by Julian Wood

Year:  2024

Director:  Brady Corbet

Rated:  MA

Release:  23 January 2025

Distributor: Universal

Running time: 215 minutes

Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Adrien Brody, Flicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Stacy Martin, Raffey Cassidy, Isaach De Bankole

Intro:
… a well-made film, which like its subject matter, feels built to last.

A fictional portrait of a Jewish Hungarian architect that runs for three and a half hours (with a retro built-in intermission if you please) might mean that The Brutalist is a film that ends up being more talked about than actually viewed. Of course, in these days of binge viewing, the film might get a second lease when it finally reaches the small screen. However, it wouldn’t be nearly the same film on your TV screen, as its sense of monumentality would be fatally diminished.

Its director is Brady Corbet, an actor who burst onto the scene as an enfant terrible with his divisive films The Childhood of a Leader (a Jean-Paul Sartre adaptation) and Vox Lux, a depiction of an artist in meltdown. However, it also heralded the arrival of a bold stylist who was prepared to sacrifice ease of viewing for a purity of vision. The Brutalist is no exception.

Adrien Brody plays the lead, and as with his performance in Polanski’s superb The Pianist, this film shows him as an actor who can give an intense and sweeping performance with elements of light and shade. He is brilliant in this film. Incidentally, the film was first planned to be shot in 2019, but the COVID era ruined that ambition. Not only was Brody not down for the role (originally to be played by Joel Edgerton) but almost the entire cast got replaced. The casting of Felicity Jones as his long-suffering wife is another welcome addition (replacing Marion Cotillard).

The film has a long historical sweep and it confirms the well-worn idea that the history of America in the twentieth century is a story of its immigrants. Like PT Anderson’s There Will be Blood, it is a story of the origins of American capitalism and the large role played by the super-rich. This meant men (yes, mostly men) who had the drive to make untold millions and the vision to shape the culture. Of course, they needed artists to make the money into something tasteful.

The hero of the story is Lazlo Toth (Brody), a Jewish refugee from his native Hungary who arrives in American with nothing. He has the good fortune to meet expansive millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (the ever-reliable Guy Pearce), who gives Lazlo the chance to furnish his new mansion. When he sees the fierce elegance that Lazlo brings to his projects, he backs him all the way, leading eventually to the great modernist buildings that will be both of their legacies.

The Lazlo character is an amalgam of émigré architects and designers such as Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was Mies van der Rohe who provided the mantra for the modernist aesthetic with his famous dictum that ‘less is more’ but, the while the architects may have pared back the lines to an essential elegance, they did not work in miniature. The buildings they created were brutal in scale and weightiness. That was the point. Whether you like this style or even care about its aesthetic importance in art and design history, there is no doubt that Corbet wants the big screen to showcase their vision. If the lives of the people who create them seems puny in comparison, then so be it. It is not just a visual essay in architecture though. The emotions of the people who created this era and its legacy are of equal interest to the filmmaker and The Brutalist certainly has satisfying elements of emotional depth as well. It is a well-made film, which like its subject matter, feels built to last.

9Monumental
score
9
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