“The Brutalist” Review
Adrien Brody portrays an acclaimed architect, intent on constructing his masterpiece after the horrors of war, in “The Brutalist”.
What makes an epic film? Obviously, it means having a gigantic sense of scale to the film and telling a story that makes the audience feel that they’ve not just been on a journey, but on a massive odyssey that more than justified an often long running time. In the past few years, American audiences have seen their fair share of epic films including “Gladiator II”, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”, “Dune: Part Two” and the Best Picture-winning “Oppenheimer”. Besides being made by some of the brightest filmmakers of our age, all of these films had big price tags with budgets in the hundreds of millions. However, I recently saw another American epic that has managed to equal or even surpass these aforementioned films with a budget of just $10 million. The film is “The Brutalist” and its uncompromising direction by Brady Corbet, spectacular performances and breathtaking narrative about The American Dream warrant the description of “epic”.
Set between 1947 and 1960, László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who immigrates to America to meet with his surviving kin and raise funds to reunite with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) who are still in Soviet-occupied Europe. While the buildings he designed in Europe were incredibly celebrated, with many of them still standing in defiance of Allied and Axis shells, the most László can hope for is to work in his cousin’s furniture shop in Philadelphia. But one day, while doing a renovation job for the extremely wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), Van Buren deciphers László’s identity and commissions him to design a grand monument. As the project builds momentum and László finds himself surrounded by so much wealth, he must make a series of tough choices to determine if he can build this structure and keep his integrity, family and sanity.
Directed by Brady Corbet and written by him and Mona Fastvold, watching “The Brutalist” feels like watching a species that you had long thought was extinct. While we’ve seen our fair share of large-scale period dramas over the past several years (they are a tried and true favorite come awards season), very few are like “The Brutalist”. This is a three-and-a-half hour long film that is being projected in many theaters on 70mm film stock and comes complete with an overture and a 15-minute intermission.
Corbet even resurrected the old shooting process of Vistavision with cinematographer Lol Crawley where the image is captured horizontally on 35mm film stock which makes the resolution all the stronger and makes the projection of the film on 70mm film all the more easy. This is the same process used on iconic films like “White Christmas”, “North by Northwest”, “Vertigo”, “The Searchers” and “The Ten Commandments”. All of the technical wizardry used in the creation of “The Brutalist” has certainly paid off because your jaw drops at the beauty conveyed in every shot. Visually, the film places the American iconography on its head because we’ve seen many films where immigrants marvel at the sight of Lady Liberty as they head into New York Harbour, but none of them have ever shot that statue the way Crawley has framed it.
But this is certainly not a film where the style is far more impressive than the substance. Adrien Brody has tapped into a level of drama not seen since his Oscar-winning performance in “The Pianist” when he was 29-years-old. Comparisons between his performances as László Tóth and Władysław Szpilman are inevitable but there is a strong distinction between the two: Brody is older. “The Pianist” is about how the joy of life is stripped away from a human being but also how hope can remain. But, in “The Brutalist”, Tóth has already been through the unimaginable horrors of World War II and The Holocaust. He has been beaten by humanity’s depravity and, in the film, spends his time trying to reclaim his agency and find the joy in being alive, especially when the opportunity comes to make a monument in America. But that path itself is fraught with hardship, making “The Brutalist” a compelling portrait of what it means to be an immigrant.
Set primarily during the McCarthy Era, you can feel the atmosphere of suspicion as Tóth finds himself immersed in the fears that native-born Americans (as the pathetic souls that belonged to the Know Nothing Party would say) have always had towards immigrants. This is especially evident when Tóth finds himself in the company of Van Buren who is very much the foil to the film’s protagonist. While both are accomplished in their fields, Van Buren has power, wealth and influence and, despite Van Buren believing that he and Tóth have an intellectually stimulating relationship, it’s clear that the disparity of privilege is going to result in conflict with the building he has asked Tóth to make. In this film, Guy Pearce is exceptional as this Hearst/Rockefeller/Carnegie-type who has built his own empire and rules it without compromise.
Also compelling in its lack of compromise is the majestic score by Daniel Blumberg which is so triumphant that it more than earns the overture at the beginning of the film where the audience can only hear the score and slowly be engulfed in the remarkable story about to unfold. Apparently, Blumberg spent seven years working on this score while Corbet worked on the script and got people interested in producing “The Brutalist” and all of that time has paid off. It’s a score in the same vein of epic composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer and is sure to find a place in the soundtrack section of my vinyl collection.
With construction of this monument facing challenge after challenge, Tóth is faced with insurmountable pressure that can only be relieved by family. Besides being a steady presence of support, even though she doesn’t appear until halfway through the film, Felicity Jones has this tenacity in her performance as Erzsébet that makes her a force to be reckoned with. She looks at all of the egos and has none of it.
“The Brutalist” is a pretty appropriate title for this film and not just because it’s the style of architecture that Tóth practices. It is a brutal film not in the sense of physical violence (although there are a few scenes depicting that) but in what is not being shown to the audience. We never have flashbacks of László in Buchenwald but we feel the weight that time has left on him. There are implications too ghastly to think about but the mere presence of them shows the cracks within the American Dream and how, through those cracks, the worst in us can come to the surface. But it’s this dream that pulls László on and keeps us hoping that he can leave his mark on the landscape of America.
Despite the smaller budget, the film uses this to its benefit because no one looms over a film that is being made for $10 million. Brady Corbet was able to make this film his way and, with the distribution efforts of A24, has been able to get the film screened in the largest theaters which have all but been reserved for massive blockbusters. Watching “The Brutalist” was like witnessing a grand, operatic event and this is nothing less than a masterclass in making an American epic. With so many studios funneling tens and hundreds of millions to make the next larger-than-life film, it’s ultimately what kind of story you tell and the conviction with which you tell it that will make the difference.
