Part 1: The Illusory Paradigm of Actuality

Are you ready to see the brutalest movie of all time? It’s called THE BRUTALIST. So brutal they had to have a 15 minute intermission built into the theatrical version. Also an overture but it’s only like 30 seconds or something. A full length overture would’ve tamped down the brutality too much.

THE BRUTALIST has the most jerking off and fingering of any of the 2024 Best Picture nominees, and it can be argued that it’s also the most masturbatory in its filmmaking, what with its 215 minute runtime, its unbearably corny chapter titles and unmistakable posturing of capital I Importance. Don’t you get it? This is about stuff like history, architecture, America, history… Important stuff. I had some questions about whether a writer/director born after AN AMERICAN TAIL came out should be making The Great American Epic about immigration combined with the non-asshole version of THE FOUNTAINHEAD. Undeniably, though, that confidence and grandiosity is what makes it an event.

Since most of the hype I’d heard was about how this was a huge historical epic shot on film and presented in VistaVision, and how did he possibly do that on a budget under $10 million, I found myself very conscious of “Oh, I see, you’re gonna shoot him in closeup so we don’t see that none of the buildings or cars or people around him are from 1947.” But I stopped doing that pretty quick. Corbet grabbed me and kept a solid grip until some wild swerves toward the end.

This is the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody, SPLICE) (not a real guy, by the way, this is fiction), who has arrived at Ellis Island after surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp. Back in Hungary he was a very respected architect, but here he’s willing to work and live in the back of a small Philadelphia furniture store owned by his much more assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola, FACE/OFF). They seem to get their big break when Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn, THE FAVOURITE), son of famous rich guy Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, LOCKOUT), commissions them to renovate his father’s library as a surprise. They pour their hearts into it and do an amazing job but before they’re finished Harrison comes home early, makes racist comments about László’s friend and worker Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé, THE LIMITS OF CONTROL), and chases them away without payment. Attila unfairly blames László and also his wife Audrey (Emma Laird, A HAUNTING IN VENICE) makes false allegations against him so he moves out to pursue shoveling coal and shooting heroin.

Three years later Harrison tracks him down at work to tell him the library he built was profiled in a magazine, and that he researched him and learned about his past achievements. Also he finally pays him. László just sits there smeared in coal and sweat thinking oh yeah, that’s nice, glad you like it, I better get back to my pile. But soon Harrison changes his life by commissioning him to design a huge community center called The Van Buren Institute. Life seems pretty good, Harrison is generous to him, and the family’s not all bad, or at least Harry’s twin sister Maggie (Stacy Martin, THE NIGHT HOUSE) seems genuinely nice. László gets to live with them, has a team and budget at his disposal for an ambitious project, and Van Buren’s lawyer (Peter Polycarpou, EVITA) even helps arrange to finally bring László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, THE TEMPEST) and their orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy, DARK SHADOWS, TOMORROWLAND, ALLIED) to the U.S.

INTERMISSION

(Go take a dump.)

Part 2: The Artistic Artisticness of Artistry*

*Corbet’s actual chapter titles, “The Enigma of Arrival” and “The Hard Core of Beauty” are lifted from a novel and a lecture he likes, so maybe I’m making fun of them too hard, but I can’t help it, I just think they sound ridiculous.

The second half of the movie is about László’s successes and failures in building the institute and his family. In a big emotional scene he goes to the train station to welcome his wife and niece to America, and is shocked to find that Erzsébet is now wheelchair-bound due to starvation and osteoporosis. He acts weird about it and maybe it really is just being upset that she kept a secret from him, but it also becomes clear how self-absorbed he is. He has set up a shitty child’s bedroom for teenage Zsófia (in my opinion an homage to UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY when Ryback forgets how old his niece is and brings her a giant teddy bear). But the more upsetting part is when they have dinner with the Van Beurens and Erzsébet realizes from their complete lack of awareness about her accomplished life that László doesn’t talk about her at all.

Zsófia is transfixing because she does not speak and has unusual, haunting eyes that seem to be judging you. To tell you the truth I did kinda think she just didn’t want to talk to these bozos, not that she was mute due to trauma, but it’s still a despicable villain moment when Harry takes László aside to tell him she’s rude not to talk and he needs to do something about it. Fuck you, Harry. It’s very effective how they make us fear what he’s gonna do and then it seems like something did happen but it’s never confirmed.

László battles with other people on the crew he thinks are undermining his vision, and seems to be winning until some materials are lost in a train derailment and Harrison decides to cancel the whole project. It does get resurrected a couple years later, but that completely fucks over Erzsébet because she has her writing career back up and running in New York City. As we know from Important dramas from THERE WILL BE BLOOD to FERRARI, self-styled Great Men doing their Greatness – which often involves unfolding large papers, pointing at things, and overseeing the moving of large, heavy objects – often neglect their families. I’m not sure if that’s a message of the story here or just the rules of how these stories go. In the end (an epilogue set decades later), he seems to have been loved.

