Ambition can destroy you. This insight is not news, but filmmaker Brady Corbet has done his damnedest to ensure that people will believe it is. In constructing The Brutalist, Corbet has built a gilded cage from his thematic and formal hangups. The film is a three-and-a-half-hour saga that follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who has immigrated to the U.S. in search of a better life for his family after surviving a concentration camp. This search lands him at the feet of nouveau riche industrialist tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) who initially dismisses but soon lauds Tóth’s work and asks him to build a community center in his mother’s name. Their artist-patron relationship drives the film.
Corbet is an ambitious filmmaker whose quest to canonize himself is eating him alive. His nostalgia is made manifest through his endless technical fetishism, which sabotages The Brutalist from the get. From the beginning of his and Mona Fastvold’s thudding script, his thesis is clear – the film’s title card, announcing that cinematographer Lol Crawley shot the picture on VistaVision, comes on the heels of the now-iconic shot that follows Brody through the claustrophobic quarters of a ship on its way to Ellis Island. As Daniel Blumberg’s discordant score blares, the camera breaks free from the huddled masses alongside Brody into open air, in a whirlwind of euphoria until it lands on the film’s defining image: the Statue of Liberty shot upside-down. This is as sharp as the film will ever be.
Proclamations of greatness define the film more than anything else because Corbet takes it upon himself to declare its greatness. From self-aggrandizing dialogue, simultaneously didactic and vague, to Corbet and Crawley’s sweeping imagery, the film operates as a desperate plea for canonization. The loftiness of the project is inescapable despite its significant financial limitations.
Thematic conceits range far and wide: the tensions inherent to being the foreign art pet of a philistinic new-order baron, the ramifications of American colonialism and the violence it inflicts upon its victims, and how it forms Jewish repatriation. All of these are wildly interesting. However, Corbet is only taking fleeting glances at them. They are not the meat of the film. That title belongs to the form itself.
Form follows function. The age-old adage that many take umbrage with, for good reason, lies at the heart of the film. Near the intermission, Tóth asks Van Buren, “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” Corbet may as well have had Brody look into the camera and ask this question to the audience. “Monumental,” the film’s marketing declares loudly. This is not wrong, but only because the film unrelentingly leaves an impression of momentousness. Corbet approaches each sequence trying to break ground on new soil to the point that most scenes flow into each other like grey sludge poured into Tóth’s buildings.
As a metaphor for filmmaking, The Brutalist works quite well, if a bit on the nose. Tóth and Van Buren’s knotty dynamic through much of the first half is fun to follow along and Pearce swims in the rivers of ham with clenched jaws and affected enunciations to spare, but the ugly and juvenile literalization of their power dynamic in the second half exemplifies the film’s shortcomings. It is specifically that pivotal moment of violence that highlights how little Corbet cares about anything that doesn’t neatly fit into his screed against the studio. The screed can read as entertaining, but it often feels empty and misattributed. With Van Buren as financier and Tóth as artist, the one-to-one of studio head and director makes a patent analogy, but that doesn’t excuse the recklessness with which Corbet deploys burgeoning Zionist ideology, heroin addiction, assault, or the myriad hot buttons he and Fastvold press in order to provoke. Empty provocation is still empty.
More preoccupied with its status as Great Art than with its own promising soils, countless potential roads to travel down over three and a half hours get back-seated while thundering sound and fury take center stage. Corbet is clearly inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson; the DNA of There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) run through this movie in its grandeur as well as Tóth and Van Buren’s dynamic, so reminiscent of the one between Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd. Even still, Corbet aims for Bertolucci and Visconti. The Italian auteurs’ fingerprints run deep here and it is clear from how Corbet cribs from their opulent surfaces while never plumbing their depths. In the quest to, as the script attributes to Tóth, define an epoch, Corbet instead falls face first into an identity crisis.
This is not a hollow movie; it is anything but. Alas, The Brutalist is a barrel so oversized for its generous handful of ideas that it scales down their individual impact. The result is a clanging-about of bite-sized explorations, loud and relentless, until one realizes that it is only their echo that reverberates.
-August
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