The Brutalist arrives with a head full of steam and a heart full of pain. It opens with an interrogation and ends with a mystery. It is caught – or it captures – the point of history, of the human condition, between tragedy and triumph, between misery and ecstasy. It is absolutely the most electrically exhilarating, ambitious, and unexpected film of the year.
We won’t know Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) for some time, but hers is the first face we see, nearly thrown down in a chair as a series of offscreen voices pummel her with questions about her relations and companions. The camera and crossfades let her slip gradually into the ether, to be replaced, alarmingly, with darkness, all light extinguished. Machines. Voices, alarmed and excited. A churning force that could be death. A voice, offscreen, carrying the cadence of a letter, urges someone named László to carry on, to push onward, to assure the circumstances under which a reunion can happen. It is the man we see pushing through this machine. It is Adrien Brody. He is desperate and exhausted. The environment is pummeling. Until suddenly, the light emerges, the camera swings upward to find the Statue of Liberty, in a now-iconic upside-down image, hanging from the heavens. László has reached America. He is thrilled.
His problems have only just begun; his salvation, if it ever comes, is decades away.
Brady Corbet (who directed the film and cowrote the screenplay with his partner Mona Fastvold) has settled into a career of striving. Beginning as an actor, he seemed intent on absorbing everything he could of a certain stripe of the mainstream art house. He appeared not in comforting works, but films by Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke, Sean Durkin, Lars von Trier, Antonio Campos, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, Bertrand Bonello, Noah Baumbach. And maybe Thunderbirds too. But almost entirely strivers, filmmakers of modest means but unruly vision, those who saw their budget not as instruction but as an obstacle, another component.
The Brutalist is a striving film. Shot on a $10 million budget in Hungary with a cast befitting a film several times its budget and a running time (worry not, there’s an intermission) beyond the common understanding of what an audience will accept and even a medium – VistaVision – that no one on Earth is trying to use…the fact of The Brutalist’s existence stands in defiance of everything contemporary cinema suggests is possible.
So, too, does László Toth. He barely survived the concentration camps. He has just arrived to America. He works menial jobs. He waits on bread lines. He lives in a back room of his cousin’s (Alessandro Nivola) furniture store. We feel we know this story. We do not know Lászlo Toth. No more so than Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) does; certainly no more than his son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), does when he hires László and his cousin to refurnish his father’s study, an act Harrison finds outrageous…until he learns who László is.
He is not the anonymous immigrant we, or Harrison, expect; the one he almost fashions himself to be. He built works of art unto themselves. And now, perhaps, he will again.
As with Corbet’s prior film, Vox Lux, The Brutalist is about how tragedy shapes history; how it embeds itself within artists; how it finds fruition in their work. Unlike Vox Lux, we don’t see László’s tragedy firsthand. We see it in his eyes, his posture, his deference to those who never suffered; a deference he cannot maintain for long. I have read much that seeks to account for Brody’s relative absence from the center of mainstream film, while he fills his filmography with little-regarded genre fare; The Brutalist reminds us of the artist too long ignored. It isn’t just the pain he expresses; it’s the pride. The look of a man who had the world in his grasp and had everything taken from him. The inability to reconcile that fact. To account for his place in a global atrocity. To reassert his place as an individual. To be an individual in a country that doesn’t see you as one. Barely a scene goes by without him. I missed him in the few that do.
Not that we are poorly off otherwise. Guy Pearce – another brilliant, expressive force that Hollywood cannot account for – is at once humble and grandiose, entering as a lion and exiting…will we ever know? Felicity Jones has not been short of opportunities, except for those that allow her what she has here. Her voiceover, which comes in at a rush in the film’s opening moments and forms its stark backbone throughout the first act, is terrifyingly heartbreaking. I’ve spent two viewings of the film and weeks afterward trying to account why it brought tears to my eyes in each viewing. She sounds like resilience. Resilience is deeply moving,
I won’t spend this paragraph rattling off themes. This film is pregnant with them. That is not what is moving about it. What’s moving is listening to these actors, and many more – Cassidy, Alwyn, Nivola, the wonderful Isaach de Bankolé, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, among others (this $10 million continent-spanning 3.5-hour-film has extras much-better-funded films can’t be bothered with) – speak, move, gesture, and gaze. Chalk it up to Corbet’s time spent as an actor; I often do. He is refreshingly willing to give the film’s time and aesthetic over to them. To watch them exist in this world he has built for them, this frame – this magnificent frame – he and cinematographer Lol Crawley have constructed. Young directors spend too much time chasing The Shot. Corbet knows what Billy Wilder asserted nearly a century ago – cinema is about faces. Give us faces. The images will take care of themselves.
The film will play in select engagements in 70mm. If you can, see it there. See it in some massive auditorium. Feel it rattle. Get thrown headlong into its early bus-mounted rush down the freeway. Become a co-conspirator in its mutinous uprising against the state of cinema itself. Rejoice in its victory.
I’ve seen it twice. I cannot wait to see it again.
