**½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola
written by Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold
directed by Brady Corbet
by Angelo Muredda “I’m not what I expected, either,” Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth tells the first of many resentful hosts he’ll encounter in his new land early in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a super-sized historical epic that, despite its flashy, roguish presentation, tells a fairly old-fashioned story of capitalism funding, then strangling, art, interwoven with a fable about the ethnic roots of American innovation dying in a soil poisoned by white supremacy. It’s a good line, ably delivered by Adrien Brody in a nimble performance that flits from the depths of prostration to the confident delivery of treatises on the utility of brutalist architecture. Like a number of the film’s pronouncements concerning the titular artist (whose name, as fictionalized art-world stars go, is at least as good as Lydia Tár’s, evoking the Australian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972), it’s also a thematic tease. Protracted in length but paced like it’s in a hurry to get someplace, The Brutalist is prone to such dashed-off expositional asides about the self-alienation that ostensibly drives its protagonist, who would otherwise remain something of a cipher apart from his strong feelings on the literal and figurative endurance of concrete.
Though The Brutalist has been understandably compared to period epics such as The Godfather and There Will be Blood, Corbet is also after the novelistic pleasures of a sprawling, epoch-defining book such as Middlemarch or Austerlitz, which is not least apparent in his bluntly expressed literary affectations. The film opens with a brief prologue that sees Laszlo’s chaotic trip to America overlap with offscreen narration of a letter from home, the ongoing persecution of the loved ones from whom he was forcibly separated in Europe during the Second World War carried into the new world. The credits then roll in from right to left as if on a news ticker at the bottom of the screen as the camera propels forward on the open road behind a bus taking Laszlo from New York to his destination in Pennsylvania, ambivalent land of opportunity. The ensuing opening chapter–entitled “The Enigma of Arrival,” likely in reference to V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical emigration story–spans Laszlo’s first days in the midwest in the late 1940s, where he tentatively settles with his furniture salesman cousin Attila, (a mercurial Alessandro Nivola, embracing his shifty character actor phase), and Attila’s aforementioned hostile non-Jewish wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), and meets Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a temperamental industrialist who will define Laszlo’s professional life by commissioning him to build a community centre in tribute to his beloved mother.
Following a 15-minute intermission that comes complete with a countdown clock to encourage discourse and mid-movie pulse-taking, the film takes a grim turn in the second chapter (indelicately titled “The Hard Core of Beauty,” a more obscure reference to the writing of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor), as Laszlo is reunited in America with his long-suffering niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), and wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), now a chronic-pain-suffering wheelchair user as a result of starvation-induced osteoporosis. The horror imprinted on the women’s faces and their plain disappointment at their hostile reception in their adoptive country leaches into Laszlo’s work as he struggles to achieve his vision in the face of the material demands and whims of capital and live up to his self-image as an artist of consequence in a country that at best tolerates him.
A brutalist with a propensity for the massive himself, Corbet seems more comfortable working at a large scale than he does defining his characters’ minute wants beyond what broad social movements they represent at any given moment. As good as he is at inhabiting the privilege of a wealthy developer who can snatch away contracts and kindnesses as easily as he gives them, and whose charity towards the migrants he collects is just a front for his white supremacism, Pearce, by the end, is effectively playing the idea of those things rather than a specific person. Isaach de Bankolé, as always a warm and grounding presence, is similarly stranded as Laszlo’s decades-spanning right-hand man, simply named Gordon. He’s given very little to do in the first chapter, indulging in and scoring opiates for Laszlo and summoning him for meetings–his presence as one of only two Black characters of consequence (the other being Gordon’s son) working largely as a shorthand for an ambient depiction of midcentury industrial Pennsylvania that otherwise feels thin on the ground. A late moment where Erzsébet scolds an increasingly temperamental Laszlo for being rude even to Gordon feels like a laughably unearned reference to a deep relationship not depicted on screen, despite the hefty runtime. Erzsébet herself feels like the product of a filmmaker’s well-intentioned effort to avoid representational trappings about long-suffering wives in artists’ biopics rather than a well-realized presence. Jones capably renders her wilfulness as an intellectual stranded in a new country, writing lifestyle pieces for women she feels are beneath her, surrounded by polite antisemites and ableists who view her as something less than a person. But she’s done no favours by a grandstanding climactic set-piece that sees her character standing for the first time in a walker–a prop that is there primarily to be removed for dramatic impact: Chekhov’s gun as an accessibility aid. This moment could be Jones’s Oscar clip, if it comes to that, but it’s pure kitsch, which wouldn’t be too out of place in her previous disability melodrama, The Theory of Everything.
A builder himself, Corbet is on more solid ground when working in broader strokes on matters of structure–bracketing in stylistic digressions such as faux documentaries and radio bulletins on the industrialization of Pennsylvania or on the state’s growing Jewish community (as well as the early stirrings of Zionist enthusiasm for settling in Israel), along with time-lapse montages of Laszlo’s structures starting to rise up from the ground. Not unlike Toth’s long-gestating great work, whose cultural meaning is elucidated for us in the epilogue–perhaps with some irony–by his grand-niece in a video-recorded intro to a retrospective at the first architecture Biennale in 1980, The Brutalist is an impressive project, with Corbet’s technical effort and scope more or less deserving of the comparisons he’s earned to Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet the film feels like the framing matter of an ambitious work of literary fiction–the thematic epigraphs and chapter titles and layout–with the core of the text filled in somewhat dutifully after the fact. Programme: Special Presentations
