The Brutalist (Preview)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Produced by Brady Corbet, Nick Gordon, D. J. Gugenheim, Andrew Lauren, Trevor Matthews, Andrew Morrison, and Brian Young; directed by Brady Corbet; written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold; cinematography by Lol Crawley; art direction by Csaba Lodi; production design by Judy Becker; costume design by Kate Forbes; edited by Dávid Jancsó; music by Daniel Blumberg; starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Isaach De Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola. Color, English and Hungarian dialogue with English subtitles, 216 min., 2024. An A24 Films release.

Like the building that is its centerpiece, The Brutalist is a bombastic monument with a core of kitsch. Indeed, everything about The Brutalist is monumental, as dutifully noted in extensive press notes, profiles, interviews, and admiring reviews. It is nearly four hours long, with a built-in intermission in the tradition of roadshow spectacles of the Fifties and Sixties, like The Ten Commandments (1956) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

A melodrama about a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who attempts to rebuild his life in postwar America, it deals with Big Themes—the trauma of the Holocaust, the American Dream, Jewish identity, masculinity, family, inheritance, creation, the conflicts between Art and Mammon, and the individual in relationship to his community, society, and time. It shuns the audience-orienting close-ups and editing of classic and contemporary Hollywood in favor of minutes-long sequence shots that invite admiration for the filmmakers’ technical ingenuity. It features the kind of Big Acting that attracts the attentions of—and was duly awarded by—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Its score, amidst passages of Downton Abbey-style schmaltz, features Charles Ives-style dissonance, grandiose and nation-defining, with fanfares of ringing brass at moments of epic epiphany or release—all well-suited to a film of its stated ambition. All this on a minuscule budget of $10 million—at a time when most Hollywood blockbusters cost somewhere in the region of $200 million—which is, in itself, a monumental achievement. Like its protagonist, architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), filmmaker Brady Corbet (pronounced Cor-bay) and his collaborators conjure something massive from almost nothing—the film then, perhaps, serves as an allegory for visionary European directors’ struggles (and Corbet’s, too) against Hollywood’s money-driven backdrop.

The chief marker of the film’s monumentality is this narrative mode of allegory. The actors try hard to bring individuality and psychological specificity to their roles, but too often their characters are made to represent “Ideas” or “Types.” If you listen hard enough during the remarkable opening sequence, amid the images of panicked people heaving in the dark and the sound of trumpets signaling their emergence into light, you might hear the ringing of alarm bells. It is an overpowering scene, with many viewers having reported initially confusing it for a Holocaust scene—intensified by the industrial sound design clanking in a darkened theater. The camera cleaves to László’s point of view as he makes his trepidatious way through the crowd, conveying his delight when he finds the light. But, of course, this Holocaust inference is a misguided reading that may trick viewers by eliciting certain emotions. While we may think we are watching a Holocaust scene set before April 1945, László in fact is—and obviously knows he is—aboard a ship bound for America, some two years after his liberation from the camps, although he probably spent the intervening period in a displacement camp of the kind depicted in Andrzej Wajda’s harrowing Landscape After Battle (1970). László knows that he is heading toward the future and hopefully toward creation, not destruction.

The question then arises as to director Brady Corbet’s purpose in suggesting otherwise. Why does he first invite identification, only to differentiate the viewer’s assumptions from the character’s knowledge? Is this meant to propose the film’s main theme—that the Holocaust is always with László, haunting his dreams and informing his every waking moment? Perhaps, but Corbet is also calibrating his audience’s reactions, forcing them to rethink what they first feel with their bodies, just as László struggles with traumas inflicted on both mind and body.

More questionable are the final shots of this opening sequence. As in countless chronicles of the immigrant experience in the United States, the passengers see the Statue of Liberty, which always has a double function in such stories—as a geographical marker of one journey’s end and an ideological promise of the new journey and new life to come. This image and its ideology were satirized as early as 1917 with Chaplin’s The Immigrant. After an Atlantic voyage as “heaving” as that undergone by László, the Little Tramp and his fellow passengers spot the Statue of Liberty. At this genuinely moving moment, the comedy pauses, and the passengers look with awe and hope—only to be quickly corralled by immigration officials. Their brief rapture of humanity is undermined by the dehumanization, or brutalization if you prefer, of their bureaucratic processing.

Corbet’s version of this “primal scene” of the migrant experience is striking. The Statue of Liberty is shown upside down in frames that are feverish rather than redolent of the stability immigrants hope to secure. In fact, the statue is not simply upside down, but canted at a downward angle, as if hanging like a victim of impromptu executions so prevalent in the recent war. Having cleaved so closely—physically and emotionally—to what László can actually see, the film suddenly departs from his point of view. After all, this vision of the upended statue could only represent László’s viewpoint if he had somehow fallen or been upended himself.

The image becomes symbolic, implying an overthrow of the values the famous statue embodies—the promise of welcome, hope, liberty, solace, sustenance to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse…the homeless, tempest-tossed.” That this promise is revealed as bluster worthy as the Wizard in Oz is certainly proven by the end of the film. But at this point László is not cynical—he feels relief and a tentative hope. This image, taken out of the narrative world the characters inhabit, facilitates an exchange between filmmaker and audience. It is a warning of what is to come—a symbol imposed on the narrative, rather than emerging logically and plausibly from it, in contrast to The Immigrant, in which the corralling not only reflects historical reality but also has symbolic force…

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Darragh O’Donoghue is an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 3