‘The Brutalist’ Review: Everything Old is New Again in Brady Corbet’s Monumental, Novelistic Epic | NYFF

Early in The Godfather Part II, a young, solitary Vito Corleone looks out the window at Ellis Island and sees The Statue of Liberty in the distance. Here, Francis Ford Coppola and cinematographer Gordon Willis capture the icon not just as a symbol of opportunity but as a promise. Vito has escaped the cruelty of Don Ciccio’s mafia and, against all odds, will make a better life in America. Brady Corbet’s exquisite, expansive new epic, The Brutalist, begins with an inversion of this shot where a daunting Lady Liberty fills the frame. Notably, she’s upside-down, illustrating the American Dream as nothing more than a myth, an oath that rings hollow. That will be especially true for Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody), the wide-eyed man who witnesses her on the deck of the ship after the camera follows him in a tight tracking shot amidst the chaos. She’s both an ominous warning and a reference to Lázsló’s work on mammoth structures as a Bauhaus-trained architect, connecting the symbolic to the concrete. Like Lázsló’s creations, The Brutalist reshapes and defines how we (and our character) view cultural iconography. 

Much as Lázsló’s work will reconfigure his life and the film’s fabric, so will his traumatic past at Bucharest. As Lázsló navigates the depths of the ship, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) recounts their separation and gives updates from Hungary in voiceover. Is she reading a letter? Invading Lázsló’s daydreams? He may have arrived in America, but his true freedom is in question; the pain of his past is guaranteed to forever influence the present. Amidst the faces at Ellis Island, Lázsló looks fearful and heartbroken, displaying the first of several moments of brilliance in Brody’s performance. This isn’t just another epic portrait of a genius rising to prominence on new soil, though. Shot entirely in VistaVision and stretching to 215 minutes (complete with two acts, an overture, intermission, and epilogue), The Brutalist has the ambitious feel of a groundbreaking, go-for-broke ‘70s New Hollywood relic while bravely venturing into the current, radically pulling apart thorny issues through its daring structure and the potent work of its protagonist.     

Alongside Daniel Blumberg’s bright, jazzy score, director of photography (and Corbet’s frequent collaborator) Lol Crawley (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) depicts Lázsló’s sojourn from New York to Philadelphia by bus through a dazzling series of driving shots that would make Paul Thomas Anderson starry-eyed. Once he arrives, Lázsló meets his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife Audrey (Emma Laird) at their furniture store, Miller & Sons, where he quickly points out that Attila is neither a Miller nor a father; the furniture store is just a misnomer to attract the family ideals of the All-American customer. Nivola imbues Attila with a convivial spirit fitting of the City of Brotherly Love and a convincing, period-specific accent that could only belong to a postwar businessman desperately trying to hide any evidence that he hails from Hungary. While Lázsló crashes in their storage room, they have their own ideas to encourage his assimilation, including a “great doctor who can help with that nose.” Lázsló isn’t one to blend in, though, and soon enough, Attila brings him on a job for a client that will alter the trajectory of his life in America. 

In affluent Doylestown, Harry Lee Van Buren (a comically evil Joe Alwyn) wants Lázsló to redesign the library on their sprawling estate as a surprise for his business tycoon father, Harrison (Guy Pearce). Production designer Judy Becker (Brokeback Mountain, Carol) depicts the exterior and interior worlds of the Van Buren clan as a blend of old-money Americana and European architectural and design influences, with dark reds and greens that are warm in one moment and suffocating in the next. This, combined with Crawley’s stunning photography and the dreamy grain of the 70mm blowup, makes The Brutalist feel like an old print the Van Burens carefully kept in their personal archive. In one of the most beautiful sequences in the film, Lázsló transforms the crimson, dusty library into a breathtaking modern space far ahead of its time with a single, Marcel Breuer-inspired reading chair placed in the center of the room. Deciding to surprise a hotheaded, finicky man is never a good idea, though, and despite the startling beauty of the new construction, Van Buren screams Attila and Lázsló off the property for destroying his library. On paper, this was the perfect job for Lázsló (he did design the city library in Budapest), but Van Buren’s rejection repeats a core conflict he experienced in Europe once before–the Reich rejected his work because it wasn’t Germanic enough.   

As Lázsló adjusts to his new life in America, Corbet incorporates a newsreel-style voiceover to orient the viewer to the mood of the moment and the subtle anxieties still present in today’s landscape. These announcements range from the importance of small towns in Pennsylvania to the creation of Israel as a Jewish state to the postwar narcotics epidemic. With a high-stakes election around the corner, the inclusion of “Pennsylvania, where crucial decisions happen!” feels like a remarkably prescient piece of dark comedy. These historical details pinpoint the critical moments in the film’s thirty-year timeline and underline Lázsló’s fate and the reasons behind his choices. Corbet also makes a point to overlay the sounds from the news with detailed montages of Lázsló’s process of drawing, building, and creating, depicting their influence on his work and art’s potential permanence within a swiftly changing world. His work is his source of freedom and immortality, yet he still can’t be totally free of the evils of the dominant forces around him. 

Time passes, and Lázsló is completely down on his luck, living in a shelter and working on a construction site alongside his trusted friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé). His work on the library was featured in Look Magazine, though, and that little bit of attention prompts Van Buren to find him, make amends, and propose a new task: to create a large, multipurpose community center in Doylestown dedicated to his mother. While at lunch together, Brody and Pearce brilliantly display the juxtaposition between the two characters and the film’s surprising, biting sense of humor. It’s here that Corbet and co-writer (and partner) Mona Fastvold also introduce the ideas and concepts of Brutalist architecture thematically. The style, with its sharp edges and thick concrete, embraces modernity and rejects nostalgia. It’s the perfect style for Lázsló, a character whose ideas are initially appealing in their novelty but frightening to Americans like Van Buren, clinging to the classical traditions of their Western European ancestors. 

