Brady Corbet’s grand, yet intimate, tale of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant struggling to make a life for himself in mid-century America is an engrossing, thematically rich masterwork, writes Yasmin Omar.
‘Welcome to America,’ murmurs a teary-eyed László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) when they are reunited at a Pennsylvania train station in 1953 after a protracted, five-year separation. Thus begins the second act of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, an immense, awe-inspiring tome of a movie, structured novelistically with chapters and an epilogue, but realised cinematically in splendorous 70mm VistaVision. László’s greeting to Erzsébet, delivered with love and sincerity, suggests a homely warmth towards his adopted country that the place itself is yet to reciprocate.
Since his solo arrival on US shores in the Forties, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust with a broken nose and spirit, the Hungarian-Jewish László’s comforts have been cold, housing precarious and employment unstable. In the first of the film’s consistently striking images, the bobbing camera swoops from László’s giddy, back-slapping relief at reaching Ellis Island to behold an inverted Statue of Liberty looming above. It’s disorienting to see this symbol of freedom upside down; it presages that the American Dream, for all its promise of betterment and opportunity, has also been upended.
The Brutalist is widely described as an epic, and while it’s certainly epic in length (three and a half hours including a 15-minute interval), the term implies a singular focus on scale and only a glancing interest in character. Corbet pulls off the magic trick of making a film both vast and intimate, intricately mapping the specifics of one man’s story onto a detailed topography of great sweeps of mid-century American history. It’s a lot of movie, and Brody carries it on his shoulders. Not since his Oscar-winning turn in The Pianist (2002) has the actor, himself the descendent of Hungarian immigrants, delivered such a titanic performance.
His László, coming to this new land hollowed-out but hopeful, is ground down under the weight of accumulative indignities, and must fight harder to defend his beliefs, retain his composure. He is a celebrated, Bauhaus-trained architect – a profession that allows him to literally and figuratively rebuild his life – who is commissioned to design a community centre for the capricious, Waspy multimillionaire Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Spanning four decades, the film observes the pendulum swings of their strained working relationship as striving artist and cost-cutting patron.
The Brutalist (2024)
Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold dig deep with The Brutalist, and have wisely given themselves the space to unearth, dust off and properly scrutinise each of their many Big Ideas. They stack them together to construct a monument to the rickety incertitude of the immigrant experience. László’s Philadelphia-residing cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a small-business owner who puts his relative up in his furniture showroom’s dank storage closet at the beginning of the film, represents the immediate pressure to assimilate. Attila has forsaken his identity: anglicising his surname, converting to Catholicism and marrying a Gentile (who makes a seemingly friendly, but covertly antisemitic, comment about their guest’s nose).
His cousin’s swift deracination gives László a complex about his thick, othering accent, and he is depicted rehearsing tongue-twisters to lighten the heavy consonants of his English shortly thereafter. Alienation is another foundational building block of The Brutalist, evident in the queues of displaced Africans and Europeans lining a city side street for scraps of Christian charity; the white hands of streetcar passengers protectively clutching their handbags and briefcases as an offscreen voice pleads for coins. The hostility of the American people towards foreigners becomes stronger in the second half, when the threatening undertow of violence crashes to the surface.
The Brutalist (2024)
The Brutalist is first and foremost an immigration story, but it quickly transforms into an exploration of the act of making art – and not the airy notions of inspiration-striking and private sketching. This is a film about the straining, practically Sisyphean effort to will your vision into concrete reality, pushing against the buffeting headwinds of financiers. Architecture – which, like cinema, sits at the intersection of art and commerce – is a fitting form to illustrate this clash. It’s a collaboration between hundreds of specialists that, once completed, must guarantee a return on investment. László, poor as he is, doesn’t care about money. He’s content to subsist on a daily dinner of watery vegetable broth rather than compromise his legacy.
Harrison (played with hard-skinned dominance by Pearce) is concerned with acquisition, not creation. A collector of books, butterflies and fine wine, he treats architecture, and László, as his latest plaything, toying with it, showing off about it, discarding it, then retrieving it at whim. (It’s important to note that Harrison is frothing with anger over a surprise library-renovation project until he’s made aware of László’s overseas renown.) Though The Brutalist never romanticises the struggles of the artist, its revelation of the hidden meaning behind our hero’s majestic, minimalist community centre takes your breath away. All the pain and arguments and bartering and salary cuts might just have been worth it.
The Brutalist (2024)
László’s ambition is to leave behind great art that will ‘transcend all time’, and it appears that Corbet is aiming for much the same thing with his magnificent, questing film. Every element is in perfect harmony: its high-mindedness counterbalanced by emotion, its beautiful images bricking over xenophobic ugliness. Without being too grandiose, The Brutalist is what cinema is all about.
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