The Brutalist (or, Its Purports and Aspirations of Greatness)

Within the first five minutes of Brady Corbet’s staggering epic playing at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival, The Brutalist, you get the sense that you just might be seeing one of the new greatest films of all time. You listen as Daniel Blumberg’s score roars—yes, roars—to glorious life over a fading-in, all-caps “OVERTURE” on a black screen. You watch as a man named László Tóth (Academy Award winner Adrien Brody) wades through a crowd of immigrants on a passenger ship to the United States. You watch as he is guided by the voice of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), still trapped in Europe with their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). She is speaking to him in Hungarian through a letter, as he is drowned momentarily in the dark of the crowd with gaps of light shining through the window, before the door swings open, and it all bursts through dramatically and blinds you. You watch as László laughs in elated joy with the guide who accompanied him, and you see what he is so happy to see. You watch as cinematographer Lol Crawley’s handheld VistaVision camera keels over backward to the sight of an upside-down Statue of Liberty, struggling for a split-second to place its view before finally finding a firm place to stand, and the brass of Blumberg’s symphony rises to meet the inverted monument’s utterly towering stature. Not since “I believe in America,” has a film so full-heartedly declared in its opening minutes “So do I.”

For a time, the saga that Corbet charts from there is just as full of that caliber of inspiring, ambitious energy—the energy you only find in a modern American auteurist vision that seems to come around by a function of once every fifteen years, give or take a few, where the last consensus-definitive appearance it made was with Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood back in 2007. Indeed, that film and The Brutalist share some common ground. In Anderson’s opus, we see a tale of a capitalist whose blood and soul are as black as the oil he wants to dig. Here, we see a tale of the artist who is about to be subjected to the noxious whims of capitalism and is about to find that its dangers are more covertly hidden, but perhaps no less sinister, than the genocidal fascism of the Reich that he’s just escaped.

However, for now, Corbet spins the tale of the American Dream come true—the strokes of good luck and fortune that steadily guide László into a position of prominence, and the grounded, modest pride in himself and his roots that influences his every decision. Formerly a licensed architect in Hungary and now a groundless wanderer just looking for a way to sustain himself, László starts out with a gig working in his cousin Attila’s (Alessandro Nivola) furniture shop in Pennsylvania, where his first project of note is a Bauhaus-inspired chair that is promptly scoffed by Attila’s wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), as resembling a tricycle. László’s fortunes are due to swiftly change upon the arrival of Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who invites László to remodel the study of his father, billionaire mogul Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) in whatever aesthetics he sees fit, as a surprise gift for Harrison before he returns back to town.

László’s end result does away with the chipped blue-red-paneled stained-glass dome at the top, as well as the crimson curtain drapes that obscure the sunlight. In their place, large vertical wooden panels that creak open in alignment cover up the shelves containing first-edition literature while revealing them in measuredly angular fashion, and a glass hole in the top illuminates the perfect spot for Harrison to potentially read his fine literature in a lounge chair replete with a book stand. Alas, Harrison’s first instinct upon seeing this new study is not a show of awe, amusement, or gratitude for his son having arranged this surprise gift. No, he instead throws a hilariously petulant fit of unbridled, screaming rage against Attila and László, one so catastrophic in fact that Attila declares that he can’t give László a place to stay anymore.

Harrison’s awe, however, comes later, when he comes to regret his outburst and instead opts to repair his relations with László, offering him photos of his previous brutalist architectural projects back in Hungary that László believed were destroyed by the Reich, and are moved to see once again. From there, László and Harrison’s working relationship deepens further, as the former gets continually invited to Harrison’s family and patron gatherings, getting himself acquainted to the ruling class’s etiquette and workings—namely the veneer of benefactor kindness they offer to anyone who they can sink their monetary hooks into. Eventually, one of those hooks takes shape for László in the form of a colossal project that Harrison assigns him: an overwhelmingly vast Institute made in dedication of Harrison’s late mother, which houses a litany of facilities, including a library, a gymnasium, and others that László reiterates with increasing disbelief. The project brings with it a stable place to stay and work, not just for László, but also for Erzsébet and Zsófia, who are finally due to arrive to America thanks to the work of Harrison’s associates.

As László gets to work on virtually every step of the production process for the Institute—including a board meeting to persuade the townsfolk of the Institute’s benefits, as well as various methods of sourcing materials for the Institute’s construction—Corbet’s formal handle on the craft shines so deeply that it’s blindingly, inspiringly radiant. The length of The Brutalist almost makes the presentation of a 15-minute-long intermission mandatory, but it also permits for Corbet to create one of the most electrifying Act One mic-drops this side of any given smash-hit Broadway musical. As the film barrels its way towards its intermission, a wildly effective and persistent use of montage impresses all at once the temporal and spatial vastness of the project, a deeply immersive sense of place and time in the film’s post-World War II industrial America via interstitial use of archival footage, as well as the antsy anticipation of László’s long-awaited family reunion narrated by recurring Erzsébet-letter voice-over.

