Of all the Oscar contenders in play this awards season, The Brutalist is unquestionably the longest. We’re talking three hours and 35 minutes, which includes a 15-minute intermission period that you will definitely need. In his debut feature Vox Lux, director Brady Corbet impressed me mightily with his eye and ear but much less so with his storytelling. Here in his second movie, he’s teamed up with Mona Fastvold, a fellow director who collaborates with him as a co-writer. I’m happy to report that the story flows much better here, even if there isn’t quite enough to support 215 minutes of running time. I do think this is somewhat overrated by some of my fellow critics who think that more is more, but I can’t deny the remarkable things in this epic.
The movie begins in 1947 with architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) arriving in Philadelphia from war-torn Europe. He starts out making furniture for Attila (Alessandro Nivola), his best friend from Budapest who now owns a store in the City of Brotherly Love. They get a commission from Harrison van Buren Jr. (Joe Alwyn) to remodel a private library as a surprise for his shipping magnate father (Guy Pearce), but the surprise is ruined when Harrison Sr. unexpectedly comes home and throws the Hungarians out amid much cursing. Three years later, after his new library has become the talk of Philadelphia’s design professionals, Harrison Sr. tracks down László at his job shoveling coal, apologizes to him, pays him the money that he’s owed, and gives him a new commission for a massive community center in honor of Harrison’s late mother.
Brutalism is the architectural style that László works in, and it’s a controversial style because it’s mainly associated with Soviet-style apartment blocks. So it’s a bit disappointing that the movie gives us so little about why László embraces this style, or how the Americans around him receive his severe buildings. His Jewish faith doesn’t receive much play, either, and if he doesn’t think very much about his ethnic heritage, the movie doesn’t see fit to address that. We’re left with some rather dull stuff about our artist being an uncompromising sort — László has an enemy kicked off the project by baiting him into a fistfight with the words: “Everything ugly and stupid and cruel here is your fault.”
The movie spends most of its first half cruising on the solidity of the writing, acting, and direction here. Corbet generates some great visuals like an overhead shot of a trainwreck that impacts Harrison’s business. The atmosphere of a city that takes its architecture seriously is well captured enough to make this one of the all-time great movies about Philly.
Only in the second half does the film truly take flight, after László’s starving wife Erszébet a.k.a. Elizabeth (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) come over from Europe, and the architect’s joy is tempered when he learns that starvation in Nazi concentration camps has made Erszébet into a paraplegic. A breathtakingly beautiful interlude with László and Harrison traveling to the marble quarries in Carrara — the same place where Michelangelo got his marble — is worth seeing on the big screen all by itself.
It gives way to a scene when a drunken Harrison does something in the streets of Italy that is so terrible that it makes us re-evaluate his entire character. He is a complicated villain, a man who deploys his financial and legal resources to reunite László with his family but then immediately pisses off Elizabeth by making a joke about how her husband dresses like a homeless man and throwing a penny at him. Pearce gives the performance of his career here as a man whose facade of plain-spoken manners hides a sexual psychosis that ultimately destroys him.
The story of an artist who flees war and repression for the freedom and prosperity of mid-century America is overly familiar territory. It isn’t until that scene in Italy and its subsequent fallout that The Brutalist crystallizes, imperfectly but well enough, into its own thing. In a year when one of cinema’s greatest masters made his own movie about architecture (Megalopolis was a mess, wasn’t it?), Brady Corbet can claim to have made a much better film on the subject. That’s something to take home.
The Brutalist
Starring Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce. Directed by Brady Corbet. Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Rated R.