Epilogue: The Melancholic Corporeality of Immense Spoilers

I need to discuss a shocking turn in part 2, so there are BRUTAL SPOILERS from here on out. László and Harrison go to Italy to meet up with an old friend from before the war (Salvatore Sansone), now an anarchist, who can hook them up with some good marble. (It’s an interesting meta moment because they’re going to great lengths, literally, to obtain the finest materials, and Corbet is filming on location in Tuscany to get the best sequence.) At night there’s a wild party in the mines, and a very drunk Harrison finds László on the ground puking with a needle in his arm. I thought this was bad because Harrison was gonna judge him, but it’s much worse – he rapes him. My initial instinct was that this was too much, too outrageous for this particular story, but then I decided it made sense. Without this you could come away thinking that Van Beuren is kind of a jerk and a racist but he’s a pretty good guy, a patron of the arts, that László should be grateful for everything he’s done. This way there’s no spinning him as anything but a reprehensible bastard.

But if I’m looking at it in those terms then the very last part before the epilogue feels too phony, too naive. Erzsébet shows up at the Van Beuren mansion unannounced, they invite her to join them for dinner but instead she tells them she has something to say that will be upsetting, and she accuses Harrison of raping her husband. A whole bunch of things about the scene seem off: we didn’t know that László remembered the assault, we didn’t get to see him tell Erzsébet about it, he is not in this scene, also the family sits with weird passivity letting her speak, nobody shushes her or stands up to rush her out, but after she has said it then Harry goes overboard and fucking tackles her, and finally Harrison (who has just denied it) disappears and though it’s deliberately ambiguous I think the implication is that he immediately commits suicide? It’s all very awkward, but mostly it just seems untrue for the rich guy to immediately be destroyed just by one person making an accusation. It definitely lost me, broke the spell of the movie, a what the fuck moment that was not the good kind.

Obviously one level the movie is operating on is as a metaphor about art, with the architect and his benefactor mirroring a filmmaker and a producer or studio head, and the violation being an over-the-top, perhaps in poor taste, but perhaps deeply felt by Corbet depiction of their collaboration. In that case, though, again, it’s not like a producer’s career was ended because someone called them out for ruining a filmmaker’s vision. So I don’t understand the choice to end it that way, but I’m open to hearing interpretations.

I feel closer to understanding the epilogue, in which grown up Zsófia (Ariane Labed, THE VOURDALAK) reveals that László’s design of the community center made a personal statement by secretly mirroring the concentration camps he and his wife were imprisoned in. It’s a cool idea, though it maybe throws off the idea of this being metaphorically autobiographical, since Corbet has never directed a commercial feature so how much smuggling could he have had to do? Maybe he got the money for THE BRUTALIST by pretending he was making a Jason Statham movie.

My problem with the scene is that Zsófia actress Raffey Cassidy has such distinctive facial features that it’s very distracting to have her play Zsófia’s daughter in a scene where a very different looking actor plays adult Zsófia. The illusion never worked for me.

On a first (and likely only, but who knows where life will take us) viewing I don’t think THE BRUTALIST sticks the landing, but that’s okay. It doesn’t blow up. It rolls and skids out and ends up in the bushes but right side up and no one seriously injured. Anyway by that point I had been on board for hours, I’d taken a 15 minute break, Corbet had me. Good job, young man.

Is it saying important things about surviving the Holocaust, our country of immigrants, the connection between rich people and art, the power of artistic creation, jerking off, etc.? I don’t know, man. Who’s to say? I appreciate that it glorifies America as a place for refugees to come forge a new life, something the current management is ending. And also that it shows some mixed feelings about how well that may work out for them. But I didn’t notice anything that expanded my thinking on any of those topics. But what it is is A Whole Lotta Movie, which is something I enjoy, as a person who enjoys movie. I can chuckle at Corbet’s mix of pretension, hubris, and erratic narrative steering and let that stuff enhance my appreciation of his earnestness, skill and taste (for example in typography and music). The more corporatized mainstream movies become, the easier it will be to be a sucker for an ambitious, idiosyncratic movie with personality, the fingerprints of a passionate, messy human person who created it.

That reminds me that there has been some controversy about two uses of A.I. in the movie. From my understanding these are not the plagiaristic kind, but I’m not going down fighting for them. One is a software (openly credited) that apparently improves some of the Hungarian pronunciations. How different is that from using ADR to do the same thing? I guess it’s hard to say without knowing how extensive the changes are. The other use was to create architectural drawings glimpsed in the faux documentary clips. For all I know production designer Judy Becker (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, ACCIDENTAL LOVE) trained it on her own drawings and never would’ve hired someone else to do it, so it’s not necessarily an ethical breach. But I’m still against that one, personally. If you’re making a movie glorifying this brilliant, hands-on architect, draw the shit by hand, motherfucker. In my opinion. We need something to believe in.

I kind of believe in THE BRUTALIST though. Is it one of the greats? Not to me. Is it still interesting and a little thrilling to see some dude from THUNDERBIRDS taking a flying leap at the stars and getting closer to touching them than you ever would’ve thought he would? For me, yeah.