There’s a certain out-of-time quality to “The Brutalist.” It hearkens back to the Hollywood epics of old, having more in common with films like “Ben-Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” than anything contemporary.
It clocks in at three-and-a-half hours, opens with an overture and pauses for intermission halfway through and it’s divided into two parts with an epilogue. It is a film that’s, without a doubt, carefully crafted for the theater experience.
But there’s more to it than that: aesthetically, “The Brutalist” is essentially a modernist project, “essentially” only because true modernism was a uniquely early 20th century phenomenon. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though — its title comes from the brutalist architecture its main character, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), specializes in. Like brutalist architecture, Brady Corbet’s film directly descends from the modernist movement.
There are shades here of not only its titular genre but of Cubism and Expressionism as well as Art Deco. It’s intensely stylistic — it’s geometric and experimental, making use of montage and title cards and odd camera angles — but that’s precisely the point.
Here, we follow Tóth, a Hungarian Jewish architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, immigrates to the U.S. to chase after the American Dream. Already a great actor, Brody presents us with a career highlight, one of his best performances to date.
Equally great are Felicity Jones, who plays László wife, Erzsébet Tóth, who still lives in Europe; Guy Pearce as Harrison Lee Van Buren, an industrialist who becomes the physical embodiment (for better and for worse) of the dream László’s looking for; and Joe Alwyn as Harry Lee Van Buren, a perfectly entitled and spoiled rich-man’s son who, from the beginning, amounts to the most recognizably antagonistic character.
Across the film’s runtime, we see each of these characters and their relationships with each other grow, in good ways and bad, from 1947 to 1980 — an incredible amount of time that, admirably, never feels like too much.
A word that keeps recurring with “The Brutalist,” even on its poster, is “monumental,” and as should be clear by now, it is absolutely a huge film in almost every respect. I, unfortunately, wasn’t able to attend one of the few 70mm screenings of the movie, but I did take the chance to watch it in IMAX and that experience felt like the second-best thing.
Don’t get me wrong, IMAX makes almost any film better by pure virtue of its being IMAX, but it felt particularly appropriate for “The Brutalist”: shot in VistaVision — a specialized film format, wider than traditional 35mm filmstock, that hasn’t been used for a feature since 1961 — “The Brutalist” is begging to be seen on as big a screen as possible. I couldn’t imagine watching it on a traditional theater screen, the sense of grandeur and, again, monumentality, would be, if not totally lost, then at least severely altered.
Also, important to “The Brutalist” experience is its sound design and score, both of which are heightened even further in a premium format. Composed by Daniel Blumberg, the score is daunting and mighty, almost crumbling and growing ever more discordant and abrasive as the events on screen grow ever crueler and darker. Like the plot, nothing about the music in “The Brutalist” is static, one moment you’ll be listening to a beautiful piano medley and the next a series of deconstructed saxophonic notes in a jazz club as László tries heroin for the first time.
Blumberg presents here an eclectic mix of ‘40s and ‘50s pop music, contemporary classical and big-band, improvisational jazz that, despite its experimental nature, thoroughly reflects the turbulent soundscape of the middle-century era it’s representing.
But the soundscape of that era was only as turbulent as the social and political turmoil that came to define it. Make no mistake, “The Brutalist” is an angry film. It’s angry about the mental and physical displacement of Jewish peoples after the Holocaust, it’s angry about American capitalism and imperialism, it’s angry about the way America treats her immigrants, it’s angry about the big lie that is the American Dream. Here, the dream is a broken, stolen watch sold to you on the street by a con man who quickly disappears into the night. “The Brutalist” is brutalist, of course, in the architectural sense, but also in the way it’s blunt and explicit in its portrayal of the realities of that big lie. This is not a subtle film, but it doesn’t need to be.
If “The Brutalist” falters anywhere, it’s in its pacing. That isn’t to say it’s too slow, actually quite the contrary. Despite its massive runtime, “The Brutalist” moves quickly and is more compelling than many 90-minute films. This is especially true of the first half, which, in my opinion, is the better of the two. It begins to stumble in the second half, where it tries to cram a bit too much into its last 100 minutes or so — it’s not true of many films, and it sounds almost insane to say, but “The Brutalist” might’ve benefitted from being even longer than it was, a four-hour runtime might have suited it even more. Whether it was intentional or not, the ending feels especially rushed and it doesn’t quite work exactly well.
That being said, this amounts to a minor quibble in what is absolutely one of the best films of this past year. It’s a film that’s juggling a lot, but it somehow manages to balance it all in a nearly flawless performance. Firing on all cylinders, from the cinematography to the acting to the score and everything in between, there’s a reason why “The Brutalist” is dominating the awards race conversations and why it has the potential to sweep at the Academy Awards. The release window has been a bit of a slow one — it was technically released in a super limited capacity on Dec. 20, and a slightly less limited one Jan. 17 — but “The Brutalist” is set to release in Bloomington Jan. 24.