In Pearce’s hands, Van Buren is a rich man with a twinkle in his eye, a penchant for regaling others with tall tales, and a spark of sadism that makes him feel like the long lost brother of Daniel Plainview and Lancaster Dodd. He could believably convince anyone to join him in any endeavor. When he shows Lázsló photos of his pre-war architectural builds in Budapest that were believed to have been destroyed, it initially feels like a thoughtful gesture, especially as Brody fills the moment with an emotional vulnerability for his character. But that raw emotion connected to the past only makes him more susceptible to Van Buren’s wills and whims. Van Buren even introduces his lawyer, a man powerful enough to help get Erzsébet and their orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) out of Hungary. These men are introduced like a stroke of good luck, their purpose to pull him out of the gutter, but in reality, it’s all just a shiny veneer. Van Buren can use Lázsló’s artistic prowess and immigrant identity to convince others of his flirtations with socially conscious capitalism and his lack of wealth and community to keep him in his wicked clutches. 

Brody has never been better, capturing facets of Lázsló’s genius and an underlying bitterness that only grows more apparent as the film and the Doylestown project progress. As Van Buren and his crew scoff at the frankness of Lázsló’s designs, suddenly insisting that the project include Italian marble instead of concrete and a space for Christian worship, Brody convincingly makes Lázsló feel like an outsider on his own project, even more foreign than when he first arrived in America. It’s a performance style befitting the films of the New Hollywood that’s rarely captured in modern cinema. He takes advantage of the richness of Corbet’s design and runs with it, imbuing the character with a quiet intensity and a wry sense of humor that plays with the seriousness of the subject matter. On the surface, there are quite a few similarities to Brody’s Oscar-winning role as Władysław Szpilman in The Pianist (even the film titles), but his Lázsló is a richer, more mature rendering of a man struggling to find salvation in art. Instead, these two roles function as a beautiful pair of performances where Brody uses each character’s responses to physical and emotional violence to unlock each film’s deeper truths about the war and Jewish identity. 

Corbet and Fastvold emphasize that arrival is often an enigma, which is certainly true for Lázsló on the Van Buren compound and beyond. Arrival doesn’t simply refer to his first steps on American land but to something that extends to the presence of new ideas, characters, and architectural designs; there is a threatening beauty to change. But when Lázsló finally reunites with Erzsébet and Zsófia, his wife’s arrival doesn’t bring him the joy one might expect and instead disrupts the status quo. She’s malnourished from the famine, which put her in a wheelchair; he’s impotent, and as it turns out, her Oxford education puts her in better company with the Van Burens. Jones doesn’t fare quite as well with the material compared to her counterparts, as she’s often boxed in by the script’s thin drawing of Erzsébet, whose purpose is to simply reflect the war’s physical toll and act as a voice of reason and encouragement for Lázsló. The film’s most important detail connected to Erzsébet and Zsófia occurs when they introduce the idea of leaving America for Israel for repatriation. It’s not just an indicator of the film’s ideas of Jewish persecution connected to the immigrant experience but also an observation of how vulnerability and pain have fed Zionism–an idea that appears throughout Lázsló’s work and most strikingly in the epilogue.  

Many comparisons will be made to the work of the American masters, but Corbet’s film often feels more inspired by the poisonous texture of European art cinema that reflects isolation amidst political turmoil (namely the works of Bertolucci and Polanski). As the brutal nature of the second act reveals itself, the sprawling rise of Act I and the gorgeous crescendo to the intermission (reminiscent of Reds) feel like nothing more than a ruse. Like Corbet’s earlier works, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, The Brutalist contains challenging, audacious tonal shifts. But while his earlier works felt completely reliant on style to support the bold choices, this film’s foundation is sturdy, allowing the radical narrative decisions to feel more purposeful. Here, the palpable change in mood and tone doesn’t simply exist to shock but rather to reveal the rot underneath the shiny exterior of American ideals after the first act’s convincing optimism. Not every swing connects with as much conviction (there are many loose threads and little subtext), but the violent and often shocking events that befall Lázsló punctuate the flaws of Capitalism and the painful nature of creating art for others, especially when it connects to personal identity and religion. As Lázsló and Van Buren’s doomed power struggle becomes more pronounced, so do the contradictions of imposing Christianity upon a secular space to secure additional dollars and personal power. Lázsló’s Doylestown project is a shared space in name only and a towering monument to the hubris of the Van Burens in practice. 

In one of the film’s most overwhelming sequences, Lázsló wanders through the nearly completed Doylestown project, where the claustrophobic concrete threatens to trap him inside, and the impossibly high ceilings invite an illusion of boundlessness. When the light shines through, the shadow of the cross that Van Buren demanded is upside-down, signaling the contradictions that will only continue to invade and influence Lázsló’s work in America. The Brutalist brilliantly mirrors the Doylestown project and all that is tied up in the empty promise of the American Dream. Its beauty and contradictions form parallels with the current moment that are far too salient to ignore. Corbet’s epic is transcendent and, like Lázsló’s designs, only time will tell if it has the potential to define an epoch. 

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 New York Film Festival where The Brutalist is playing September 28 and October 11. A24 will release the film in select theaters on December 20.