Brady Corbet's THE BRUTALIST (2024)

 

(Pennsylvania SPOILERS ahead)

"Concrete! Concrete! Concrete! Steel! Steel! Steel!"- Dustin Hoffman's character from Megalopolis.

Also, seriously: "Don't forget, we tolerate you."

So... the first half is pretty much a masterpiece! Second half... not so much, Brady.

What sets apart The Brutalist from any other film this year, or most other films in the 2020s (save maybe Killers of the Flower Moon or to an extent Oppenheimer) is the massive sense of capital-S Scale that the director puts with how the world seems and is seen from the point of view of the lead character and that being matched by the sort of gargantuan psychic toll we see on the face throughout. Laszlo is permanently scarred and marked by his time at Buchenwald camp, and like so many Jews his identity was consumed by this over any of his past achievements.

So, when he arrives in America as more like a refugee than an immigrant and, through some odd luck and a connection via a cousin (who later rejects him) comes upon a wealthy Archetypal White Patriarchal Capitalist (err a "Gentile" white man as Jews would say more simply), named after not one but two presidents, who recognizes via some homework that he's actually *the* Laszlo Toth who designed all these Bauhaus designed buildings in Europe, it might seem as if this will be a redemption story of a kind.

 But one of the great things about this film is that there are multiple readings one can put into it; my own mother as an example who saw this with me thought it was a direct Holocaust film - as in the gigantic Grey building he crafts for Mr Van Buren that he's making as a "Christian" community center fornhis mother is all about Concentraion camp allegory which, sure, I can see - and I saw it as another sort of metaphor.

Obvious? Maybe! But not all art need be subtle, and for me it all seems to be a story of how any artist, but especially one who is bankrolled by someone with a sufficient lack of a vision yet with the means to see that someone has "something" poetic to say and give them the space and bread they want and need to cook (ie a Studio Exec or any given financier on a film), will face challenges to their visions most of all to those around them, and one's identity inevitably will play a role in the process. One might think that time has made some distance from the 1950s and how much antisemitism and xenophobia has softened, but... not in where we are in the mid 2020s, and if anything the gulf between the People with Power and Those Who Actually Have Talent (but not money, but maybe some trauma) has deepened.

Aside from Corbet and his co writer wife and actress Mona Fastvold finding tremendous wells of nuance and ambiguity to mine, at least in the first half, that makes this so remarkable a feat it's that The Brutalist is about how hard it is to reckon with one's identity both on a Nationalistic and spiritual level and on the more intimate level of "how do I live with myself doing this around these people I can't stand and my family finds so abhorent" and how the filmmakers (including awe inspiring and magisterial but equally never showing off because they can rather it always fits the mood of the scene cinematography by Crowley) go about showing this world of pain and misery that Laszlo fights externally and internally.

 Laszlo has a brilliant mind and talent, and (not but) there are vast wells of pain as an immigrant, a European Jew at that, an emotionally broken husband and Holocaust survivor. Drugs become a way to escape, if only briefly.

All through this Adrien Brody is so fully locked in that we understand Laszlo's aspirations so much and his natural confidence as well as his much darker moods, and it is magnificent, heart rending work. Guy Pearce is maybe the stand out of the film though - or at least on par - and it's all the more remarkable because his performance starts with his most volcanic pissed off moment (after all Laszlo and his cousin were working a surprise gig at his house while away, who was he to know etc etc), and then gets quieter but still as intense as a heart attack.

He is playing not only an archetype but a cliche as the kind of Capitalist who just... has money always no questions asked and is someone we know not to trust (to what sadistic extents leads to one of the flaws of the movie that I'll get to). And Felicity Jones gives easily her greatest work yet in a tricky part inasmuch that this could be too melodramatic but we fully believe in her as much as Brody, only she sees through more of the bullshit (or is willing to call it out more) that her husband goes through while she writhes in pain from her own post Holocaust physical nightmare.

I was so on board in that first half and even into some of the second with what Corbet and his DoP and the composer and everyone were doing here, as stylists and as storytellers, and with the director especially with such a finely tuned sense of what his actors need - I can't fathom how he shot this mammoth bastard on not only 10 million but in *31 days* this guy is fearless and *takes care* in what he is seeing and wants us to see - that I only feel some remorse on a first viewing it seemed to unravel somewhat in the last half hour....

(SPOILERS)

There's something Van Buren does to Laszlo that had me go fully bug eyed and is such a disturbed turn that I would almost be fine with as a story choice if it didn't come so out of the blue (you're mileage may vary on that however). But the film keeps going from this point to some other revelations, and a beat involving the drugs and some more sex and an overdose, and then a giant last confrontation with Van Buren that gets so enigmatic that I sort of threw my hands up and was like "uh... sure," and I wasn't as on board with that. I don't think things we are shown had no way of working, rather it just seemed to get sort of rushed and odd feeling, which is ironic given how much time and patience we have with this story that, for all of its intentional grandiosity and more intimate questions on how far art and commerce can go before it cracks, worked on its own sort of internal logic.

I also didn't care for the epilogue, for minor (what is that make up job come on and that end credits music is lame) and larger reasons (why doesn't Laszlo get to talk, it's all about the "Destination" I suppose). Maybe I will feel a little dumber watching this again sometime soon or later and find many of my issues washed away with some things I missed, but right now I don't think so.

 I think it's a case where The Brutalist set itself up through its pre release (to use the word of another Holocaust film icon, Oskar Schindler) PRESENTATION hype as well as every review and ad saying it was the second coming that to be a little short of a Masterpiece - or a little less than Killers of the Flower Moon or Oppenheimer (or past decades PT Anderson landmarks). If that less than 5 star marker means anything it's simply the high standard this had, like the student that comes in ready for the A but will have to make do with the A minus.

Everything noted, I am so happy that filmmakers want us to think and feel and experience so deeply on a VistaVision filmed canvas like this in 2024/25, that the actors are ready and deliver at the level of their crafts persons, and there is so much to talk about once it all ends. As far as beat for beat special moments in cinema for this year or most years, Corbett and the Brutalist has it.