The Brutalist

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is his strongest and most accomplished film. The script, written by Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold, is sturdily constructed and provides opportunities for the film's accomplished players. Thus far, Corbet's main attribute has been his laissez faire handling of his players. He gives them space in an exact, but not rigorous mise en scene. The Brutalist works, in part, because it is so well cast. Adrien Brody gets to show off his mastery of his mother's tongue and dig into his default role, a masochist. When a whore tells Brody's character, an architect name Laszlo Toth who emigrates to the US after World War 2, that he has ugly face, we know Brody was the man for the job. Similarly, Guy Pearce, as sociopathic tycoon named Harrison van Buren, is a cinch for the role. However, Pearce, though capable of entitled bombast, lacks the manic and Satanic glee that lurks below the performances of such cinematic tycoons as Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis).

The reason I bring up Citizen Kane and There Will Be Blood is that, as with those films, the creator of The Brutalist is swinging for the cinematic fences. The Brutalist is shot in VistaVision, a high resolution 35mm process that was created at Paramount Pictures in 1954 and utilized in such disparate films as White Christmas, The Searchers, and Vertigo. The Brutalist is structured like a Roadshow film from that era with an overture and, mercifully for the audience, an intermission. The Brutalist is a grandiose throwback for both good and ill. The main problem with the film is that it's theme can be boiled to a very simple premise, to paraphrase Manny Farber's review of The Chase, Amerika stinks. A message Corbet underlines with his already famous shot of an upside down Statue of Liberty. I don't neccesarily have a problem with this message per se, just the unsurprising way Corbet delivers it. As soon as Toth meets Harrison van Buren (the names of three Presidents), we know that the artist will be screwed over by the capitalist and, in this case, it is too literal.

Now the message of The Brutalist is not all that different from Citizen Kane or There Will Be Blood, but it is a much less exciting stylistically than either of them. Also, the script of The Brutalist tends, at times, to wallow in cliches. This is especially true of the character of Toth's wife, Erzsebet, who shows up after the intermission in a wheelchair. Felicia Jones does her best, but the character is not provided a second or third dimension. She simply serves to amplify Toth's suffering and trauma. Toth's avant-garde props are that he shoots up and listens to be-bop. Zzzz. However, The Brutalist is a technical triumph, particularly the way it is able to mimic the sweep of an epic on a small budget. Daniel Blumberg, formerly of the band Yuck, offers a discordant and challenging score that is always listenable, but never overwhelms the picture. The production design entertainingly conveys the Brutalist style even if the construction scenes border on fantasy. Corbet's skill and respect for actor remains. I particularly enjoyed the efforts of Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, Stacy Martin, Alessandro Nivola, and Michael Epp. Still, someone with a more disinterested view should have taken a cleaver to this occasionally interesting movie which runs well over three hours.