‘The Brutalist’ Review
(A24)
This review was first published on KENS5.com and can be viewed here.
Adrien Brody is transfixing in this unorthodox, stunning immigration drama
In his second consecutive feature about laborers whose talents are leached by the worlds they’re trying to endear themselves to, Brady Corbet gives “The Brutalist” an intermission that, at first blush, allows us to take a bathroom break in the middle of his three-and-a-half-hour drama. It’s a thoughtful gesture, but that’s not all the interlude is: It’s also an intentionally placed twist of the thematic knob between simmering and full-blown boil, a portal through which the fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) passes from wielding a golden opportunity in an unknown land to reckoning with what it will cost him.
What it costs us, the audience watching László’s fall and rise and eventual evisceration, is a little bit of disorientation, as well as some necessary adjustment while an exceptionally manicured immigrant tale jolts into something more barbed and bloody. Casual prejudices played off early on by the family of Harrison Lee Van Buren, Guy Pearce’s uber-wealthy and ostensibly well-meaning industrialist scion who hires László to build a skies-scraping community center on his property, are revealed for the outright cruelties they are as a project of good ol’ A-murican ambition becomes defined by antagonism. Maybe they all are, in some way or another. But that doesn’t prevent things from feeling a bit jarring when the niceties of collaboration crumble, preventing us from ever truly witnessing László’s triumph even as it’s being constructed on a Pennsylvania hill shot like Corbet’s version of the biblical Mount Sinai.
What “The Brutalist” comes to reveal in that dissonance – and in its epic-sweep dissertation about a country’s gilded compassion for outsiders – is that figures with power in America and those without it seeking to forge their own legacy are only as tolerant for one another as personal motivations require them to be. Sometimes those motivations are forged in tragedy. Sometimes, in obscenity.
László has arrived here by way of cataclysm and fateful timing undergirded with an almost overwhelming scale of cinematic grandeur that drops anchor early, most severely in Daniel Blumberg’s score, announcing itself with a three-prong alarm of bellowing brass that over the course of the movie feels like it’s keeping jittery trumpets and fussy strings at bay. A Holocaust refugee separated from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), he’s in the U.S. seeking a fresh start that rears its head in the form of the Statue of Liberty, photographed upside down and splintering the screen as his ship arrives at Ellis Island—a supremely arresting image foreshadowing the journey to come. Here László meets his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who’s been stateside long enough to learn what it takes for immigrants to survive: His Pennsylvania furniture store is called Miller & Sons, but there’s no Miller and no sons. “The people here like a family business,” Attila confirms, an early suggestion on the movie’s part that assimilation is not only organic, but all-encompassing.
Immigrant stories have long endured as a subject of interest in Hollywood, and you can imagine why for a country built by the people that have come or been brought to it. In terms of drama, these movies provide the means by which to extrapolate profound truths about how humans use humans for their own gain. In terms of universality? Well, there aren’t many who couldn’t relate to the uncertainty of being somewhere they don’t recognize, with denizens they couldn’t entirely trust.
In László’s case, it’s his own blood that betrays him after a job they’ve been hired to complete by Harrison’s son goes slightly awry, the father responding to surprise library renovation with volcanic fury. Though Corbet struggles early on to convey the passage of time (his movie generally remaining light on the feet of its mammoth runtime), it isn’t lost on us that László has truly arrived at ground zero when he gets to work at a coal mine, his beard grown, his dreams humbled. Harrison will soon come knocking, this time with calm and curiosity after having discovered not only László’s background, but also his own chance at funding a family monument to stand the test of time.
The complicating dimension of “The Brutalist” (written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold) is that it envisions the partnership between László and Harrison as being at peculiar odds with itself, carving out tension between the film's rapturous images and the weight of dialogue—promises, explications, confessions, threats. Harrison douses his initial fury towards László when learning of his stature in Europe, and the two strike up a friendship that plays like a staring contest between great men who know when they’ve met their match. A key scene at a party finds Harrison making ample time for László as the two engage in a prolonged exchange of philosophies and personal ethos that is also a job interview of sorts, briefly interjected by shots of glamour and luxury.
Harrison – whom Pearce embodies as an increasingly unsettling character defined by testiness and puffed-up superiority – might insist that he finds the conversations “intellectually stimulating.” In his eyes and intensely raised chin, however, we notice something else: someone discovering a means to an end, namely the development of a capitalistic hilltop monastery to symbolize his wealth. As with the movie’s stunning opening sequence where we hear Erzsébet’s voice over images of László arriving to America, the promise of glory here contends with the starkness of reality, as if the two were destined to dance. The architect will come to find that out for himself.
But this isn’t to say he's without agency. László – who in building his masterwork must fend off rival developers, Harrison’s bratty kids and ballooning project costs – appears to be complicit in his own exploitation, and part of the movie’s draw is the mystery of why he would subject himself to the employ of people he knows will use him. He’s a complicated figure off the bat, an expert practitioner who resorts to women and drugs almost as soon as he steps off the boat, and who keeps his architectural exploits to himself until Harrison inquires about them. He’s also Jewish, and in fulfilling the assignment of creating a facility complete with a Catholic chapel and towering cross, he finds himself starting to reject his religious identity. Brody’s turn is one of constant searching and scrutiny and unexpected flare-ups, a performance with depths of interiority that aren’t fully revealed until an epilogue provides the keystone on this figure Corbet has imagined as someone smarter than he appears, but willing to endure such unconscionable abuse so as not to show it.
What’s the point? we might ask, especially when László briefly finds other work in a place shot to look like paradise compared to the Van Burens' shadowy estate. And we’d be right to. As tight as Corbet keeps the focus on his architect, we’re still kept at arm’s length from the roots of László’s fortitude; it can feel like he’s betraying a character already sketched as a savvy prognosticator of his place in the pecking order. It’s like we’re seeing László through Harrison’s point of view: a Great Man whose greatness simply can’t afford to be dimmed, no matter how much is thrown at him. Even the presence of Erzsébet in the movie’s second half occasionally threatens to dilute our understanding of László; it’s a new element, and an emotionally tumultuous performance on the part of Jones, that doesn’t further detail the character’s blueprint so much as underscore its crumpled lines to eventually heartbreaking extremes.
Whether the movie’s direct and surprising finale – an epilogue to "The Brutalist" that also serves as the coda to the eponymous architect’s life – officially obfuscates or fully enlightens the hand László has kept so close to himself over the preceding three hours will confirm whether the experience has been, for you, one of grand-scale entertainment or surgical contemplation. Suffice to say that the ending fully shifts the picture’s contours if you watch it more than once, which might be an amusing joke on Corbet’s part given its length. And yet, “The Brutalist” flies by, the grandiosity of its vision about how America operates ringing true even as characters seem to wilt away as soon as their true selves are revealed.
