Brady Corbet has all the things you need to be a great filmmaker. He’s technically precise — his shots are frequently brilliantly composed, and his blocking is genuinely solid — and he casts his films appropriately (except for Natalie Portman in Vox Lux). Corbet’s command of tone is also impressive: You inhabit the settings of his films as much as the characters do, enveloped in the mood. Moreover, he’s fucking ambitious, and financiers/distributors have been more than willing to indulge that impulse, even as the runtimes of his films have crept well over the 120-minute mark. It’s no wonder, then, that TIFF chose to put his latest, The Brutalist, up against Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis – I could only see one of the two at that time, and I wound up going with Coppola – not simply because both films are about architecture, but because studio marketing would call both “visionaries,” regardless if the label applied. In what will be my last comparison between the two movies, I’d like to say that, despite their willingness to pursue their “visions” to the end of an audience’s patience, Coppola is a visionary, while Corbet is still looking for that first hit. When first hatched, The Brutalist may walk like a great film and talk like a great film, but as it goes on, it becomes clear that it’s not what you first thought would come out of that shell. And, sadly, Corbet’s baby isn’t a duck, never mind a swan – it’s a goose, and it’s ready to bite you for looking at it on the bike path.
The lovely part about intermissions is that they offer great demarcation points for analyzing where things go wrong, and The Brutalist is yet another example. Its first half is frequently astonishing, with a brilliant flourish coming in its “overture,” which A24 understandably used as a centerpiece in the film’s advertising. Few scenes from any movie released this year are as accomplished as this introduction to Laszlo Toth (Adrian Brody) and his circumstances: we watch him stumble around in the dark, surrounded by crowds of people hurrying about. We get the discomfort and anxiety he feels as a Hungarian Jew in this historical moment and these conditions – it’s not clear to us when or where he is, but the situation feels tense and ugly. Corbet follows Brody, letting the camera bob and shake with each passerby that rushes past him, immersing us in the chaos. When Laszlo finds what he’s looking for – a suitcase – he then makes his way towards a stark, white light. Once he makes his way through the door, it becomes clear where and when he is: He’s on a ship bound for Ellis Island, and as he and a friend he made on the journey celebrate their arrival, we see the Statue of Liberty tossed about in the frame, bounding about in a kind of surrealist ecstasy.
We then move from the ecstasy of that moment to the first of two parts, acting as a simmer before the film hits a rolling boil in the second. Dubbed “The Enigma of Arrival,” the first part follows Laszlo as he grows accustomed to the U.S. He makes his way to Philadelphia, where he finds a place to stay and work with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has become Americanized (and Catholic, thanks to his wife) in the years since he immigrated. Attila does a lot for him early on – in addition to providing room and board inside the furniture store that he runs, as well as opportunities to practice his trade, he lets Laszlo know that his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), survived the war, along with her mute cousin Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), whom Erzsebet has taken on as a charge ever since the girl’s parents died. It’s when they’re hired by Harry (Joe Alwyn), the son of self-made industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to renovate his father’s study/library inside their rural mansion. It’s an extravagant renovation, which Laszlo puts a ton of effort and stymied creative energy into, transforming the space into a modernist wonder full of natural light without damaging the first editions that line the shelves – concealed by shutters made of marble. Much like the character in “She Blinded Me With Science,” Harrison hates what the two have done to the space – they’ve tidied up, and he can’t find anything. The Van Burens refuse to pay, brewing conflicts between the cousins come to a boil, and soon Laszlo is staying in a Catholic-run flop, working construction, and doing heroin to nurse an injury he sustained during the war.
Months later, Harrison tracks down Laszlo at his job site, wanting to apologize for his initial outburst. His mother was dying — she would die the day after the two were thrown out of the house — and he hates surprises. Over a cup of coffee at a diner during Laszlo’s lunch break, he tells him that he’s come to love the room and then did a great deal of research into Laszlo’s background, presenting him with images of the stark and Bauhaus-influenced buildings he designed back in Budapest. Even more, he tells Laszlo that his buildings somehow survived the war unscathed, which brings the architect to tears, cuts the Toths a check for the money he owed them, and invites Laszlo to a holiday party at his estate. This is where the two bond over matters of art, philosophy, and business; and it’s where Harrison presents Laszlo with an opportunity he’s been dreaming of. He wants the architect to design a community center, named in honor of Harrison’s beloved mother, for his small town and will spare no expense to get it done. Once he says yes, Laszlo is sucked further and further into the Van Burens’ orbit: He comes to live in a spare house on the property, finds his money issues solved almost immediately, and is introduced to influential lawyers who can help him bring his family over to the states. Everything’s coming up roses, right? Right?
