The Brutalist (2024)

Review

215min

Genre:     Drama

Director:   Brady Corbet

Cast:       Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce…and more

Writers:   Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

-Synopsis-

In post-war USA a visionary Hungarian architect and his wife escape the horrors and bleakness of World War II Europe for the promise of a booming new world, rising to grab their piece of the American dream and establish a new legacy when a mysterious and wealthy industrialist decides to back his paradigm changing vision to help usher in the birth of modern America, only for personal demons and a toxic partnership to threaten to derail his life.

After impressively transitioning from an indie film career on-screen as an accomplished character actor to a promising fully-fledged filmmaker behind the camera with films like ‘The Childhood of a Leader’ and ‘Vox Lux’, writer/director Brady Corbet audaciously makes his mark on mainstream Hollywood by taking a ponderous cinematic plunge into the makings of modern USA. Delivering a striking and rousing yet sobering mid-century “American Dream” immigrant tale, wrapped in a hypnotic ode to architecture and poignant period portrait of power, prejudice, and obsession—as Corbet pulls modern Hollywood back into a bygone era and reminds them of what memorable yet affordable big-time filmmaking can look like.

Adrien Brody stars as Jewish Hungarian architect and holocaust survivor ‘László Tóth’, newly arrived in the “land of the free” with hope but pining for his wife ‘Erzsébet’ (Felicity Jones) and young niece ‘Zsófia’ (Raffey Cassidy) left behind in the homeland, struggling to find his place as an outsider in a booming America, only for his fortunes to change when he meets enigmatic tycoon ‘Harrison Lee Van Buren’ (Guy Pearce), and his kindly daughter ‘Maggie’ (Stacy Martin) and entitled son ‘Harry’ (Joe Alwyn)—working together to realise the grand vision of a unique building project to change the architectural paradigm. But hope and ambition soon turns to despair and obsession, even after reuniting with his estranged family, as tensions rise and his demons re-surface when complications arise and the true face of his lofty benefactor is revealed—leaving him with a fateful decision on completing his opus . . . and for his own reasons.

Among the varied praise garnered by Corbet and his co-writer/producer/partner Mona Fastvold since the unveiling of ‘The Brutalist’ at last year’s Venice Film Festival, much has been rightly made of the extraordinary visual and stylistic achievements of a film with a remarkably modest budget for a picture of its scale and scope in this day and age. Perhaps serving as a filmmaking lesson for a modern mainstream Hollywood which has become so addicted to extravagantly inflated budgets that studios are increasingly struggling to even turn a modest profit on films which rake in hundreds of millions at the box office.

It’s no surprise then that every cent of its approximately $10 million budget is up on the screen for the audience to marvel at, with Corbet and his production & design teams doing a splendid job in seamlessly transforming their Budapest studios and surrounding Hungarian locations—a contributing factor in keeping costs low—into the film’s post-war Pennsylvania setting, both the bustling industrial and the picturesque rural ones.

There is also an admirable effort in maintaining a modernist, minimalist, and brutalist ethos in keeping with the film’s design ethos and as a key element of a narrative that’s artistically inspired by these key 20^th century movements, some of which originally emerged in a rebuilding post-war Britain out of necessity, meanwhile the film’s main protagonist László Tóth may perhaps be loosely inspired by Hungarian-born British architect and furniture designer Erno Goldfinger. And it’s all vividly captured by British cinematographer and now regular Brady Corbet collaborator Lol Crawley (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) in glorious 35mm and 75mm film stock, whilst an evocative, often moody and occasionally rousing score from emerging composer Daniel Blumberg helps to set a wistful and at times foreboding atmosphere, combining well with the visuals to establish the undeniable style credentials of ‘The Brutalist’.

There are no doubt many factors which help to make this bold and ambitious period epic a success, and chief among them is Corbet’s ability to successfully weave together the many themes and social strands of the film’s narrative using the thread of a compelling era-spanning human drama which somehow keeps a modern audience engaged over the course of a more than three-and-a-half hour runtime—with the wise addition of an in-built mid-film interval no doubt helping to smooth this cinematic journey.

Despite only alluding to the horrors of the Holocaust and taking place after the end of World War II, ‘The Brutalist’ is undoubtedly a Jewish survivor story with all the emotional baggage of trauma, suffering, and a legacy of persecution which comes with it. Yet this is also a wider American immigrant and outsider tale which deals with the themes of xenophobia and isolation, power and privilege, cultural division and political paranoia, all subjects relevant to the time and yet with eerie echoes in the present. The film is also an ode to architecture, design and imagination, and to the building of the human world, shining a sobering cinematic light on the art of creating stylistic yet utilitarian structures to both reflect and define our times, and conjure something that endures through the ages.

However the foundation which holds up the many narrative levels is undoubtedly the poignant and powerful human drama at the heart of the film, with much of the weight being carried on the slender yet wide shoulders of its star Adrien Brody, himself no stranger to depictions of early 20^th century pain and despair and with the awards to prove it. But this time it’s with a more personal connection as he’s likely inspired by his own mother’s Jewish Hungarian roots and artistic exploits to bring a truly towering, troubled and heartbreaking lead performance to the screen—with a surprising amount of Hungarian dialogue to match.

Luckily for Brody and indeed the audience he can share the load of the dramatic burden he bears with a fine supporting cast on rare form, with the reliably excellent Guy Pearce commanding the screen as the wealthy benefactor and catalyst for Tóth’s American odyssey but also the personification of exploitative power and privilege. The likes of Joe Alwyn as Van Buren’s entitled objectionable son, Alessandro Nivola as László’s Americanised cousin, and Raffey Cassidy as his traumatised impassive niece all make their mark too, but it’s the stellar Felicity Jones as his stoic and suffering wife who proves the moral heart of the piece—with the Tóths representing holocaust survivors and the Jewish people, struggling with a legacy of trauma, guilt, and a heavy cultural baggage.

Although some of the critical consensus which dubs this an epic modern masterpiece akin to this generation’s ‘The Godfather’, which is not only fanciful and a product of a modern addiction to hyperbole but also less accurate than a comparison to Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’, ‘The Brutalist’ is nevertheless a modern yet classic cinematic triumph which underlines Corbet’s growing reputation as a young contemporary filmmaker with one foot dipped in the past and the other planted in the present. Not to mention a penchant for blending the artistic legacies of golden age Hollywood and world cinema to deliver bold and ambitious human dramas which stir the soul and feed the mind . . . and remind mainstream cinema of what’s possible when you take risks and focus on the story.

The Bottom Line…

Brady Corbet’s third feature film sets the bar for his impressive and emerging legacy as a fully-fledged filmmaker by delivering a soaring yet heartwrenching period drama portrait of ambition and despair, a striking mid-century immigrant epic and an audacious but sobering architectural ode to obsession and the “American Dream”.

Similar films you may like (Home Video)

There Will Be Blood (2007)

In turn of the century California a ruthless oil prospector with his eye on promising land courts the humble family who own it for the rights to drill, striking it rich only to fatefully clash with their ambitious would-be priest son and forsaking any semblance of his own family to grab a big slice of the capitalist pie, in this dark period take on the American Dream from the director of ‘Boogie Nights’ and ‘Phantom Thread’.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and staring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano and Ciarán Hinds among others.

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