The Brutalist (2024)

Watched 1/25/25 (theater)

Much has been made of the size that director Brady Corbet has adorned his long-gestating project with. The Brutalist is indeed an outsized film; one of sprawling landscapes held up by far-reaching performances, production design, editing, and most of all, metaphors. Corbet and his co-writer/wife, Mona Fastvold, reach for the stars with confidence and organization, much like the architect at the center of their screenplay, but in doing so make some unwieldy decisions that at times I couldn't wrap my head around. Why would this character make this choice? Why did the script jump in time after that specific event? Many questions swirled through my head, including many about the role of artificial intelligence in the film.

The mostly good news is that The Brutalist is a story loaded with extremely sharp-edged, pivotal, and potentially polarizing decisions. It is something I certainly want to return to in an attempt to reconcile with its more challenging characterizations and plot points. The bad news is I couldn't help but be frustrated when the movie ended, not because of writing but because of the message that the movie so pretentiously, at times, posits--and how at odds that message is with the use of artificial intelligence in the movie. There's a good chance that in two or three years we have been beaten into submission by AI, and if that's the case, I may look back on these thoughts as overblown. But for The Brutalist to wear its heart so insistently and bloodily on its sleeve, it's tough to look past a few of the filmmakers' decisions in both script and AI-enhancement as more than a conflict with their thesis on the importance of human creation.

The Brutalist begins with one of the more rousing cold opens in recent memory. Corbet's choice to shoot the movie on this VistaVision film format pronounces itself passionately as our lead character makes his way up and out of his damp, dark immigration ship into the cold light of day, where a very plainly upside-down Statue of Liberty is brought into focus. It is simultaneously a beautifully haunting image between the retro filmic quality and contrast, and a very on-the-nose sign of what is to come. Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who is coming to America, a place that is seemingly as upside-down as the place from which he came.

Personally, I found the ideas in The Brutalist to be stirring and the ham-handedness of some of their presentations to be quite desperate. Maybe we need more desperate directors with big visions--I haven't entirely wrapped my thoughts on the conundrum--but a little more subtlety could do Corbet and Fastvold good in the future, in my humble opinion. Now it's difficult, because if this had been made by a real Holocaust survivor who came to this country and experienced these difficulties, I would more than likely be wiling to forgive some of the over-explanation that this film puts on display. My personal opinion is that when writing about difficult subjects like post-war immigrants, if you yourself are not one, you should probably err on the side of caution. But is that unfair of me in the possibility that that kind of opinion stifles the creative collective? Possibly. I have to think about it more and especially in the context of the Artificial Intelligence use, which just takes away much of the good will that the filmmakers tried to create in putting one's money where their mouth is.

László arrives in America with a job and place to stay waiting for him at his cousin Attila's furniture store. We are introduced to Attila and his wife, Audrey, who is quickly presented as a possible love interest for László, which would of course not be a very cool thing to do to your cousin who is giving you a job and bed. The tension mounts! Attila quickly thrusts László into a position of power directing the redesign of a local millionaire's office/library. This is the Van Buren estate, owned and lived in by Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and his adult twin children, Harry Lee and Maggie. Guy Pearce's performance was consistently the best, most magnetic part of The Brutalist for me, even if I found him to be a bit one-note and ultimately more of a metaphor. While Harrison clamors for László's attention and sings his praises early in the film, he quickly escalates into a straight-up Nazi stand-in for the second half, as does Harry Lee, quickly morphing into Hitler Junior. They're about as bad as they come, and that point is shockingly, very unexpectedly hammered right on the head as they both commit overtly evil acts in the back half of the story. What Harrison does in particular and how that action is resolved sat the worst with me, seemingly all metaphor without good enough setup or revelation to turn me from thinking it felt a bit out of left field. In retrospect, I guess I can see a bit of the run-up earlier in the script, but perhaps a rewatch can help to solidify or disprove these thoughts.

The central conflict between the Van Burens and László develops after László's cousin Attila fires him from his company and life for both the Van Buren library job going wrong and László allegedly making a pass at Audrey, Attila's wife. Luckily, Harrison comes around to seeing László's design genius for the library, and invites him into high society with the promise of pulling him out of coal-shoveling and into architectural duties for a new faith-based institute atop the big hill on the Van Buren estate. László of course accepts both that offer as well as a potential offer to help get his wife over to America from Europe, where she has been stuck for the last few years. While all seems mutually beneficial to begin, the more sinister elitism of the Dutch family comes in spurts, more often from the son, Harry Lee, at the onset of their business relationship.

