Debating The Brutalist

Adrien Brody, the NYFCC’s choice for Best Actor, stars as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who arrives at Ellis Island in 1947 and heads to Philadelphia, where he sleeps in the back of a furniture store run by his cousin (Alessandro Nivola). A rich kid (Joe Alwyn) commissions Tóth to renovate a library for his father, the imposing industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), as a surprise.

Van Buren is indeed surprised, but not at all pleasantly. Once Van Buren picks up on Tóth’s reputation as an admired modernist innovator associated with the Bauhaus school, though, he hires him to build a community center that would incorporate a library, a theater, a gymnasium, and perhaps most challengingly for Tóth, a Protestant chapel. To sweeten the deal, Van Buren arranges to have Tóth’s wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) brought to the States.

“Classical in its construction and avant-garde in its often hazy and dissonant storytelling,” writes Mark Asch for the Art Newspaper, The Brutalist finds Corbet and his writing partner, filmmaker Mona Fastvold (The World to Come), “interested in power and spectacle—whether the frozen spectacle of a building, the crowds and mass political movements of his proof-of-concept debut The Childhood of a Leader, or the DeLilloan mix of violence and mass-media dreamlife in his previous feature Vox Lux, about a school shooting survivor turned pop icon. Also an actor, Corbet for a time in the 2010s was the go-to American for the European arthouse elite—in 2014 alone, he appeared in films by Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, and Bertrand Bonello—and like the self-expatriated New Yorker Stanley Kubrick he sets his films in what feels like an imagined America, at once magisterial in their realization and slightly stilted, as if mistranslated into archetype.”

“Though it fancies itself an all-encompassing postmodern tragedy about the essential corruption of the American soul,” writes Film Comment’s Clinton Krute in probably the harshest review yet, “The Brutalist is, if nothing else, a film about grief—over the loss of country, family, and self. This pervading sense of mourning is the most coherent thing about this largely unfocused and self-important movie, communicated almost entirely via the performances of actors Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, who embody two very different, and very grief-stricken men.”

“It’s hard to register The Brutalist as anything other than a gloss on There Will Be Blood and The Master,” writes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, and here’s where we should mention that Corbet has taken Paul Thomas Anderson’s commitment to shooting on film a step further by making The Brutalist the first feature shot in VistaVision since Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961). As David Ehrlich notes in IndieWire’s list of the twenty-five best movies of 2024 (where The Brutalist comes in at #25), “projected on three hundred pounds’ worth of 70 mm film stock, Corbet’s epic draws a perfectly self-evident connection between the weight of its raw material and that of the concrete monolith Tóth creates over the course of the story.”

“But while PTA can write showy eccentricity all day,” writes Rizov, “this film’s writing is literary but less memorable, and its weaknesses undermine the performers.” Dispatching to the Notebook from Venice, Leonardo Goi would disagree: “Even at their most transcendental, Anderson’s works can hardly hide the exertion required to conjure that; The Brutalist, in turn, makes its most otherworldly moments feel almost effortless . . . That Corbet can make such a muscular story feel so nimble is nothing short of astonishing.” For Godfrey Cheshire at RogerEbert.com, The Brutalist “gives us Corbet as a master storyteller, mounting a complex period tale that I found enthralling from its first minute to the last.”

As for Brody, “he’s remarkable in The Brutalist, in a way that makes you feel like you’re seeing him afresh, with his open parenthesis of a body and that handsome, hangdog face that’s always ruefully giving away a little more than his characters want,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney finds that Brody “pours himself into the character with bristling intelligence and internal fire, holding nothing back as he viscerally conveys both exultant highs and gutting sorrows.”

Keith Uhlich admires the performances from both Brody and Pearce, “the former strenuously working from the inside out, the latter going shamelessly all-surface,” and suggests that Felicity Jones is going to be “the one who gets the awards show clip . . . But it’s a sneakily cameoing Ariane Labed as the elder incarnation of a László relation who leads this ever-expanding void of a film deep into the abyss, via a jaw-dropping climactic monologue that defiantly explicates everything even as it diabolically explains nothing.”