THE BRUTALIST is a masterpiece. It is a challenging, deeply felt, meticulously constructed, and largely superbly acted film that is thought-provoking in the best sense. After watching it I was filled with questions and emotions - I was buzzing - and the film resonated in the days following the screening. I could only be thankful that I had another screening lined up. This is a film that I needed to sit with, ruminate over, and rewatch.
Writer-director Brady Corbet (VOX LUX) and his co-writer Mona Fastvold have crafted a script that truly speaks to our times. Issues raised include the brutal exercise of power by oligarchs - the othering and condescension toward immigrants - the violent insecurity of the intellectually inferior - the need for sanctuary in an anti-semitic world - the need for emotional and sexual connection in an atomised and traumatised world. And then there is the perennial struggle of the artist versus the capitalist patrons and corporates who fund their work.
All of this intellectual complexity is brought to bear in the fictional figure of Laszlo Toth. He was a Brutalist architect in Hungary before World War Two, but expelled from his profession by the Nazis for his unGermanic work. He was then separated from his equally talented, intellectually voracious wife Erzsebet, and both sent to concentration camps which they miraculously survive. As the movie opens, Laszlo is in the belly of a ship about to land on Ellis Island. His wife and niece Zsofia remain in a bureaucratic hellscape, trapped in Europe.
The prologue of the film immediately upends our expectations with the upturned Statue of Liberty. Laszlo (the magnificent Adrien Brody) is rendered impotent by his wartime experiences, and finds solace for his loneliness, trauma, poverty, alienation and physical pain in the heroin he was given for his broken face on board the ship. He is welcomed by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) who runs a furniture store in Philadelphia - then at the height of its industrial pomp. Attila offers one method for survival - complete assimilation and abnegation. Atilla has married a gentile - nothing wrong with that - so did Laszlo - but Laszlo's wife converted. Atilla has gentilised the name of his business and toadies to his rich customers. The welcome that seems warm soon becomes one of rejection. Atilla has no truck with Laszlo for losing him business and his blonde shrill wife accuses him of sexual assault - a classic anti-semitic trope to pull.
We then move into the meat of the first part of the film - the relationship between Laszlo and his patron - Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr - again magnificently rendered by Guy Pierce as a Kane-like figure. He is vulgar and loud and ridiculously wealthy. But he is also intellectually insecure - a working class kid raised by a single mother who never went to university but surrounds himself with rare first editions. He may be superior to Laszlo in every single materialistic way - but he can never be as cultured, nor have Laszlo's taste, nor destroy Laszlo's independence of mind. And for a man who covets and owns, and wants Laszlo as a vanity-pleasing prop, this drives Van Buren mad. I loved the purity of this first half. The battle between the two men. The beautiful breaking of ground and coming-to-reality of Laszlo's gigantic community centre and chapel.
In the second half of the film, the narrative framing device of letters from Laszlo's wife becomes real, as both Erzsebet and Zsofia arrive in Pennsylvania after many years' separation. Here we see further physical and mental damage caused by the Holocaust. Erzesebet (Felicity JoneS( is in a wheelchair because years of starvation have damaged her bones. Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) is so traumatised that she cannot speak. The arrival of Erzsebet if further proof to Harry of his intellectual inferiority. She is an incredibly smart, perceptive, strong woman, who studied at Oxford and returned to Hungary as a journalist. It is no coincidence that Harry tries to find her work as a journalist not in Philadelphia but in New York. She is a threat to his jealously obsessive relationship with Laszlo.
There is an inevitable argument over money and the project is paused. But Harry inevitably begs Laszlo to come back and the project recommences. We then move to Carrara, Italy for a bravura set-piece segment that seems infused with mystery, a dreamlike unreality, and emotional tension. Laszlo is reunited with a marble cutter who might look like a dreamy artist but fought the fascists - exhibiting more manhood and courage and moral acuity than someone like Harry can conceive of. We are now, for the first time in the film, completely in Laszlo's world and Harry has, metaphorically, the wrong shoes for the journey. Is it any surprise that it is here that Harry sexually violates Laszlo in an attempt to reassert the power dynamic, in a scene foreshadowed by his nephew violating Zsofia?
And how fitting it is that real loving sex will resolve this narrative. Laszlo has been impotent for much of the film, despite the inducements of sex workers and porn, and then the entreaties of his wife. They finally achieve climax under the influence of heroin, which he has administered to her for her pain in desperation. It's an incredibly moving, intimate scene, and has a fever-dream aspect which we will only see the ramifications of when Erzsebet confronts Harry with his crime against Laszlo. For a man so wrapped in his self-perception and vanity, he cannot recover. And this is the end of the "American Dream" for Erzsebet too. She too will follow Zsofia and make aaliyah to Israel.
We then move to the epilogue of the film where we learn that Laszlo is being feted at the Venice Biennale in 1980. His commission was indeed finished and now its meaning is explained. Laszlo was not just being stubborn about its proportions as any artist might. He was stubborn because he designed it while still separated from his beloved wife, to represent their separation and internment in two different concentration camps. And so we discover the true meaning of a Cross created by absence - the gap between two concrete cut out pillars - that cannot meet, but the buildings are united by the subterranean level of the complex.
There is so much to love in this film - the audacity of its length, its thematic scope, its incredible performances.... On that last topic the only slightly false note for me was Felicity Jones somewhat inconsistent Hungarian accent as Erzsebet. I even wondered if they inserted the line about Erzsebet studying at Oxford to explain the occasional middle-class English lilt breaking through. Counter-balancing this we have the breakthrough performance of a lifetime by Joe Alwyn as Harry Jr and the deeply moving potrayal of Zsofia by Raffey Cassidy.
Behind the lens, the production is flawless. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (WHITE NOISE) films in close focus Vistavision, a technique contemporaneous to the story and worth seeking out in 70mm prints. This gives the film a kind of visceral feel of intensity, with saturated colour. I also cannot speak highly enough of Daniel Blumberg's stunning score, that goes from orchestral classical to jazz to electronica.
Overall, I feel that what Brady Corbet has done in this film is of equal importance to what Paul Thomas Anderson did with THERE WILL BE BLOOD. It's a movie that does something that you have not seen before, that moves you, provokes you, envelopes you in a unique vision, aurally, visually. It's so far above the run of the mill film that if feels as though it's from another universe.
THE BRUTALIST is rated R and has a running time of 215 minutes. It opened in the USA on December 20th 2024 and opens in the UK on January 24th 2025.
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