‘The Brutalist’ Review – Brady Corbet’s Decades-Spanning Epic Is A Titanic Work Of Cinematic Mastery [TIFF 2024]

Brady Corbet has a real proclivity for rise-and-fall narratives. In each of his first three feature films, he’s plotted out fascinating arcs, though rarely heroic, for all of his principal characters in one way or another, charting them from their infancies (literal or professional) to the heights of their powers. In his first film, 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, that’s where the journey stops. We see Prescott (played as a young tyrant by Tom Sweet, haunting despite having been only 10 at the time) as an adult, ruling over an authoritarian state with the prowess of a military leader; there’s a profound sense that his subjects support him more out of fear than love. In 2018’s brilliant Vox Lux, the story of a teenage girl (Raffey Cassidy) who survived a deadly mass shooting when she was in high school and catapulted to stardom after a song she wrote about the event captured the heart of the nation, the adult Celeste (Natalie Portman) is who the film closes with. Despite all of the glory that being a world-famous pop star has afforded her, she buckles under the pressures of fame, unable to cope without alcohol or drugs in her system, and wholly unable to be a proper mother.

These tales are complex and tragic, of course, and telling them in this thematic formula has done Corbet a great many favors, from consistent critical acclaim to lofty praise that goes so far as to call him cinema’s next Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, or someone of that ilk. (It’s fair to assume he’d be reasonably happy with any of those three careers.) If Corbet’s latest dramatic tragedy, a staggering, grand epic called The Brutalist, is any indication, such reverence is just the beginning. For what he has with this ever-rich, decades-spanning film about a Hungarian-born architect who survived the Holocaust and later flees post-World War II Europe to take a job in America, one that unexpectedly changes the course of his life, is the cinematic Great American Novel. Despite a runtime of 215 minutes, you never once feel as though Corbet is lengthening the proceedings for sport, as The Brutalist is entirely engrossing, meticulously detailed, and warrants how massive it is, in both scale and scope. At the very least, it’s the best film I’ve seen this year; at most, it’s a true masterpiece in every sense of the distinction. 

László Toth (a career-best Adrien Brody) is an ingenious architect whose reputation precedes him. Never mind that he’s a Jewish man living at a time when someone like him would not receive the same recognition nor respect as his peers; his designs are visionary achievements. However, that’s not the state we find him in as the film begins. Corbet begins by following László through a dense, congested underground hideaway, one he must emerge from in order to travel to Philadelphia to work for his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola). He runs a furniture business, one that László finds uninspired, and not just because the name on the front of the building is a false identity crafted so as not to drive antisemites away, but because the pieces on the floor are “not very beautiful.” Laughing off his cousin’s critique, Attila says, “That’s why you’re here… Maestro.”

In short order, László becomes the shop’s architect, a job that provides him with a place to sleep and proximity to family, the latter of which he longs for. His wife Erzsébet (a career-best Felicity Jones; noticing a trend here?) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), stayed behind in Europe when he immigrated. At least the gig offers him an opportunity to build a library for a wealthy client, Harry Lee Van Buren (a very snooty Joe Alwyn, whose introduction is nothing short of a Rita Hayworth in Gilda impersonation), son of the wealthy industrialist Harrison Van Buren (again, a career-best Guy Pearce), the man who becomes László’s most important client and North Star. Despite his initial fury with the remodeled reading room, built in the minimalist architectural style that gives the film its name, Van Buren warms to his unique new study – not least due to the positive press it receives in the aftermath of its completion – and hires László to build a massive center for study, leisure, business, and pleasure, one that will cover acres of land in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Maestro, recognized for his brilliance, being handed his first opportunity to orchestrate a mind-bending symphony. 

It’s from here that The Brutalist expands, opening up its purview from the streets of Philadelphia to a smattering of hilly burroughs in the Pennsylvanian countryside where Van Buren’s estate resides. Where others may crumble under the weight that comes with adding tens of key characters, layers of specificity, and miles of landscape, Corbet thrives; his lens, operated by English cinematographer Lol Crawley (who has been behind the camera for all of Corbet’s three films, as well as 2021’s The Humans and Noah Baumbach’s 2022 adaptation of White Noise) feels as though it was built to capture environments of this scale. Perhaps that’s because it was: Corbet elected to shoot entirely in VistaVision, making his production the first American film since Marlon Brando’s 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks to be shot entirely in the format, which sees 35-millimeter film stock run sideways through the camera, increasing the frame’s surface area. As if the project wasn’t already one-of-one.

