The Brutalist Review
A towering achievement, and a manifesto to creativity in its most pure forms.
Fleeing Europe in the wake of World War II, renowned architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) arrives in Philadelphia. After some initial luck working on a library for the unknowing and wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce), Toth finds himself stripped of his original job and living in a communal Church-provided guest house, while addicted to drugs and working in hard, menial jobs. When Lee Van Buren Sr seeks him out to right his wrong, and get his help in building a community centre in honour of his late mother, Toth finds a new opportunity to return to his life’s work of architecture. He sets out trying to create a truly remarkable building - particularly for regional Philadelphia - and has to overcome a broad swathe of challenges in doing so. When his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), finally joins him, further challenges begin to arrive, and Laszlo starts to question whether he’ll ever be able to hold on long enough to finish this monumental build.
Brady Corbet tackles The Brutalist with a wanton abandon for appeasing the Netflix-era, attention deficit cinema-goers that studios seem obsessed with enabling. The film meanders its way through the life of its lead character, willing to give plenty of time to elements that may feel extraneous. It runs for three and a half hours. It has an intermission in the middle. Corbet sticks up a big ol’ middle finger to the studio heads who say that audiences don’t have attention spans anymore, and we’re all the better for it.
Despite its long runtime, The Brutalist is a thrilling and engaging watch throughout. Corbet threads a consistent tension throughout, and while the stakes may at times objectively seem small, the wrap together towards the end brings the sheer scale of the ambition on display by both the main character and the filmmaker into stark relief.
The film is, of course, anchored by a tremendous performance by Adrien Brody, who quite frankly deserves the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Laszlo Toth. He breaks your heart frequently in quiet and despairing moments, showcasing the immigrant experience of this character, while also revelling in some of the bigger, showier moments. He’s supported by a suitably strong performance by Guy Pearce, and Felicity Jones, but to be frank Brody towers above everyone else in this film.
The other big highlights are the set design and the cinematography. The former, aiming to capture the beauty and shock of Laszlo’s vision, really succeeds in creating some architectural spaces that bring a sense of wonder to the audience. The latter, in its full vista-vision extravagance, bringing a sense of scale and ambition to every shot, while also leaning into the brutalist lines and lighting not only of the buildings, but of even the small moments like Attila (Alessandro Nivola) telling Laszlo he has to go.
Recently, some alleged issues have come to light about the production’s use of AI in two areas; firstly, in tailoring Brody and Jones’ Hungarian accents when they speak Hungarian, and secondly in an ending sequence of various art undertaken by the fictional Toth in a Venice Biennale exhibit of his life’s works. Honestly, the first seems like a non-issue; the vast majority of video editors use AI these days to clean up dialogue in various ways, and the description seems to be a slight tailoring of some of the pronunciation of vowels in the Hungarian portions of the performance, which doesn’t really make up a large amount of the film nor does it impact the remarkable-ness of Brody’s performance in particular. The latter would be of more concern, but in my opinion doesn’t touch the film’s legacy as that entire ending sequence has a few issues (like the makeup on Brody) that take you out of the ending anyhow.
Ultimately, despite these few minor stumbles, The Brutalist is the sort of film that should be held up as a baston of filmmaking excellence; a director fearlessly pursuing his vision in the hopes that it resonates with audiences - and in the hopes that the prevailing attitudes of big Hollywood studios of the last decade, obsessed with the instant gratification, attention deprived and homogenous view of their audience, are wrong. Let’s hope that The Brutalist proves them so.
