The first thing that Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) sees upon emerging from the dark, cramped cabin of the ship taking him to America is an inverted view of the Statue of Liberty. It's a striking image that foreshadows what's to come in Brady Corbet's masterful epic, The Brutalist. In the filmmaker's delicate hands, the glossy sheen of the American Dream is stripped down to its nightmarish core.
As expansive and ambitious as the community centre László finds himself building, Corbet's film is both minimalist in design and massive in scope. Similar to the era of brutalist architecture that Corbet explores, The Brutalist rejects the warmth of nostalgia and presents something that feels both timeless and of the moment.
Spanning 30 years, the first half of the 215-minute film (complete with a 15-minute intermission) follows the renowned architect as he tries to rebuild his life in America in the late 1940s. Separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) in Budapest, whom he discovers are alive but stuck overseas, László quickly realizes that the land of freedom and opportunity is not that kind to immigrants or its own veterans. Staying in the back room of the furniture store run by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), the architect quickly realizes that his past glories mean little in a country where racism and money govern who's successful.
Attila clearly understands this, as he has not only converted to Catholicism and married an American woman (Emma Laird), but also called his business "Miller and Sons" despite not having any kids nor being named Miller. Refusing to denounce his identity, László seems destined to a life of shovelling coal until he crosses paths with the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce). A self-proclaimed intellectual, the millionaire commissions the architect to build a multi-room community centre as a memorial to his late mother. The centrepiece of the structure is a church that, due to the window placement on its high ceiling, will form the sign of the cross on the alter twice a day.
As construction begins, and László's artistic vision butts heads with Harrison's penny-pinching staff, the first portion of the film plays out like an American fable — one where the illusion of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps feel like a tangible reality. Of course, it's tough to climb the ladder of success when the affluent control when the rungs beneath them are sawed off.
Juxtaposing László's upward momentum with the steel boom in Philadelphia at the time, Corbet captures the ways artistic endeavours and capitalism are inexplicably, often to the detriment of all, linked. It's in this insidious bond where The Brutalist pulls the rug of optimism out from beneath the audience in the second half. Playing like a slow-building tragedy, László's spiral begins to commence once Erzsébet, now suffering from osteoporosis, and Zsófia, who has become mute after witnessing so much trauma, arrive in the United States.
The presence of his loved ones only further exposes both Harrison's need to remain dominant over the architect and László's own destructive vices. By framing America as a place of corruption, especially through the eyes of individuals who experienced the hardships of the war, Corbet uses the film to touch on how trauma and Zionism feed into each other like a snake eating its own tail.
It's no coincidence that Corbet only shows Zsófia speaking when she, now married and pregnant, tells László and Erzsébet that she plans to raise her child in the newly-established Israel. Zsófia would rather struggle in an undeveloped land that she can call her own than see her belief polluted the way America has infected László and Erzsébet's marriage.
Another form of opium that László cannot break free from, America becomes a corrosive addiction that eventually erodes all it touches. The community centre, for example, which the audience sees being built in snippets, becomes a tomb of sorts for both him and Harrison.
The cruelty of architecture is that its beauty forever holds the sins of the past. This makes the retrospective of László's work in the epilogue even more chilling. As we watch László's designs being revered, indicating the persistence of good art transcending time, the audience knows the painful cost that came with him being ahead of his time.
A spellbinding and sweeping epic that only gets better on subsequent viewings, The Brutalist is a masterful work. Presented in VistaVision, the film renders particularly glorious in 70 mm — as it will be presented at select screenings at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto — while still feeling richly expansive when viewed outside that format. Featuring a script that manages to tackle everything from opioid addiction to the post-war economy to antisemitism and more, the film offers a riveting tour through an important period in history.
The fact that the film was made for only 10 million dollars is shocking. However, as László himself would probably say, one should never focus on the cost of art, but rather its ability to capture a period in all its beauty and ugliness — and The Brutalist does just that.