Bigger than life

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist Is a Visionary, Divisive Epic—And That's the Point

(Adrien Brody as the haunted and enigmatic architect. All photos courtesy of A24 Films.)

Part one

Whatever else you want to say, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is not a work of half-measures. It’s big-bodied and built for scale.

With its ambitious and epic shape, the movie’s clearly intended as an outsize experience framed by large ideas, themes and concerns. It’s a work about man and art, of capitalism, assimilation and their discontents.

I’ve seen it twice now, a couple of months apart, at the same place, the Music Box Theatre, in Chicago. The first time, projected in 35mm, as part of the Chicago International Film festival. I returned there last month for its commercial run, in striking 70mm.

With a running time of three and a half hours (with a roadshow style fifteen-minute intermission), the movie’s meant to explore all of the messy and exalted promises of American exceptionalism. It also probes more intimate concerns, of men and women, of power dynamics and social, political and sexual relationships.

The Brutalist is the third feature by Corbet. Were he born half a century earlier, he probably conformed to the classical notion of Actors’ Studio profile, good looking, solid and physically imposing.

As an actor Corbet tended toward the recessive, his alienating and opaque state projecting a studied and calculated indifference.

Corbet has always been drawn to intense, psychologically tense material—working with independent directors like Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin), Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene), or Antonio Campos (Simon Killer).

As a filmmaker, he is the opposite of those blank, enigmatic figures. Instead, he is direct, engaged, and bold, showing the clear stylistic and formal imprint of the modernist European directors he has worked with—Michael Haneke (the American version of Funny Games), Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria), Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden) and most significantly, Lars von Trier (Melancholia).

At the Chicago festival screening, Corbet said he saw the film as a portrait of a marriage (significantly, he has written all three of his features with his life partner, Mona Festen, the Norwegian filmmaker and the mother of his daughter).

The couple’s first feature, The Childhood of a Leader, is currently available at the Criterion Channel (subscription required). Like their second feature, Vox Lux, the new film has a two-part, interlocking structure.

(The bold and the damned: the severity of the landscapes gives way to a highly impressionist style.)

Part one, called “The Enigma of Arrival,” is more thematically and rigorously composed, in my mind, governed by absence and self-abnegation and developing a very sharp and pungent exploration of memory, guilt and time.

Corbet’s influences are not just cinema and architecture, but paintings, sculpture, and dance. Part one has an epistolary and circular structure, framed by the reading of two letters that persuasively bind the two parts together.

In the 70mm projection, the detail and textural play of light and shadow is just breathtaking, giving shape and inflection to faces, objects and landscapes.

The switch of tones and styles is invigorating and fascinating, deftly moving between impressionist art and documentary realism, with a particular emphasis capturing the way people move, speak and act.

Brilliantly shot, on 65mm, by the cinematographer Lol Crowley, the imagery is tactile, with a solidity and weight. The Brutalist is as much felt as seen, like the remarkable opening passage that moves from darkness to light, perfectly timed by the music of Daniel Blumberg, to a jarring cut to an upturned corkscrew angle of the Statue of Liberty.

The startling moment establishes the visual and formal structure of the first movement that opens in 1947, at Ellis Island, and introduces its protagonist, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Balhaus-trained Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who’s been forcibly separated from his family.

The bravura visual passage also underscores or crystallizes ideas about death and renewal that Corbet returns to throughout the film, of Tóth seemingly being broken and damaged and discarded only to be revived and resurrected by fate, history and character.

The credits come up shortly after that, and they are play off movement and landscape, an inventive and remarkable blend of von Trier and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

The movie’s contradictory strains are immediately evident, the self-discovery and yearning (the libidinous Tóth at a brothel) playing off the guilt and shame of this fragmentary, elliptical man haunted by the past.

Tóth’s sexual expression is inseparable from his creativity, and his indiscretion or misunderstanding with the wife of a sympathetic cousin (Alessandro Nivola) irreversibly destroys that relationship. Does he have, one wonders, a masochistic desire to destroy himself. Addiction, in different iterations, is another rhyming theme.

If part one is framed by the subjective, conceptually The Brutalist is dominated by personal dynamics and power relationships—of family, religion and especially, commerce.

