knives, eager to cut open its secrets and spill them out of the clouds, into the dirt, and do the Lindy Hop on top.Make no mistake we do the dance of the dead here, too—we just put a pretty ribbon around its throat and yank.