The result of such boldness is enriching and textural, and with Daniel Blumberg’s score providing beautiful, soul-stirring accompaniment, the sequences where László and his crew (namely Gordo, played exceptionally by Isaach De Bankolé) walk the grounds of the community center are saccharine, the visual representation of passion and skill as only a whiz like László could bring to life. As the building begins to grow, Corbet’s scale inflates, concrete rapidly rising from the ground toward the clouds, while the underground areas that have yet to be completed feel as though they are hell-deep. The center itself serves as a perfect metaphor, if not a terribly subtle one, for László himself: The highest highs in its construction coincide with László’s better days, whereas its setbacks are linked to him slipping into a deep depression and debilitating opioid addiction. Brody juxtaposes these two sides to László about as harshly as he can, imbuing jubilance into the character when things are going well, indifference when they are at a standstill, and full-blown hysteria when they are at their worst. 

It’s a remarkably emotive performance that warrants comparison to Daniel Day-Lewis’ work as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. (Which was, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.) It’s a towering achievement in portraiture, one that makes László Toth feel as real as he appears to be on screen. The character and performance alike are nothing if not authentic and intellectually stimulating – fitting, as Pearce’s Van Buren repeatedly calls his conversations with László the same thing – which makes his descent into madness all the more enrapturing to witness. Brody’s intensity only increases the longer the film continues, and the more troubling the center’s construction becomes, and we watch the man who started as a humble architect become a maddened scientist who is enslaved by the powers that be, by this path and his behavior being the only option for him and for Erzsébet. As she notes late in the film, long after joining her husband in America and observing the changes he’s undergone in the years since they were last together, “The man I married is inside, but the lock’s combination, I cannot decipher.”

Lines like these, memorable yet designed more for literature than cinema, see Corbet and his partner/co-writer Mona Fastvold’s script occasionally wander into verbose territory, though it’s never more fitting for The Brutalist to be wordy than when Pearce is on screen. While Memento is undeniable, as is Pearce’s excellent work in Christopher Nolan’s sophomore effort, he’s never done anything quite like this, to the point where Oscar pundits are already predicting that Pearce will receive his first Academy Award nomination in March. Like Brody, he towers over practically everything about The Brutalist, though he casts a different, darker shadow. Not once from the moment Van Buren is first introduced do we feel comfortable with his presence; the kind of character who attracts suspicion from an audience like a moth to a lightbulb, he’s a man whose intentions feel undeniably murky from the jump. Pearce supplies him with a tone that is at once hypnotic and menacing, and he stalks through the film with a furious grace that is as inviting as it is terrifying. He’s not a man you’d want to be left alone with. It’s not a matter of if he’ll cut your legs out from under you, but when. 

Inventions of the László Toth and Harrison Van Buren sort are rare in film, yet Corbet and Fastvold manage to populate their film with two of them, all while not forgetting how important it is to surround them with worthwhile contemporaries and adversaries. With every passing chapter – it’s divided into two (“The Enigma of Arrival” and “The Hardcore of Beauty,” with an overture and epilogue serving as the film’s bookends and a welcome 15-minute intermission coming a little over halfway through the duration – more and more characters are introduced and discarded. But never does it feel as though their existences are of no value nor could’ve been cut out just as easily as they were included. Alwyn’s Harry, for instance, could have solely been positioned as a shitheel baron’s shitheel son, and while he is certainly that, he’s also a complex moral figure in his own right, an irrevocably-damaged child hidden in the body of the heir to an empire. Jones is certainly saddled with the often-lazily-crafted role of the dutiful wife, but Erzsébet does more than sit at home. She challenges László, mentally and sexually, and sees the real man, even if it requires wading through a whole lot of bullshit in order to find him. 

I used a word to describe The Brutalist earlier in this review: masterpiece. I can’t take sole credit for that honor; it has been a popular way to describe Corbet’s film. But what has been even more common are rejections of the very notion that a three-and-a-half-hour historical epic from a young filmmaker could ever truly be a masterwork of any kind. Which, frankly, is and should be universally considered ridiculous due to art’s eternal subjectivity, something I suspect The Brutalist will benefit from once more audiences have had the chance to see it. Here at the Toronto International Film Festival, where I narrowly snuck past the cut-off of a fully-packed 9:45 a.m. press screening that had a line around the block by 7:30 that morning, I didn’t hear many muted reactions. Now, I didn’t talk to all 221 attendees – not a seat was empty – but I did hear a wide range of opinions, from “that didn’t work at all” to “that was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.” 

Though there’s nothing like a lively debate to enhance a work of art’s reputation, I tend to agree with the latter notion. There hasn’t been anything quite like The Brutalist in a long time. Perhaps there’s never been anything like The Brutalist at all. 

The Brutalist held its North American Premiere as part of the Special Presentations section at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be released by A24 on a date yet to be determined. 

Director: Brady Corbet

Writers: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold

Rated: NR

Runtime: 215m