Sometimes it’s the boulder in your path, and sometimes it’s the pebble in your shoe. For me, The Brutalist is both.
Who the hell is Brady Corbet? How did he manage to get such an amazing cast? How could it be possible to make a movie with so many stars, presented in 70mm (filmed in 35mm and converted to 70mm in post), at three and a half godforsaken hours long, on a budget of less than $10 million?
This movie kept pinging away on my radar so loudly and for so long, I knew I’d have to carve out a whole weekend to watch and write about whatever this was. Buckle up, folks.
To start with, Brady Corbet came up as a child actor, working through various sitcoms until he had the misfortune to star in the notorious Thunderbirds adaptation that bombed in 2004. Luckily, Corbet aged into a respectable character actor — he was somewhere in the respective casts of “24” on TV and Martha Marcy May Marlene in cinema.
To date, Corbet has directed two feature films, writing both alongside partner Mona Fastvold. Childhood of a Leader turned out to be the kind of movie that the critics all freaking loved, but it didn’t even crack $300,000 at the box office. As for Vox Lux, that movie starred Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Raffey Cassidy, and Jennifer Ehle, and it didn’t even gross $2 million. I couldn’t get to that one myself, but it was a highly controversial film and a notorious box office bomb for a hot minute in the last few months of that year.
All told, this sounds exactly like the kind of pretentious arthouse auteur who would make an overlong movie beloved by the arthouse circuit and seen by nobody else. Especially if he could somehow keep the budget low enough that nobody would take a huge financial hit when and if it bombed. (Seriously, how did he do that?!)
For all of that, what did we end up getting? Well, it’s a 3.5-hour Adrien Brody picture. To paraphrase the great philosopher Michael Bluth, what exactly were you expecting?
Before going any further, I should definitely issue a CONTENT WARNING for this movie. There is drug abuse and addiction, including a near-death from heroin overdose. There are explicit sex scenes. There’s a highly graphic rape scene in the third act, which I will not discuss any further. Sure, you’d expect an Adrien Brody awards-bait picture to go dark, but this shit gets dark.
Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who flees to the USA in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Alas, his wife and niece (Erzsebet and Zsofia, respectively played by Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy) get caught up in red tape and they don’t make it across the Atlantic until just after intermission. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
(Side note: Yes, there is a fifteen-minute intermission at the 105-minute mark. In my case, the projectionist was good enough to stop the clock at 32 seconds left while everyone was getting back to their seats.)
Anyway, Laszlo is a supremely talented and accomplished architect who got imprisoned and chased out of Europe because his aesthetic wasn’t “Germanic” enough. Long story short, he finds meager shelter and work designing furniture with a cousin living in Philadelphia (Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola). From there, he flukes into meeting a wealthy industrialist (Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce), who eventually hires Laszlo to design and build a massive community center. Hilarity ensues.
For a film this long and with this subject matter, it should come as no surprise that there’s a lot to unpack here.
To start with, this is very much an immigrant story with a lot to say about the American Dream. Yes, it makes a difference that Laszlo came over with a highly valuable education and skill set. That doesn’t exactly count for much when the vast majority of Americans don’t trust foreigners or Jews or anyone who doesn’t look or think like them. This is still very much a capitalist nation built of, by, and for those willing and eager to backstab each other on the way up the ladder.
Thusly, it turns into a recurring pattern that when Laszlo’s projects fall apart for reasons he has nothing to do with, Laszlo is routinely the only one made to suffer for it so nobody else has to. Never mind that he’s literally the architect of the operation, he’s still a poor immigrant speaking in a thick European accent. That puts him at the bottom of the ladder, so he’s the only expendable one.
All of this is further embodied in Harrison Lee Van Buren, even more so in Harrison’s idiot son (Harry, played by Joe Alwyn). The Van Burens are your typical deranged millionaires, only interested in lifting up others when it suits their interests and makes them look good. Harrison is a racist piece of shit through and through, only courteous to Laszlo and his friends in the gutters for as long as it suits his interests. He’ll talk a big game about how much he appreciates Laszlo’s architectural genius, and then make fun of Laszlo’s accent in the next breath.
But then comes a point when it could go both ways. Sure, Laszlo needs to work for this racist bastard long enough to get his family to the USA and get his feet under him, but what then? What happens if and when enough people in the USA start to figure out how talented and valuable Laszlo is, to the point where he doesn’t need to put up with Harrison’s shit? Then again, there’s the distinct possibility that Laszlo is so obsessed with his work that he’d put up with all manner of sacrifice and exploitation to see it finished.
The film makes all manner of statements about artwork, using the premise to explore the concept in many intriguing ways. To start with, the film makes a huge deal about the setting in Pennsylvania, a state famous for its production of steel, which is in turn used to make big and strong buildings. Speaking of which, Laszlo notably prefers to use stable, reliable, and inexpensive concrete structures that will last from now ’til Doomsday. The cost-effective factor is crucial, as it makes possible structures that wouldn’t be feasible with newer and more expensive materials. Taking concrete as symbolic of the poor yet unyielding laborers, it beautifully dovetails the architectural metaphors with the class dispute themes and the namesake Brutalist Movement motif.
Moreover, it’s fascinating to see what happens as the community center progresses. There comes a point when it becomes a place Laszlo can walk around in, thus figuratively and literally getting lost in his own work. While it’s certainly and aggressively on the nose, I respect the filmmakers for illustrating the point in a way unique to the medium of architecture. Of course we’ve also got themes of artistic compromise and the drive to create something that will outlive the creator and so on and so forth. And I have to say, I’m always grateful to see a film from 2024 that successfully and coherently says everything Megalopolis tried and failed to say.
On a technical level, the film is marvelous. All the actors are putting in next-level work. The score is fantastic. The dialogue flies off the page. The production design and camerawork are breathtaking. The editing and pacing kept me riveted through the entire runtime.
That said, there’s no denying that this is three and a half hours. Of extremely dark and dense material. And did I mention there’s a sexual assault scene waiting near the end?
I would put The Brutalist in the same class as Killers of the Flower Moon: Great movies made with an extremely high bar for entry. It was never intended to be a fun movie or an enjoyable one, but it is a deeply rewarding one.
Put simply, the film is critic-proof. You’re either the type of person who’s willing and able to sit through three and a half hours of Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce torturing themselves and each other for Oscar acclaim, or you’re not. And honestly, I would still recommend Killers of the Flower Moon over this one — if (and only if) you made it through that movie and came out glad you did, you should definitely give The Brutalist a watch.