The Brutalist

The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s sweeping drama about a Hungarian architect who emigrates to America after surviving the Holocaust, is one of its more vivid retellings. In scope and ambition, it brings to mind similar epics ranging from The Master and The Immigrant to Oppenheimer and even The Godfather. Though time will tell whether it stands on the same level as those forebears, even now it feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Great American Novel.

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After arriving in New York City by boat and being greeted by the Statue of Liberty in a stunning opening sequence that itself feels like a dream, László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is taken in by a cousin named Attila (Allesandro Nivola) who came to the land of opportunity years earlier and has long since assimilated. He’s Americanized his name, married a Catholic girl from Connecticut (Emma Laird), and added “...and Sons” to his furniture business despite not having anyway. “You’re not what I expected,” Atilla’s wife says upon meeting László. “I’m not what I expected either,” he responds.

Attila offers a blueprint for how to live in this new country, if not necessarily one our protagonist seeks to emulate. Fluent in English despite living in Budapest until the outbreak of World War II, László was forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) but hopes against hope to be reunited with them. But “dreams slip away,” we’re told, both the kind that arrive in sleep and the kind that define a country’s collective spirit, and even getting what we want tends to lead us in unexpected directions.

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Brody, still the youngest Best Actor winner in Oscar history for his performance in The Pianist, has always looked like he belongs in the 1950s rather than the 2020s. Tall, lean, and angular, his features beg to be seen in just the kind of throwback celluloid employed by cinematographer Lol Crawley here: VistaVision, an ultrawide format that hasn’t been in regular use since the ‘60s. The Brutalist wouldn’t look as towering as it does without it, ditto Brody’s astonishing performance. It’s so lived-in and sincere that you may spend the entire 215-minute runtime under the mistaken impression that Tóth was a real person rather than an invention of Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold. Everything in the film has that same ripped-from-history feeling, like a midcentury fantasia taken from the pages of a lost issue of Life.

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Corbet’s first two movies, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, quickly established him as one of the most ambitious filmmakers of his generation. A once-ubiquitous actor who appeared in nine different 2014 releases and now epitomizes the “…but what I really want to do is direct” trajectory, the 36-year-old's films might best be described as biopics about fictional characters. All of them take place over the course of several years, and all three feature one actor playing both a major character and, later, that character’s child. In the hands of a less gifted director, the technique might feel gimmicky. Here it reads as a statement on what we pass down from one generation to the next: not only physical characteristics but the kind of shared trauma that seems stored in our DNA.

Even getting what we want tends to lead us in unexpected directions.

Brutalism arose from the ruins of postwar Europe and is characterized by exposed building materials (especially concrete) and blocky, geometric forms. It more than lives up to its name, with many considering it an unsightly reminder of the circumstances that brought it into being. Corbet’s film, which likens brutalism to a physical manifestation of postwar trauma, is in many ways a brutalist structure itself: raw, imposing, and strikingly beautiful in its own unique way.

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In a crucial scene near the end, Zsófia says that her uncle envisions his buildings as “machines with no superfluous parts” — a description that applies equally well to Corbet's film. Movies, like buildings, outlive the hands that created them. The Brutalist seems destined for an especially long afterlife.

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