The Brutalist | 2024
Guy Pearce, Adrien Brody, and Isaach de Bankolé in THE BRUTALIST. Photo by Lol Crawley. Courtesy of A24.
There will undoubtedly be a lot of words written about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist that are some variation of "they don't make 'em like this anymore." And it's easy to say such things in a media landscape such as ours, where genuinely epic, prestige pictures, the kind that felt like real events, arriving to great acclaim and solid box office, are increasingly rare.
There have been examples of these kinds of films in recent years - Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon...but you'd have to go back a bit further to find something like The Brutalist. Comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and James Gray's The Immigrant are perhaps most apparent, but what Corbet really seems to be channeling here are the works of filmmakers like Coppola and Leone, filmmakers whose grand visions had something to say about America and the American dream. The Brutalist is in rarefied company here - and while it has ambition to spare, Corbet has the goods to back it up.
The Brutalist is a sprawling, three-and-a-half-hour-long exploration of the symbiotic and often parasitic relationship between capitalism and art told through the eyes of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Jewish-Hungarian architect who flees Europe during the Holocaust and settles in Pennsylvania to start a new life. There, he meets Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who is impressed by his unusual and evocative work and seeks to hire him to build a massive new community building as a tribute to his late mother. It's a project that could change his life and help bring his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe, but it comes with a price. What begins as an amicable partnership becomes a decades-long battle of wills between an uncompromising artist and an uncompromising businessman whose endless demands threaten to derail the project and upend Tóth's fragile existence.
There's a palpable tension here between the drive to create great art and the financial realities of undertaking such a project, and Corbet gets at the heart of the contradictions between artistic freedom and pleasing the benefactors who fund it. When splashed across Corbet's grand 70 mm canvas, it's a conflict that feels at once cosmic and intimate, an age-old conflict between capital and art, and more specifically, capitalism and progress. In one corner, we have Tóth, a wunderkind whose work boldly eschews classical form, and on the other, we have Van Buren, an old-school businessman who demands the best but doesn't understand what it truly takes to achieve it.
Corbet's style reflects that tension. The Brutalist is not just a towering piece of classical Hollywood cinema; it's also a visionary work of tormented genius that feels electrifyingly modern. Is the brutalist structure at its center reflective of a deal with the devil? Or is it emblematic of beauty found amidst great pain and strife? In that regard, the film itself feels like a product of those same contradictions, which makes it not only an exhilarating throwback to the prestige epics of yore but a fundamental product of our time. It's a great American film, the kind of film that one would expect from a master filmmaker far more seasoned than Corbet, a former actor who only has two features under his belt - The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018). With The Brutalist, he asserts himself a staggering talent, not just a keen observer of the nature of power and the human desire to create something bigger than themselves, but a conjurer of indelible images whose work, like his protagonist's, feels almost elemental.
