“The Brutalist” Review: Adrien Brody Towers in a Wobbly Epic About Art vs. American Might

The Brutalist has been receiving rapturous reviews ever since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. That praise isn’t undeserved, by any means, especially since Adrien Brody gives a flawless performance as a brilliant Hungarian architect — an artist of genius — struggling to put his stamp on the American landscape in the years after World War II.

More importantly, perhaps, is the revelation that 36-year-old director Brady Corbet is that most worshipped kind of filmmaker, an auteur. (Put it this way: Who’s more celebrated, Philip Johnson or Quentin Tarantino?)

Corbet's 3-hour-35-minute epic, which comes with an intermission, is a challenging, daringly ambitious take on 20th-century history, and clearly built on a foundation that has nothing to do with franchises or superheroes. The movie is its own rare, complete thing, sprawling and raw-boned. Don’t expect The Brutalist II or a prequel, Monsieur Belle Epoque.

Still, is Brutalist a masterpiece, as it's almost routinely described? Is it on a level with Martin Scorsese’s 3-hour-26-minute (and intermission-free) Killers of the Flower Moon? No, not really. In fact, you could just as fairly call Jesse Eisenberg’s compact, modest A Real Pain a masterpiece, even though in scale his movie and Corbet's are as different as a castle and a tool shed.

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But the interiors need to be examined, as well. Real Pain is surprisingly and expansively dark, a buddy comedy that reveals itself to be about the American-Jewish legacy of the Holocaust — a theme that’s integral to Brutalist too.

To Corbet's credit, his castle is imposing — dauntingly so — as you approach. To cross the moat and venture into its immense chambers, shadowed by a seriousness of purpose, is to experience a kind of awe, or at least the deepest respect for whoever erected and owns this stronghold.

But eventually you lose your way on the journey inward, as the dim rooms and passageways multiply. You may even begin to think about finding an exit sign. Which, as you know, is a fruitless endeavor in a castle.

But enough of this analogy. The Brutalist's first half, at any rate, is flawless. Absolutely flawless.

László Tóth (Brody), an accomplished Hungarian architect trained in the uncompromising aesthetic of the German Bauhaus movement and now committed to an even more forbidding school that will become known as Brutalism, escapes the death camps (he’s Jewish) and arrives in America, where he’s welcomed by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture maker who owns a store in Philadelphia.

Attila, who has the smiling hucksterism of a salesman without much talent, encourages László to design and oversee a quick, simple commission. He's to install a reading room/library in the mansion of a rich businessman, Harrison Lee Van Buren.

The results, which are beautifully austere, flooded by sunlight but somehow cold, infuriate Van Buren, played with a masculine bluster by Guy Pearce, who sounds as if his idea of the Breakfast of Champions was a bowl of ground glass drowned in whole milk.

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Van Buren has no interest in László's commanding air of intellectual superiority and authority — until an article in Look magazine flatters him as a millionaire with a becoming taste for modernity. Now he embraces László, commissioning him to build an immense concrete community center that will incongruously house both a gym and a church. What, no petting zoo?

This opening section is carried off with great, brisk energy and a cleanly defined narrative that speeds along with the ease of an automobile on a fresh-paved road (an image of confident American dynamism that recurs throughout the film).

But it’s Brody, a Golden Globe nominee for best actor in a drama this year, who's truly extraordinary. His performance possibly surpasses his work in The Pianist. His face is capable of a tragic, suffering sensitivity and exalted artistic inspiration, as well. He looks as if his mother had insisted that he play Franz Liszt's heroically difficult piano sonatas since the age of 2. (Actually, in a long wig he might resemble Liszt.) As he did in Pianist, he manages to represent an entire era.

In the film’s most moving scenes, you’re tempted to cry along with him — possibly for him — as he tearily discusses the principles of architecture and his passion for them.

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Post-intermission, though, the story grows more complicated, and confusing, with the arrival of László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a furiously insightful woman who can no longer walk because of her wartime injuries, and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who’s been practically silenced by the trauma of her experiences.

They’re both intriguing, novelistic characters, full of fine detail and offering subtle, intelligent observations, but they distract from the central drama of László's endless frustrations with his massive building project and Van Buren, who’s both anti-Semitic and sadistic.

If László had written the script, these women would have been regarded as ornamentation, a festooning, and probably would have been removed. Instead, their presence tips the narrative into something both more melodramatic and more conventional, with blazing showdowns and a climax of moral retribution worthy of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

If anything, Brutalist should play more like Herman Melville's power throuple of Captain Ahab, sailor Ishmail and Moby-Dick. Come to think of it, László's model looks very much like a big white whale that happened to swallow a church.

Instead, the film winds down with a pretty epilogue (this film has everything, including a brief “overture”!) that reveals the fascinating private meanings László has built into his design for Van Buren. But this feels like a footnote more than a proper coda. Why couldn’t the information have been incorporated into the movie’s framework? It’s not as if the screenplay couldn’t accommodate an additional scene or two. Or six. Or 16.

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By the end, in any event, the movie has lost the sense that in László we’ve encountered a supreme artist whose work — and whose willpower — will transcend the cruelties and persecutions of both war-torn Europe and the United States in its imperial prime. Or, conversely, a true artist who'll be unjustly crushed by those forces.

The film includes a quote from Goethe — "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” — that suggests director Corbet is after a grand, defining statement about the blind spots of republicanism, capitalism and any number of other -isms. But that statement never really crystallizes.

Meanwhile, the connection between the man and his vision, so richly present in Brody’s performance, has been compromised, damaged, perhaps lost. Imagine There Will Be Blood without oil, Oppenheimer without the bomb, or even Tár without Mahler.

You come away, rather, feeling that The Brutalist is an allegory about a brilliant director’s battle to complete his or her visionary epic without Hollywood interfering and mangling the whole thing in its money-grasping mitts. That puts The Brutalist in a league with Francis Ford Coppola’s extravagant Megalopolis.

So where does all this leave us? With the thought that Corbet is indeed a significant new talent, and that we can expect something genuinely mega from him in the future.

The Brutalist is in select theaters now.

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