By the time the screen cut to black and its intermitting image faded into view, I found myself simply sitting in purely relieved tension, jittering with electrifying excitement for what laid on the other side of those fifteen minutes. To expect a narrative direction more characteristic of a downfall for László after witnessing such a triumphant rise is not terribly novel to begin with. The signs, after all, are littered throughout. The Van Burens’ masks gradually slip, with Harry letting loose the cordial threat to László of “We tolerate you,” while Harrison and his associates go behind László’s back in order to hire another architect to oversee and assist the project’s development in more financially plausible, less artistically integral terms. Trouble lurks around the corner for László. Even the briefly joyous arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia is undermined by the former being wheelchair-bound by osteoporosis, the latter also rendered mute—and full-chested Zionist later on—by the trauma of the Holocaust.

Yet, dear reader, imagine my genuine disappointment when I find later that Corbet proceeds to invest his energy into defining that downfall in the most simplistic, predictable terms. For one, he binarily delineates, with no room for further contextual exploration, the troubling divide between artist and capitalist defined by the newly-immigrated working-class Jew and “native” ruling-class white Protestant*, in a way that solely resembles prey and predator in respectively powerless and powerful absolutes. Perhaps most egregiously in The Brutalist, he gratuitously literalizes that proverbial, absolute divide through a bizarrely tactless depiction of an unspeakable act of violence. Imagine, from that point on, the frustration that emerges when I realize the unbelievable dilution of potential helplessly unfolding before me. Nearly two hours of exceptional narrative setup and formal rigor promising incomparable nuance eventually only leads to a puzzling blearing of both late-stage capitalist cynicism and world-weary optimism, cutting its primary players down from fully fledged beings to reductive, defenseless-or-monstrous, victim-or-perpetrator archetypes of their respective industries and worldviews.

The frustration here is not in the film’s wholesale lack of merit. It is in the loss of potential worth an entire Great American Novel’s worth of thematic and narrative richness and complexity. In other words, The Brutalist winds up exactly matching the most reasonable and non-hyperbolic of expectations, and that is far too profound a disappointment for a film that starts and persists with such rarely precedented verve and vivacity.

Even still, among the elements making up that exceptional narrative setup in The Brutalist are the actors at the helm of this story. Through the Van Burens, one gets the beginnings of a deeply insightful taste for what kind of people these uber-rich figures represent to begin with. Joe Alwyn plays off the slimily entitled, slick-haired Aryan-lite Harry to a tee, exuding an appropriate amount of disgust before ramping it up to a chilling degree of latent paranoiac rage. Guy Pearce, meanwhile, expertly balances between being the primary source of a pompous, upper-class-oblivious comic relief, as well as the menacing imposition of being a respected figure of significant political and financial import, delicately enough to be sincerely believable. On the Tóths’ side, Felicity Jones’s showing as Erzsébet gets too few moments of note to really shine, but what is there highlights an intriguing contrast between Erzsébet’s frailty and determination that provides a solid foundation to work and interpret. Of course, no mention of this film can truly go without that of Adrien Brody, whose gradually intensifying, lighter-snapping evolution into László’s full potential preceding his catastrophic deterioration provides an echo to his iconic work in The Pianist, building on that film’s depiction of perseverance while intriguingly deviating from the specific nature of its Holocaust-founded trauma.

But any mind or heed given to the more nuanced complexities of these characters as people—beyond their archetypal place in historically imbalanced power dynamics—ultimately feels wasted in The Brutalist. Additionally, any thought provided to the nuances of post-WWII antisemitic persecution or the paradoxical bond that ties artist and businessman together ultimately feels irrelevant in the face of the simplicity that Corbet winds up reaching. Indeed, the scope of The Brutalist‘s ideas feels like it narrows over time, which feels like yet another waste when such an extensive runtime truly feels appropriate for the scope of its epic immigrant narrative, and the titanic presence of which feels like a self-imposed prerequisite for complex thematic exploration, regardless of how well-paced it proves to be. Even the sporadic incorporations of a nascent Israel’s rise to statehood felt like a relative afterthought meant only to sparsely add specificity to the film’s otherwise benign portrayal of the American Dream.

Trained and directed by the likes of some of our greatest modern auteurs (Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke, and Bertrand Bonello among them), Corbet seems to very intuitively understand how to formally present grandiose ideas of assimilation, power, artistry, nativism, corporate parasitism, and so on, which seems to be why the presentation of the first half’s rags-to-riches seems to work to such overwhelmingly inspirational effect. Yet it becomes clear by the film’s ambiguously cynical (or anti-climactically reverential—it’s hard to say) conclusion that grandiosity may have been his only real priority. When it comes time for Corbet to confront the violence inherent to transactions between art and business, oppressed and oppressor, and have-nots and have-it-alls, those obvious binaries are the only operative terms through which Corbet proceeds to narratively explore such violence. In the end, binaries are woefully insufficient for a work that, from the onset, dares to aesthetically purport and aspire to be the next Great American Film. It is only all the more dispiriting that, for a time, The Brutalist‘s purports and aspirations of greatness are unfathomably persuasive.

*Editor’s Note: an earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Catholic, instead of Protestant, in describing the film’s class divisions, and has now been corrected.