Eventually, while László has made great progress on the Van Buren institute, his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia arrive from overseas. With them comes challenges including osteoperosis forcing Erzsébet into a wheelchair and a muteness-by-choice for Zsófia that draws the ire of some members of the Van Buren family when they eventually make their way onto the estate. This is when events begin happening onscreen that seem far more interested in ambiguity and interpretation than logic, and that is where much of the pretension and problems arrive. Despite some ultra-intellectual, VERY written conversations that take place in the first half of The Brutalist, the second half is where things begin to take one out of the immersion. Sneaky, astonishing plot points from kinky sex and rape to hospital trips and character disappearances all seemingly act in service of the writing/directing team wanting to forcefully create subtext at the expense of realistic behavior. We have spent enough time with characters at this point in the movie to have a good idea of who they are and what kinds of decisions they could and could not make. I was often scratching my head, trying to wrap it around some second-half decisions.

Without spoiling too much, the more frustrating elements of these off-putting screenplay choices is the performative nature of their resolution or the gnawing absence of resolution. When one character finally reveals a key event in a Me Too-style condemnation, it feels a bit underdeveloped as we had no reason to believe that that character had such bravery. There had been no setup to that trait. Once that confrontation is over, one of the characters spirals out of control, unfortunately with no on-screen resolution. We can surmise what happens to that character, and it is more very on-the-nose subtext. But the final moment of shock-over-substance comes with the quickly-following epilogue, in which we are explained at an architecture gala what the main character's goals had been. For a movie that so clearly wants to hide its meanings beneath the surface, to a fault, at so many twists and turns, the final reveal here falls with such a blank thud, almost feeling like they ran out of time to write and shoot something better.

Which brings us back to the AI use. At the end of the movie, generative AI is featured in the form of architectural designs, and this is really where I wish that they had stayed away from this technology. To showcase such a counter-point to the story's morals right at the climactic, overwritten speech is such a silly sequence of events that I couldn't help but chuckle at the end of the movie. If they did run out of time and resources, why not put in their own money instead of AI--that is what they show László doing with his project. It's a tough beat to basically give up on your own point at the end of your movie while simultaneously preaching it so vigorously. Characters become damned at the end while metaphor, AI, and "significance" are allowed to rule. It feels more like an experimental novel than a film, and the pretension hits hard.

If you have read thus far and consider this a bit of a rant, I want to address more of what works about this movie for me in an effort to give the filmmakers some credit, because it is deserved. The movie looks gorgeous, and is frequently thrilling off of imagery, blocking, and shot selection alone. Without a single action beat, The Brutalist is able to captivate with process, intricacy, and seemingly-well-researched detail for hours in a way that most movies cannot sustain for twenty minutes. The fact that a $10,000,000, 3.5-hour movie largely concerning people talking in rooms is never boring is a testament to the team behind it truly caring and working hard. I have no doubts that they did, despite the AI controversy. And overall it's truly super exciting to have a 36-year-old writer/director like Corbet who is emulating auteurs like Coppola, Lucas, Milius, and all of their influences before them. The guy clearly cares an awful lot about the history of movies and putting his own spin on the films he respects. We need more young people making things in this country, we just don't need them doing it with AI.

Adrien Brody is so damn expressive in this while never walking into melodramatics. Guy Pearce saves what could have been a cartoon villain by being the perfect combination of menacing and bumbling. Joe Alwyn's Harry Lee, although burdened with some of the same one-note psychosis as Pearce's character, allows Alwyn to showcase a clear understanding of the assignment and just having a presence--he is effectively annoying even when his mouth is closed. Felicity Jones is the one actor I am not sold on--she feels just as out of place as she did in Rogue One almost a decade ago. In all fairness, her character feels very underwritten to me and does more for the plot than she does for her own existence, but the performance and accent just feel outsized in a way that Brody's never did for me.

As the screen went to credits during my showing of this Best Picture frontrunner, my initial thoughts were: 1. The Brutalist is engaging for almost every minute and I would happily watch it many times. And 2. I hope it does not win Best Picture or Best Director. I want Brady Corbet to keep making movies. I really want to see what he does next. But I don't want him to be rewarded for taking some shortcuts here and I don't want him to be rewarded for such sloppiness overall. This is a great, great movie with some serious issues, ethical and in story. It's a terrifically watchable film with some genius-level content, a fascinating production, and some ugly issues. If I get a vote, it's that Brady Corbet largely loses out at the Oscars this year and builds off of The Brutalist to make something even closer to five stars, because the bones are clearly existent.

8/10