One: The Exaltation of Irresolution
Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is designed to be analyzed and admired, which truth be told kinda takes the fun out of it. Interpretability has become a bane of modern art and criticism alike, and I include myself and this review in that estimation. One can too often sense artists trying to beat critics to the punch these days, in effect priming us for the reviews they want. Watching “The Brutalist,” I felt that I wasn’t seeing the fruits of an artist’s obsessions so much as an audition reel for title of Next Great Auteur.
Every symbol has been planted in “The Brutalist” fastidiously, and the themes have been carefully pruned and left unresolved, lest we divine conventional meaning from anything that happens during the film’s 3.5 hours. Of course, the gigantism of the running time is another dare to audiences, as the film is split into two halves with titles that celebrate their own pretension, parody it, or maybe all the above.
László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who arrives in New York City after World War II, fleeing the ravages of the Holocaust. He is shaken and haunted, first seen by us emerging from the cavernous bowels of the ship that brought him here. This opening is Corbet’s first big flex: it is staged as a single shot, dropping us into the film with no context, with us wandering along with Tóth among the gurgling sounds of the boat and confusions of other immigrants grasping for a new life.
The scene is moody and impressive, a knowing riff on similar sequences in grand American epics like “The Godfather Part II.” Corbet also shows his impudent modern touch in the scene’s final flourish: Tóth arises from the ship, as if birthed, and regards the Statue of Liberty, which from his angle appears upside-down, its sharp and eerie angles serving as the first of the film’s many visual riffs on its own title.
The first half of “The Brutalist” is absorbing, in part because Corbet seems torn between indulging in the smirking irony that’s far too common of rarefied movies these days, and in utilizing his authentic gift for style and drama to fashion a straight-faced American saga. This conflict on the part of the off-screen artist comes to mirror certain splits governing the artists onscreen. Tóth is taken in by a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who hires him to work in the furniture business that he’s built up in Pennsylvania by passing himself off as a WASP. Attila is slick and full of himself, and he’s even got the gentile wife to round out a stereotypical package of postwar American prosperity, Audrey (Emma Laird), whose ambiguous air towards Tóth is not to be trusted.
This portion of “The Brutalist” juggles emotionally and socially freighted material with a dexterity that’s virtually unheard of in modern American cinema. By “passing,” is Attila betraying his people and himself or using common sense to survive? And where does Attila’s willingness to leave his past behind intersect with his loyalty to Tóth? America, with genocide and intolerance in its DNA, is built on such quandaries. This conflict between cultural identity and personal aspiration runs through the first half of the film like a live wire, and Nivola, a subtle and frequently underrated actor, makes Attila into an unforgettably irresolvable character.
The overlap, and potential war, between one’s culture, inheritance, and identity is brought into starker focus when Tóth meets Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The latter is a wealthy, new-money businessman who learns of Tóth’s esteem in Europe as an architect before the Holocaust and contracts him to build on his property an enormous and insanely expensive community center, made of concrete and Italian marble, which is of course above all meant to be a monument to Van Buren’s largesse.
Like Attila, Van Buren is all conflicting impressions: When he first meets Tóth, who has been hired by Van Buren’s son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), to refurbish the old man’s reading room, he is entitled and irate. When he learns that Tóth is a commodity, perhaps a fashionable charity project, he softens up and the men develop an ostensibly friendly yet curt, more-than-vaguely homoerotic bond that’s meant to embody the riddles governing the relationship between capitalism and art.

Without Van Buren’s money, Tóth can’t renew his career as an architect (we assume, though this implication feels like a script convenience). With Van Buren’s money, Tóth is treated like a pet of the family, subject to its whims, and he must balance his creative urges with Van Buren’s desires. Tóth is a symbol of artists who’ve quietly contributed mightily to our society while the Van Burens of the world take the lion’s share of the credit. Corbet is fascinated with art creation as a struggle of dominion between creators and the funders who are locked in mutual resentment of what the other has. Put bluntly, one has the talent and the other the money. My guess is that any filmmaker who’s had to wrestle with power-mad producers will find “The Brutalist” intensely relatable.
Notice how I’ve turned myself into a court stenographer for what happens in “The Brutalist” and what it means. The movie demands that you watch it that way. Again: Every moment is weighted, loaded, rigged. Nothing feels spontaneous. For a while, this overwhelming purposefulness is spellbinding. At a certain point, though, this movie’s thicket of lightning rods comes to feel absurd.
After an intermission, the second half of “The Brutalist” opens with the arrival of characters that have been discussed but not seen: Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and teenage niece, Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), who’ve managed to get to America from fascist Europe with the help of Van Buren’s attorney. Erzsébet is in a wheelchair due to osteoporosis caused by famine suffered in a concentration camp, while Zsofia doesn’t speak. At some point along the way here I forgot to mention that Tóth is also a heroin addict. Later, someone is raped. Perhaps two people, depending on how you wish to interpret another coupling. For me, that’s several miserabilist signifiers too many.
And on it goes, like a round of uncompromising art-house-cinema bingo. Not even the weight of the Holocaust is enough for Corbet, who drops in references to the conflict between Israel and Palestine that exist mostly as Easter eggs. “The Brutalist” begins to feel like a joke, or an experiment in how many contrivances an audience will accept if they are wrapped in a patina of prestige. Even the casting of Brody, who is superb, feels in the grand design to be another fortune cookie, a reference to his searing work as another Holocaust survivor in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist.”
Two: The Befuddlement of Severity
“The Brutalist” is the kind of movie that tries to intimidate you out of your own uncertainties with it. Must every scene shake me from my complacency, and isn’t that smugness its own complacency? For all its Sturm und Drang, what is “The Brutalist” actually about? I’m of the mind that it’s about its own severity and impressiveness. Yet like the movies of many current art-house darlings, it feels insular and un-lived in and enthralled with prior movies. It’s big, memorably staged and scored, and yet there’s not quite a vision here, a sense of a response to actual life, the sense that separated the “Godfather” movies from genre films, or James Gray’s “The Immigrant” from other movies enthralled with New Hollywood.

The air leaks out of “The Brutalist” during its second half, as Corbet keeps hammering away at his power games and signifiers of oppression. Playing only to the miserablism of the material, Jones gives a disastrously shrill performance—she’s an anchor added to the film just when it needs to cohere into something beyond its cryptic references to dashed longings and historical atrocities. Pearce is commanding, and you miss him when Jones is on screen, but there’s not much underneath his stylishness besides predictable bitterness and cruelty.
Tóth and Van Buren’s ambiguous collaboration intentionally suggests the central relationship driving Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” But Corbet doesn’t earn that comparison. Much as I like Guy Pearce, he’s no Philip Seymour Hoffman, who could suggest bottomless nuance with the enunciation of a vowel. In Pearce’s defense, this superficiality is part of Corbet’s design: he wants you at a distance, so that you can savor his rigorous formal scheme.
One of the most refreshing qualities of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work is that it isn’t ironic, but then again Corbet also aspires to be the next Michael Haneke, with whom he’s worked, or Lars Von Trier, both pranksters who indulge in lurid fantasies that they often seem to proclaim themselves to be above. I think one of each is more than enough.
Epilogue
I suspect that this monument to monumentality may stick in the public consciousness for about as long as Todd Field’s similarly impressive and lifeless “Tár.” Remember that chestnut? It was released but two Oscar seasons ago.
“The Brutalist” is now playing at Movieland.