His third, the monumental drama The Brutalist was, like the previous films, made in collaboration with his partner, Norwegian filmmaker and actress Mona Fastvold. While it shares much of the visual style and thematic concerns of their earlier efforts, this one is the pair’s biggest, boldest and most ambitious yet. It’s the kind of risk-taking, all-or-nothing project that sadly too few American directors are willing to make and its effect is, like the architectural style it celebrates, overbearing, complex and intellectually provocative.
At just over 3.5 hours, including a 15-minute intermission; shot in the very big-screen 70mm format of Vista Vision (which hasn’t been used in a film since the 1960s); and telling a story that spans the years 1947 — 1980, Corbet’s film is not only ambitious in scope and style but also probing in its hunger to explore more themes than would normally fit into several seasons of a television show.
It’s a film about the unequal power relations that anchor the American dream; the egotism that’s necessary to succeed as an artist; the deep buried traumas burned into the psyche of a generation of victims of the horrors of World War 2; the idealism hidden beneath the imposing, seemingly anti-humanist façades of modernist behemoths; and the Sisyphean struggle that it takes to make a film in a world where the idea that cinema is an art form is increasingly being trampled upon. It’s a wonder that Corbet and Fastvold ever managed to get such a project made, let alone that it’s actually receiving a cinematic release and has earned 10 Oscar nominations.
Adrien Brody plays the Jewish Hungarian immigrant anti-hero, architect Lázló Tóth, who arrives in the US without his family to find brief respite in the home of his friend Attila (Alessandro Nivola). Attila is a semi-established Hungarian Jew, who together with his Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird) runs a furniture shop in small-town Pennsylvania.
When Harry (Joe Alwyn), the well-heeled son of local tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) comes calling, looking for someone to refurbish his father’s library as a surprise gift, Attila proposes Lázló for the job. The result, while impressively modern, doesn’t please Van Buren Sr who, in a fit of rage, unceremoniously ejects the Hungarians from his home. Harry Jr refuses to pay them for the job, and a furious Attila rewards his friend by kicking him out onto the streets. Lázló, now a jazz-loving, skid-row scraping junkie, makes what little he can as a construction worker in the company of his new friend Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé) before he receives a surprise visit from a now apologetic Van Buren Sr who, thanks to a gushing review in an architectural magazine about his new library, has done some research on Tóth’s pre-war architectural career in Hungary and come to realise that he may be a genius. Soon Lázló finds himself hiding his track-marks under a tuxedo and being fawned upon by Van Buren’s rich friends. When Van Buren announces that he’s going to build a grand community centre on a hillside next to his estate in honour of his dead mother, he anoints Tóth as the man to make this dream a reality.
What follows is the epic, decades-long struggle between Lázló and his patron as the architect’s ambition and ego clash with the capitalist-driven whims of Van Buren in a relationship that is darkly co-dependent, sadomasochist and deeply destructive, not just for its two main actors but for all those who come too close to its toxic flames.
When Lázló’s wife Ersébét (Felicity Jones) finally manages to escape Russian-occupied Hungary and reunite with her husband in Pennsylvania she finds him deep in the murky waters of his power-struggle and the all-consuming battles he's fighting with everyone around him to make his Brutalist vision a reality. The overriding questions of the narrative are whether he will succeed, how long it will take, what it will cost him and whether the final result will be justified.
Corbet’s masterful construction of the film as an epic creation that mirrors the epic struggles at its heart and his carefully considered use of all the elements of the medium — from the darkly brooding cinematography by Lol Crawley to the quietly unsettling music of Daniel Blumberg, subtle but spot-on production design from Judy Becker and impressively multi-format and forward-driving editing by Dávid Jancsó — ensure that the film maintains interest and draws the audience into the many-shifting parts of its story in the manner of a sprawling great American novel.
It’s all held together, though, by Brody’s realisation of the many complexities of Tóth, a career-best performance that’s superbly countered by Pearce, whose Van Buren is a dark, equally troubled different side of a similar coin. The support cast, Jones in particular, are more than equal to the task and the acting ensemble as a whole throw themselves into providing the solid human heart that keeps the high concepts of the film from swallowing everything else up.
It may not be a flawless film but The Brutalist is certainly the kind of daring, boundary pushing artwork that, like its protagonist, fights hard in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles to show that serious art with ambitious aims is still possible and perhaps more necessary than ever.
• The Brutalist is on circuit.
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