ADRIEN BRODY INTHE BRUTALIST Brady Corbet's enigmatic portrait of an emigré Jewish architect strives for grandeur Reviewing actor-turned-director Brady Crobet's second film
Vox Lux in 2018, (his first, still the most interesting, was the flawed but haunting 2015
THe Childhood of a Leader), I wrote: "He's already scheduled to shoot a third film, tentatively titled
The Brutalist. It is to be the thirty-year saga of a great Hungarian-born Jewish architect struggling for recognition in America. Sounds like Louis Kahn, and his could be a very good story, though his son Nathanial's memorable documentary homage
My Architect will be a hard act to follow."
Numerous critics say of
The Brutalist "They don't make 'em like this anymore." But one could see that with
Childhood of a Leader Corbet was already thinking on a grand scale.
The Brutalist, which has met with wide acclaim, dramatically shows the ambition of its maker, who was under thirty when he satrted work on it. As such, it seems to excite young film fans like the crowd at the NYFF press screening, though even so reaction was mixed. The person sitting next to me, incidentally a Yale architecture grad, declared of the film at the end that it had "lost" him. The fiifteen-minute intermission mid-film, contributing to the effect of grandeur perhaps (or of an old fashioned Italian movie showing) gave people a chance at the crowded screening to share views.
Everything rests on the shoulders of Adrien Brody, as László Tóth, the Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor. Brody's tall, angular frame, lined features, and memorably deep, rasping impersonation of a Hungarian accent dominate every scene. His essential foil is Guy Pearce, as Harrison Lee Van Buren, the rich Pennsylvania man who discovers and adopts him working in anonymity at a furniture store run by his American cousin. It is a relationship that is a mix of adversarial and supportive from the start. Hardly anyone knows that in Europe, before Naziism came, Toth was a well known modernist architect and had designed substantial buildings. After designing a surprise birthday-gift library for Van Buren's mansion, a gift of his son, which initially infuriates him, Van Buren hires László to design a whole development, a sort of designer city in suburban Pennsylvania.
This becomes a struggle with lesser talents, such as an American architect hired to save money. But also with Laszló's own demons, his inability to connect with his wife and his strange niece and his association with drugs enabled by a poor man he has rescued, Gordon (African-French actor Isaach De Bankolé, underused).
Whether his architecture is "brutalist" or not is one of the lost threads. In fact, the film, in all its three hour and thirty-five minute length, gets rather lost in the relationship of Thoth with local magnate Harrison (a ruddy, somewhat bland Pearce), and how the lives of Thoth's wife Erzsébet (an underwhelming Felicity Jones) and his Sphynx-like niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) eventually are woven in and out of this relationship, which is marked by moments of noisy melodrama, especially in the second half. Perhaps "brutalist" refers to the egocentric Van Buren, or to the sometimes enigmatic Thoth, or to the throbbing drama itself, with its thunderous theme music insisting that it is epic, and a masterpiece. It makes a catchy, memorable title.
The beauty of the film is that it's enigmatic, especially László Tóth. But the weakness of the film also is this quality, because there isn't enough about this fictitious but brilliant architect's creations or his genius until the very end, and not enough about the work of being an architect - and not enough else from the somehow underused and ineffective secondary characters to justify this shortcoming or the claim of significance the movie makes for itself.
Still, they don't make them like this anymore. This film is grand and makes an impression, for sure, and for some its evocation of
Citizen Kane and the Paul Thomas Anderson of
There Will Be Blood and
The Master will be considered positive. It doesn't quite live up to those heroic models. but you can't help admiring Brady Corbet for dreaming big.
The Brutalist, 3 hrs., 35 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2024, and was snapped up by A24 for distribution. Also shown at Toronto and the NYFF, where it was screneed for this review. Metacritic
rating: 89% (18 reviews) ; now up to 91%.
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