There are movies that get an audience hyped, and then there are 215-minute-long movies that manage to get an audience so hyped that, during the intermission, as a countdown clock ticks away to the start of the second half, everyone is loudly chanting: Five, four, three, two… one!
The first half of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist should go down as the most electrifying cinematic experience at this year’s Venice Film Festival. It traces the journey of Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who, after being freed from a concentration camp, travels to America to begin a new life, living at first in poverty before receiving a commission from an enigmatic property tycoon (Guy Pearce) to build a monumental community center in rural Pennsylvania. At the same time, he works away with his lawyers to secure the necessary immigration papers for his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to join him—all the while navigating a growing addiction to heroin and the rising tides of antisemitism. Sequences capturing the sounds and textures of industrial America—the clang of steel girders, the roar of a smelting furnace—drew audible gasps in the theater, while during its quieter moments, you could have heard a pin drop.
It’s utterly gripping and earns every minute of its runtime, in part thanks to a trio of knockout performances from Brody, Jones, and Pearce. It’s hard not to be reminded of Brody’s Oscar-winning turn in The Pianist with the actor’s bristling portrayal of suffering and resilience, while Jones expertly captures a woman whose outward charm and fierce intelligence camouflage her righteous fury at the injustices imposed upon them in America. (There’s a stunning scene where she confronts the wealthy family that has served as their patrons for the destruction they’ve wrought upon their family, Jones’s roiling anger finally bursting forth.) But it’s Pearce who comes close to stealing the entire show as the preening, mustachioed mogul Harrison Lee van Buren. At first, he provides moments of comic relief with his smooth-talking overtures to Tóth—“I find you very intellectually stimulating,” he repeats over various dinner parties, a line that will take on a chilling resonance by the film’s end—before revealing himself as a monstrous embodiment of brutality and greed. Let’s just say that the race for best supporting actor at next year’s Oscars already has a frontrunner.
The technical work here is equally powerful. The film was shot by Lol Crawley entirely in VistaVision (the vibrant, richly textured film stock beloved by Alfred Hitchcock), and screened in 70mm on a film projector last night, making for a sumptuous visual experience. An opening sequence that follows Tóth through the dank underbelly of a trans-Atlantic steamer ship, then out into the wide open sky—before, eventually, a shaky hand-held camera lands on the Statue of Liberty, seen upside down—is thrilling. The fact this film was made on what was likely a tiny budget boggles the mind: the scale of it is immense, and the sets for the mausoleum-like architectural marvel at the center of its narrative are astonishing. A soundtrack by the avant-garde musician Daniel Blumberg, who previously scored 2020’s The World to Come (directed by Mona Fastvold, Corbet’s wife and a co-writer on The Brutalist), swerves elegantly from tinkling jazz horns and piano to bellowing, cinema-shaking blasts of brass and drums that evoke the tumult of Tóth’s inner world.
Sure, The Brutalist is not without its flaws, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing. The ending leans a little too ambiguous, with a disappointing lack of resolution for Jones and Pearce’s characters, and a whiplash-inducing jump three decades ahead to an epilogue that—while impressively stylish—feels disorientating, and outside of the haunting atmosphere of everything that came before it. (Though, on the subject of style: whoever designed the delicious, Bauhaus-inspired opening and end credits deserves a special mention.) The Brutalist may bite off a little more than it can chew, but what a pleasure it is to see a filmmaker swing for the fences and—for the vast majority of the film’s running time—hit home run after home run.
After getting back to my hotel last night, I was curious to see whether The Brutalist was on any awards pundits’ radars, but, trawling through both the trades and the blogs, it was nowhere to be found. Expect that to change immediately. For one, it’s Academy catnip: the story of an immigrant trying to reconcile the contradictions of the American dream, with dazzling performances from a number of previously nominated (and often undersung) acting talents, and some of the most brilliant and inventive production design I’ve seen in any film this year, courtesy of Judy Becker. (And some very good accent work, too.)
It even has contemporary resonances under its belt, what with immigration policy being a hot-button issue in the Trump campaign’s attacks against Kamala Harris, and the film’s (somewhat vague) stance on Zionism and the alluring promise of Israel as a land of salvation for Jewish people facing oppression and discrimination in America. So too does the troubled relationship between Tóth and van Buren serve subtly as a wider indictment of the relationship between capitalism and the arts, foreshadowing a world in which creatives are censored by the political whims of their patrons, and how families that wreak enormous, wilful devastation can launder their image by putting their name above museum halls.
But what makes The Brutalist a genuine awards contender—in my eyes, anyway—is its staggering ambition. Eavesdropping on the chatter while leaving the screening room last night, the general consensus seemed to be, They don’t make movies like this anymore. (Well, it seems they do: Corbet just made one.) While the film does take its cues from the classics—a little of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, by way of Ayn Rand—what it most brought to mind was Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood with its epic sweep, ominous atmosphere, towering performances, and unflinching window into the dark, putrid heart of a very American strain of unchecked avarice.
Still, I appreciate the sentiment, and in some ways, they don’t often make movies like this anymore. Not only in in terms of scale, but also in its intriguing moral ambiguity. If there’s one running theme throughout this year’s Venice Film Festival—from the murky sexual politics of Babygirl, to the meta take on celebrity offered by Angelina Jolie in Maria—it’s that filmmakers shouldn’t be afraid to challenge the prevailing social mores of our time…or, at least, to complicate them. Brody’s architect tries to make sense of the world through the tidy metaphor offered by modernist architecture, but the cruelty and capriciousness of the balances of power that dictate his life will never grant him that luxury. In a way, the notion justifies the movie’s weaker moments: Tóth’s creative vision may be flawless and pure, but human whim means the outcome will always be anything but.
