When eminent Hungarian architect and Nazi concentration camp survivor Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) arrives at New York City’s Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty appears on the horizon – but it is inverted. Right from the get-go, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist sets itself up as an epic about the American Dream that will be rich as well as strange.
Laszlo’s exhilaration at being alive and free is tempered by concern about his separation from his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy). Despite his impressive credentials, Laszlo struggles to make a life for himself in his new adopted land. He seeks refuge with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) before meeting Harry (Joe Alwyn), the son of industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce).
Impressed by Laszlo’s Bauhaus school designs, Harrison commissions Laszlo to build a community centre. Harrison plays the role of the benefactor to the hilt, arranging for Erzsebet and Zsofia to emigrate too. They arrive to find Laszlo locked in a Faustian deal with Harrison. Suffering, betrayal and misunderstanding haunt Laszlo, whose only friend in America is the Black construction worker Gordon (Isaach de Bankole).
The Oscar-nominated film is a formidable, formally inventive exploration of the turbulence that undergirds beauty, symmetry and the act of reinvention. The screenplay by Corbet and Mona Fastvold draws dizzying links between the materiality of building elements and the scar tissue generated by displacement.
The visible construction of the community centre unfolds against the unseen formation of Israel in the background, summed up in the line, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” From a meditation on an immigrant’s painful assimilation into America, the film evolves into an exploration of Laszlo’s Jewish identity, the experience of Europe’s Jewish community after the horrors of the Holocaust and Christian America’s attitude towards Jewish migrants.
The rupture caused by the Holocaust affects not just Laszlo but also Erzsebet and Zsofia. Adrien Brody, who previously won an Oscar for playing a Holocaust survivor in The Pianist (2002), looms large over the scenes in which Laszlo deals with an event that has permanently damaged his judgement.
Clocking in at well over three hours, The Brutalist has sequences that are like mini-movies, with beginnings, middle sections and endings. But not every one of the 214 minutes can escape Corbet’s tendency towards bloat, nor does every one of his big ideas come together.
A trip to Italy yields some of the most magnificent visuals in a movie with no shortage of them. But this passage also takes the movie into uncharted, choppy territory.
The mesmerising widescreen compositions have been shot in the VistaVision celluloid format. Low Crowley’s cinematography is so monumental in its scope, so abundant in texture and so tender in its close-ups that it spills out of even the largest IMAX screen.
The endlessly seductive visual schema is backed by terrific production design by Judy Becker. Editor David Jansco comes up with daring transitions and montages to ease along a narrative that spans several years. Daniel Blumberg’s uncanny score completes Laszlo’s bruising experience with American-style capitalism and the limits of architecture in building a new home.
