The Brutalist
After watching Brady Corbet’s first two ventures as a director no-one could be surprised that he struggled to get funding for The Brutalist. Corbet, born in Arizona, made his mark as an actor in films by Euro heavyweights such as Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier. He transitioned to the director’s chair in 2015, at the age of 27, but his debut, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) was a turgid, arthouse affair. The second, Vox Lux (2018), was arguably worse - a confusing story about a pop star dealing with trauma and terrorism. Both films were dark in tone, wildly ambitious in their themes, and frankly, pretentious.
This was not the guy you’d be handing millions of dollars to make a three-and-a-half-hour film about a Hungarian architect. It would take Corbet seven years to raise a budget of $10 million. He would shoot the film in Hungary, in 36 days, cutting corners wherever possible. The results are a testimony as to how much can be achieved with careful planning and a deal of innovation. It also throws a light on the waste and extravagance of those big budget Hollywood flicks that cost hundreds of millions and still manage to be duds.
The Brutalist is a melodrama, but also a self-conscious epic. It tells the story of a fictional Hungarian architect, László Tóth, played with huge commitment and a thick accent, by Adrien Brody, who is in line for an Oscar for this performance. It’s the end of the Second World War, and Tóth, who has been released from a concentration camp, is making his way to the United States on board a refugee boat. He has lost everything, and doesn’t know whether his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), are alive or dead.
The first thing Tóth and a friend see, as they peer up from the hold of the ship, is the Statue of Liberty, dangling over them upside down. It’s a hint of the topsy-turvy fate that awaits in the Land of the Free. Tóth’s next journey is to Philadelphia, where he reconnects with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has a furniture shop, a new American name and an American wife, Audrey (Emma Laird). What begins with a surge of joy, as Attila tells Tóth that Erzsébet and Zsófia are safe, will gradually turn sour.
Although he was an acclaimed architect in Europe, a graduate of the Bauhaus, Tóth is grateful to have the chance to design furniture and interiors for Attila’s shop. That connection ends when a big job for a wealthy client goes awry, and Audrey plots to get the Hungarian, Jewish cousin out of her house. Tóth will spend the following years working as a labourer and sleeping in a flop house, where - indifferent to the racial niceties of his adopted country - he befriends a black man named Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé). He begins using heroin to deaden the pain of a facial injury, a legacy of his time in the camps.
Salvation arrives when Attila’s disgruntled client, Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), decides that he likes Tóth’s designs after all, and comes looking for him. The wealthy businessman has done has homework and now feels excited to have a library designed by a leading European architect. He keeps saying he finds Tóth’s conversation “intellectually stimulating”, although he himself comes across as perfectly shallow.
Van Buren has a grand vision of a community centre to be erected on a nearby hill, complete with theatre, library, chapel and gymnasium. Tóth will be the man to build it – a monumental project that will become an obsession. Suddenly, at a time when most movies are winding up, we have Intermission.
In the second part of the story, Van Buren’s lawyer helps Erzsébet and Zsófia migrate to America, but it’s already 1953. Meanwhile the building work continues, as Tóth grapples with project managers who try to alter his design to reduce costs. His nemesis is Van Buren’s arrogant, spoiled son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), so selfish, racist and misogynist that he’s almost a stage villain. But it’s the elder Van Buren who will precipitate the crisis which convinces Tóth he and his family are not wanted in America. To say any more would be to give away too much of this overheated plot, which will resolve itself in a stagey epilogue set in 1980.
Looking at this saga from a distance The Brutalist seems like a hefty airport novel, but that’s not the impression one gets in the cinema. Corbet draws us in to such an extent that this long movie feels more engaging than many features half its length. The pacing, which could be viewed as self-indulgent, turns out to be crucial. Whenever Tóth travels anywhere, be it by boat, bus, car or plane, Corbet gives us a dash-cam sequence that lends a sense of destiny to the journey. Major historical shifts are presented in the form of newsreel inserts.
He has shot the movie in VistaVision, a film process last used in 1961, for One-Eyed Jacks, the only movie Marlon Brando ever directed. This antiquated method imparts a grainy, gloomy quality to the action, underlining the sense that we are immersed in the shadows of history. Shooting Tóth’s building as it takes shape, Corbet’s style could be characterised as expressionist, or even constructivist, with echoes of the experimental cinema of the 1920s.
The Brutalist remains somewhat pretentious, with the first part being titled The Enigma of Arrival, which refers to a 1912 painting by Giorgio De Chirico, later echoed by V.S. Naipaul for an autobiographical novel of 1987, on the mentality of migration. The second part, The Hard Core of Beauty, has an equally portentous ring to it, and is most probably drawn from a 1991 lecture by Swiss architect, Peter Zumthor.
The lead character, László Tóth, shares his name with the disturbed, Hungarian-born, Australian iconoclast who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972. Although this Tóth is a builder, we can also discern a destructive side to his personality. There’s something demonic about his commitment to a project that will absorb his energies for years, although we have to wait until the epilogue before his underlying plan is revealed.
As for the building itself, I’m no critic of architecture but it seems resoundingly ugly – a set of concrete boxes partially redeemed by the conjuring trick of a crucifix being projected upon an altar by rays of sunlight. The basement is reminiscent of “the Tank”, in the Art Gallery of NSW’s new extension.
Although the construction process goes on for most of the film, there’s a sense in which architecture is only a metaphor for the complicated task of rebuilding one’s life in a different country and culture. Tóth combines many aspects of the immigrant experience in both his suffering and his determination to succeed. He beats his head against the walls of xenophobia, ignorance and provincialism, but is a Faustian personality who would sell his soul to realise his vision while ‘brutalising’ those around him. Van Buren’s economic power may determine the life or death of the project, but it’s Tóth’s will and force of imagination that drives it forward.
Brody’s Tóth is steeped in emotion and expressive power. His patron, Van Buren, is boorish and pompous, conscious of his social standing, but with a skeleton in the closet. It’s a thankless role for Pearce, playing a stuff-shirt who never invites the slightest degree of sympathy. Felicity Jones’s Erzsébet, on the other hand, has an intellectual and personal dynamism that occasionally overshadows her angst-ridden husband.
The ‘Brutalist’ style of architecture, with its fondness for unvarnished slabs of concrete, has never been popular with the public, but its exponents have been virtual evangelists. It’s an idealistic form of architecture that prizes ‘truth to materials’, while stripping away all that is superfluous. Yet this idealism is forever in conflict with the workaday world, paying little attention to the puny mortals that will inhabit these uncompromising fortresses. In this film it’s not merely the patron who acts as a check on the architect’s modernist fantasies, it’s the brash materialism of the New World, where dreams are bought and sold. Given the state of America today, Corbet’s epic feels like a premonition of the greater brutality to come.
The Brutalist
Directed by Brady Corbet
Written by Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold
Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Emma Laird, Jonathan Hyde, Michael Epp, Ariane Labed
USA/UK/Canada, MA 15+, 215 mins