Every award season, at least one movie clomps onto the scene to announce itself as the most profound and artistic film around—a work so teeming with profundity and seriousness in every possible aspect that it all but dares you to regard it as anything other than an instant masterpiece. This year, that cinematic behemoth is clearly Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a film whose title alone has a weightiness to it that all but grasp viewers by the lapel and announces that it is not the kind of movie that someone should enter into on a whim—this is Art. If the title doesn’t quite connote the seriousness of this endeavor, consider that over the course of its 3 1/2 hour running time—complete with overture and 15-minute intermission—it tackles such topics as the immigrant experience in America, post-war malaise, architecture, the eternal conflict between Art and Commerce, the Holocaust, impotence, rape, drug addiction and the cruel realities lying just behind the illusion of the American Dream. To add further to the load, virtually every aspect of the film is laden with symbolism of some sort. Once upon a time, Roger Ebert wrote a review of a movie in which he appended an asterisk to every symbolic element that he cited—if I were to attempt to do that with this review, you would become convinced that a small animal was sitting on the “8” and “Shift” keys on my keyboard.
To be clear, I do not have a problem in theory with any of the things that I have cited above. Unlike some critics who seem to spend half their reviews bemoaning the stress that a 3-hour movie has on their bladders, I do not have any issues in theory with extended-length films and I similarly am fine with films that tackle heavy subject matter. Such films might be considered to be self-indulgent and while I would agree with that appellation, I would not necessarily consider it to be pejorative in nature—all art is inherently self-indulgent to some degree and the more that it is, the less likely that the end result will feel like the final execution of a corporate marketing plan in the manner of so many would-be blockbusters these days. My problem comes when all of the pretensions and portentousness and symbolism and film geek flourishes—in addition to the aforementioned overture and intermission, the film itself revives the revered high-resolution widescreen process of VistaVision and is getting play in certain theaters in 70MM—are applied to a movie that seems to be using them as a clumsy distraction from the fact that it doesn’t really seem to have anything on its mind other than its own sense of self-importance. That, unfortunately, is the case with The Brutalist, a film that starts off with a few good ideas and elements but which goes off the rails in such a way that the whole thing begins to feel like an endurance test of a particularly vapid nature from which there is no escape unless you submit to its delusions of grandeur.
To be fair, it does occasional flashes of brilliance and one of them comes right at the top in an especially impressive opening sequence. For most of its duration, we are in an unfamiliar area amidst a symphony of voices, noises and indistinct imagery that is topped when a door opens and the place where we are situated is flooded with light and the image of an upside-down Statue of Liberty. As it turns out, we have been in the cargo hold of a ship that has come from Europe to America circa 1947 filled with refugees hoping to start a new life. Among them is Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who was separated from his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece, Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) during the Holocaust. Now that the war is over, the plan is for him to come to America and establish himself and then later send for the others so that they may begin new lives as well.
After arriving in the U.S. and getting a failed handjob—his soul being evidently too sick to achieve full potency—Laszlo heads off to Philadelphia to stay with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife, Audrey (Emma Laird) and work at his furniture business. Although Attila tries to show off his success to Laszlo, the business is actually struggling, so it is a relief when the two are hired by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the son of wealthy and powerful industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to renovate his father’s study and library while he is away on business as a surprise gift. Laszlo applies the architectural vision that made him celebrated in Europe before the war for the task but when Harrison returns home unexpectedly early, he blows a gasket and orders him and Attila to leave and refuses to pay them for their labor or their expenses for materials. Soon afterwards, Attila give Laszlo the boot as well, ostensibly because of Audrey’s false accusation of him making sexual advances towards her.
A few years pass and Laszlo is now living in the basement of a church, working in a shipyard and nursing a heroin habit that he shares with Gordon (Isaach de Bankole), his co-worker and only apparent friend. One day, he is surprised by a visit from Harrison, who admits that he was wrong about the library design, which has subsequently been highly regarded in architectural corners, and reveals that he knows about Laszlo’s celebrated career back home. Not only does he finally pay the money owed for the renovations, he invites Laszlo to a party at his mansion where he has another surprise to reveal—he plans to build a massive community center on a large parcel of land that he owns and he wants to commission Laszlo to design and construct it, essentially giving him carte blanche in terms of what to do. As an added token of goodwill, Harrison deploys his own personal lawyer to pull strings in order to finally clear the red tape to allow Erzebet and Zsofia to come to America at last.
At this point, Laszlo seems to be living the dream—he is reunited with his loved ones, though both still carry the scars of their experiences (Erzebet is confined to a wheelchair with osteoporosis and in constant pain while Zsofia is mute) and he is able to pursue his artistic vision in the way he was able to do once upon a time. Alas, before too long, grim reality begins to set in as changes are made to his designs and materials without his approval, which he responds to by getting into arguments with other developers on the project and insisting on putting his own money into acquiring the materials that he wants. This leads to conflicts with both his benefactors and Erzebet that eventually come to a head when an accident involving a train carrying Laszlo’s supplies causes Harrison to finally bring the project to a halt and fire everybody involved.
More years pass and Laszlo and Erzebet are now living in New York, where he works at an architecture firm, she writes for a magazine and the now-pregnant Zsofia, who has overcome her muteness, is planning to move to the recently established state of Israel with her husband and implores her aunt and uncle to join her. At this point, perhaps inevitably, Harrison turns up again to inform Laszlo that now that all the accident-related settlements have been made, work can begin again on the community center. He agrees, but the combination of his perfectionist vision and Harrison’s increasingly heavy-handed moves of dominance to show who is really in charge end up driving him to the point of madness and beyond. Oh yeah, there is an epilogue as well.