Part of what makes the larger work so unstable, of the ground feeling never settled or constantly shifting, is how these private networks are naturally contentious and compacted by grievance, personalities, origins and class stratification.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and part one always feels lived in and achingly alive. Corbet has a gift for conflict. If Tóth is the natural emotional entry who provides a clear point of identification, the mercurial and flamboyant industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) who becomes his patron is the vital and necessary opposing force the material demands dramatically.

Tóth is the striving Jew, interior and withholding, never quite comfortable in his own skin though blessed with a natural verve, talent and vision. Van Buren is the enigmatic driver of man and action, solemn, pretentious and unbending in his reach and desire. (His name and imperial manner conjures Charles Foster Kane, and Pearce’s line readings and voice definitely play off Orson Welles.)

Van Buren has used his power and resources to define his own social order, as he lays out in a terrifying and telling anecdote of how he humiliated his estranged grandparents to assert his own authority and prove his need for dominance and control.

(The moment has its echo in the second part that is, I think, the most significant of the linking actions. More about that in the second part of this essay.)

After an initial misunderstanding, Tóth captures the wealthy man’s fancy with his bold graphic design and striking use of form and function in designing a private library that achieves social and cultural notoriety.

The swaggering Van Buren rewards him with a major public arts commission in designing an ambitious community center dedicated to the memory of his mother.

If The Brutalist is frequently an allegory about artistic compromise—the tension between personal vision and external forces—then Van Buren is the living embodiment. He makes visible and concrete the supreme personal concessions and tradeoffs Tóth must make in pursuit of his work. The most withering line in the movie is delivered by his wastrel son, who tells Tóth at a party: “We tolerate you.”

With the exception of a few establishment shots of New York and western Pennsylvania, from what I could tell almost all of the movie was shot, on soundstages and locations in and around Budapest, Hungary. The filmmakers worked with three prominent European production companies—the Italian Kino Produzioni, Hungarian Proton Cinema and Ukrainian Dovzhenko Film Studios.

“Amerika,” almost functions as the real title. Like von Trier, the defamiliarized “American,” landscapes create a heightened destabilization and dislocation that make for a striking emotional corollary with Tóth’s immigrant experience.

If The Brutalist is not exactly naturalistic, it’s not artificial or unspecific. It’s just punishing and severe.

Part two is called, “The Hard Core of Beauty.” If part one is implicitly about power, art and (male) sexuality, the somewhat less successful second part is about the return of the repressed, with the appearance of László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).

Each is badly scarred by their wartime experiences as refugees, Erzsébet wheelchair-bound from complications of osteoporosis and Zsófia incommunicative and seemingly incapable of any personal interaction.

The tension of the first part is built around explosive and anarchic ideas of freedom, desire and release—the scene at the whorehouse, another sexually charged sequence at a jazz club, or László’s deepening addiction to smack.

It’s a measure of Felicity Jones’s remarkable work as an actor that she brings an emotional balance and equanimity to László without flattening him. She becomes through assertion and subtlety the emotional centerpiece.

The second part is more a contested battle of wills, triangulated and complicated by these very distinct and warring personalities, of László’s intransigence and artistic vision, Erzsébet’s intellectual ambitions, and Van Buren’s desire, like Prospero, to bend and shape events to his own peculiar needs and private satisfaction.

Corbet naturally swings for the fences, and is drawn to mad folly as a theme. He is a filmmaker who is clearly not afraid of coming off as pretentious. Whatever its fault, the move is never passive or inert. Even during the off-rhythm or awkward moments, the filmmaking is constantly thrilling and sensational.

The achievement is hardly his alone. The work of the composer Blumberg, cinematographer Crowley and production designer Judy Becker is also deeply impressive. The editor David Jancsó is the son of Hungary’s greatest director, Miklos Jancsó.

As much as I admire the film, it’s impossible to fully talk about and explore the film without really going deep into the ending. That shocking section threatens to render everything I’ve said moot.

Like Haneke or von Trier, Corbet is a provocateur.

Corbet doesn’t just want to provoke—he wants to unsettle, to challenge, to leave his audience wrestling with the implications of his choices. If The Brutalist is a great film or a near-great one will depend on your reaction to its shocking, divisive final movement.

The second part is the reckoning. Corbet marks a rupture with an inflammatory final movement that is impossible to ignore or fully understood. It demands its own response.

In many respects, it is where the real debate or conversation about the film should begin. I’ve talked this over with other friends since I first saw the film. Please come back for the second part of the conversation.

(Please see the film first.)