Maximum Cinema
Brady Corbet’s third feature is a piece of superstructure filmmaking and cinema in its purest form.
The Brutalist
Director: Brady Corbet • Writers: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Starring: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn
USA / Hungary / UK • 3hrs 35mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 6 • III
Grade: A
The Brutalist is all the movies.
Sometimes a movie comes along that fulfils all the promise of the movies; a piece of work that we envisioned was so-called “pure cinema” (drags on cigarette) while in art school. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is one such movie. I’ll tell you right now, it’s a commitment, and it’s not really for everyone. If you fidgeted during stone classic The Godfather Part II (200 minutes), Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes) or even the less demanding Avengers: Endgame (181 minutes) you might take issue with Corbet’s insistence that we all sit with László Tóth on his determined, craggy and not entirely triumphant transformation from Nazi death camp survivor of the Second World War to celebrated Pennsylvania-based architect. A sprawling but expertly paced saga about creativity and compromise, identity, the immigrant experience, privilege and power and how we engage with the past, The Brutalist is often happy to just exist in László’s sphere. At times a paean to architecture (a personal interest of Corbet’s) and at others a condemnation of the illusion of the American Dream and its foundations Corbet has done the impossible and made a truly epic film on his terms – for US$10 million. And it’s got a perfectly placed intermission. An intermission. It feels like a night at the theatre.
But before we go on let’s address the elephant in the room: the “scandalous” use of AI that has everyone clutching their pearls. Yes, I prefer my movies be made by people. But sound, colour, IMAX, CGI and mo-cap are all technologies that are now standard filmmaking. Like it or not, so is AI. A grand total of 4 seconds (!) of The Brutalist’s total 12,900 (!!) used AI somehow. That includes a single drawing rendered before a storyboard artist created the building photo used in the film and a tweak on co-star Felicity Jones’s flubbed Hungarian vowel sound. Of course, we could leave it alone and listen to everyone bitch about her shit accent. Now, that said…
I want this library
The Brutalist spans decades between 1947 and 1980 in two chapters, an overture and an epilogue (as he did in The Childhood of a Leader and the messy but curious Vox Lux), beginning with Hungarian Jew László (this year’s long-winded best actor Oscar winner Adrien Brody) bursting out of a dark, chaotic hold as his ship sails into New York harbour. He emerges on deck and there, like so many before him, is the Statue of Liberty – on its side, upside down, sometimes backwards. László’s a Bauhaus-trained architect of some repute, but now he’s just one of many post-war emigrés looking for a better life and to rise above his trauma. In “Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival”, he moves to Philadelphia where he reunites with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola, Kraven The Hunter), who’s running a furniture store with his Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird). László is alone, having been separated from his wife Erzsébet (Jones) during the war, though he strikes up a friendship with the equally disenfranchised Gordon (Isaac de Bankolé), a Black single dad.
It’s in Philadelphia that László crosses paths with Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, awesome) and Harry (Joe Alwyn, embodying learnt moral corruption), a wealthy industrialist and his entitled son who become László’s patron in “Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty”. Harrison wants to honour his late mother by building the Van Buren Institute in nearby Doylestown, and he wants László to design it. The relationship will have unforeseen impact on the Tóths, who finally reunite 1953, along with their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). László’s story concludes with a glittery retrospective of his work at the 1980 Venice Biennale, a complete recontextualisation of his work – and a kick-ass Eurodisco hidden gem (by La Bionda).
Shooting in retro VistaVision (basically high resolution 35mm film turned on its side, the format used for The Ten Commandments and Vertigo), freshly-minted Oscar winning cinematographer Lol Crawley captures the scope of the story with understated elegance – a devastating train wreck is the epitome of show-don’t-tell – and yet somehow manages to make the images look as massive as any brutalist building (all y’all U of T students will know brutalism from Robarts Library) and of the film itself. Crawley’s helped along by composer Daniel Blumberg’s statement score, entirely deserving of its Oscar. The technical work makes it sound as if The Brutalist is all form and no function. Nope. Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold have plenty to say about the destructive nature of both art and capitalism (between this and Mickey 17 that grand institution is taking a beating this week), and not a single frame is wasted in doing so. Attila’s conversion to Christianity and name change – his shop is Miller & Sons – hint at the currents of identity as the price of success running through the film. Harrison’s constant micro-aggressions are indicative of his and rich, white America’s tolerance of people like László as long as it’s in service to them. A third act narrative turn rivals Conclave for its randomness – until you realise it’s not.
Crazy ambitious and meticulously constructed, The Brutalist is held together by a stellar cast that understands Corbet’s vision. Pearce is the film’s stealth MVP as a tightly coiled control freak prone to violence when things don’t go his way, and the normally bland Jones is a close second. Erzsébet is smart and supportive, but never a push-over, and her brazen defiance of Harrison is something to behold. The capper, though, is Brody. From the minute he and Attila find each other at the train station, to his manic drive to finish Van Buren’s monument to himself, and his slow unravelling Brody is all in and never puts a foot wrong. He’s heartbreaking, human and funny (yup). Leave him alone. He earned that speech.