As I said before, there are noteworthy elements on display throughout The Brutalist. Visually, it is quite impressive throughout and if you choose not to heed these words and go and see it anyway, you should try to seek out one of its 70MM presentations in order to better appreciate the contributions of cinematographer Lol Crowley and production designer Judy Becker. The central performance from Brody is good, though it will inevitably invite comparisons to his Oscar-winning work in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. Even better is Pearce, who turns in a career performance as Harrison, a guy who seems to be a dream come true for an artist—someone with a genuine appreciation for art and a vast bank account to back someone’s vision—only to become a nightmare in that he knows just enough about the process to think that his ideas are just as valid and who has the power to bring everything to a screeching halt if his wishes are not met. His is the most interesting performance in the film because even though we can pretty much guess that the relationship between Laszlo and Harrison will curdle at some point, Pearce doesn’t make him into a buffoon and so the relationship between the two doesn’t feel completely cut-and-dried, at least not at first. The first half of the film, which ends with Laszlo beginning work on his grand commission, is uneven in stretches but shows some degree of promise that will encourage viewers to return for the second half, which is unfortunately the point where everything goes to hell.
The basic problem is that Brady Corbet, for all of his obvious ambition, is ultimately not a particularly strong or gifted filmmaker—if he is a visionary, as some have dubbed him on the basis of his two previous features, the meh The Childhood of a Leader and the spectacularly awful Vox Lux, then he is one who is in desperate need of artistic corrective lenses. If mad scientists with an auteurist bent were to somehow revive the late Michael Cimino and magnify his flaws as a filmmaker (his pretentious leanings, his tendency to focus too much on the tiny details and not enough on the big picture surrounding them, his preference for broadly underlining every single bit of subtext so that no one in the audience could possibly misconstrue the point that he is trying to make) to the point where they overwhelm his gifts (chiefly a keen visual eye and undeniable ambition). He is so determined throughout to prove himself as an Artiste of the highest measure that his films become suffocating experiences that are more endurance tests than anything else.
His biggest flaw, which is another that often plagued Cimino, is that he simply doesn’t know how to tell a story, at least not one that is particularly strong or compelling. On the surface, the film would seem to have a narrative of a particularly humanist nature but it ultimately proves to be like the marble utilized as Laszlo’s preferred building material—whatever depth it seems to demonstrate proves to be little more than an illusion. For example, neither he nor co-writer Mona Fastvold find a way to present Laszlo’s artistic obsessions—his stubborn desire to pursue his own crackpot vision, no matter how it affects him personally or professionally comes across here as little more than someone half-remembering the plot of The Fountainhead than a serious exploration of the artistic process. Likewise, the relationship between Laszlo and Erzebet is supposed to be the real focus, at least emotionally, of the film’s second half but doesn’t work due to the lack of any real connection between Brody and Jones, the latter further hampered by an underdeveloped character and the fact that we can never quite buy that she endured the horrors that her character is said to have survived both during the war and later with her illness. (It always seems as if she leapt into her wheelchair just seconds before Corbet called “Action.”)
The main reason why these elements never quite come off as intended is because it becomes abundantly clear early on that Corbet has no real interest in his characters, their emotional struggles, the post-war immigrant experience, the lingering horrors felt by victims of the Holocaust or any of the other things that he introduces in to the mix but doesn’t deal with at anything beyond a surface level. Instead, the entire story has been crafted as one giant metaphor for the struggle of the brave, bold artist—it may be an architect in the particular case but you don’t have to strain too hard to find a parallel with auteurist filmmakers of the sort that Corbet would clearly like to be associated with—who has a brave, bold singular vision that they are driven to share with the world but who find themselves at the mercy of boors who cannot possibly understand their brave, bold visions but who do hold the purse strings required to bring them to life. Trust me, the metaphors are not exactly hard to find or difficult to comprehend (though they do become increasingly blunt and bone-headed, culminating in a sexual assault sequence that would almost be laughable in its ham-fisted symbolism if it weren’t so gross)—at a certain point, you half-expect the film to suddenly include a live element a la Megalopolis (you know, the truly ambitious and genuinely great film centered around an ambitious architect that deserved the accolades and attention that The Brutalist has been receiving in spades) in which someone stands in front of the audience and patiently explains the meaning behind everything happening on the screen so that no one misses the points it is trying to make.
As I said before, there are certain aspects of The Brutalist that are admirable and I suppose that its pretensions and failed ambitions are preferable, however slightly, to most of the comic book extravaganzas of later. The problem is that once you get past the obvious technical skill on display, there is nothing else to grab you. In terms of human emotions and interactions, the film is so chilly and reserved that it makes the works of Stanley Kubrick feel like Nora Ephron by comparison and, unlike Kubrick, there is not even a smidgen of humor to be found during any one of its 215 minutes (not counting any potential snarkiness during the intermission). If Corbet had spent less time creating a testament to his own struggles as an artist and more about the struggles of the artists at the center of his story, he might have had something. Instead, he has created an epic that is massive in scale but shockingly puny in terms of impact—one that is almost oppressively heavy throughout—it feels as if you are watching it with one of Laszlo’s precious slabs of marble sitting on your lap for the duration—but which leaves nothing behind for you to think about afterwards.