The second part, “The Hard Core of Beauty,” is when things start to fall apart, both for the characters and the film itself. Of course, things go wrong – the American Dream will inevitably curdle at some point – but how they fall apart proves to be particularly egregious, acting less as a revisionist counterpoint to the heady idealism and propulsion of the first half than a reversion to the mean. Corbet’s work has always leaned on a kind of Von Trier-esque provocation, but he’s not as gross, witty, or self-aware as the Danish master is – take, for instance, the reunion between Laszlo and Erszebet, which is spoiled by the fact that Laszlo expresses sadness that his wife is now unable to walk due to osteoporosis she developed in the camps, and this makes things rough. Once they head to bed, he becomes bizarrely cruel to her, and she responds by giving him a hand job while whispering that she’s thought about all of his straying encounters – sure, it’s uncomfortable to watch and/or awkward as intended. Yet it feels almost parodic: a sharp turn towards abrasiveness that confounds its establishment. I never once bought that Cassidy’s character in Vox Lux would later become the brassy asshole that Portman portrays. Every character in this ensemble follows a similar arc, where they steadily become the worst versions of themselves under mounting pressure, save for Brody’s suffering protagonist, who is nearly martyred for his visionary talents (though absolved by the film’s conclusion). It’s ironic, somewhat, to think of how much DNA this project shares with Zack Snyder’s long-dreamed adaptation of Rand’s The Fountainhead in the ways one would expect – the long speeches are absent, but the aesthetics and the unexpected violence remain.
Again, the provocation isn’t the issue – plenty of filmmakers can navigate this tricky path while maintaining thematic coherence – the problem is that The Brutalist’s variation on this is more of a surrender flag. This, perhaps, is what happens when writer/directors start to see the production process in any field they’re portraying on screen: if you start to notice how much the development and execution of this construction project resembles the process of making a feature film, the inexplicable and its application start to become understandable and, frankly, boring as all hell. It takes the splendid work done by the ensemble – with Brody and Pearce being specific standouts (the former is so beautifully expressive and tragic, the latter has a Charles Foster Kane-like id, full of charisma and aggression, who tears apart each scene he’s in like a tropical storm) – and makes them into easy allegories for director, studio head, producer, assistant director and so on. For instance, Laszlo’s justifications for his artistic ethos are precisely what you’d hear from a director on the festival circuit: Few take on an undertaking requiring this amount of manpower to achieve a vision with a metaphysical understanding that their works won’t last the test of time.
If I had to compare Corbet’s film to anything, it’d be “The Longest Joke in the World”, an old copypasta from the early internet, which similarly lasts far too long and ends on a pithy punchline. But I’d rather speak of it in architectural terms, though, like Corbet, I’m not qualified to do so. Much like brutalism as a design philosophy, The Brutalist is all about the show of force: an aesthetic imposition upon the landscape, full of concrete terror, emphasizing a break with the weak, dainty old and the power of the new. With its bombastic score and austere compositions, it is similarly a projection of strength, designed to build a reputation as much as it is to create modern (and cheap) landscapes from the ashes. It’s awe-inspiring if it’s the first of its kind on the landscape, but it fades into anonymity if the streets are lined with similar grey towers, which is exactly what the avenue where Corbet’s holding his ribbon-cutting ceremony looks like.
Perhaps there are great works to come in the designer’s future, but the important thing is what’s in front of you: A spartan depiction of the now, in all of its powerful terror, full of modern amenities, fit for the world to come. Yet, a closer look at the facilities shows that the plumbing doesn’t work, the doors are paper-thin, asbestos lines the walls, the staircases lead nowhere, and the fire exits lead directly into brick walls. Sure, you could live there, but would you really want to?