The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

As advertised, Brady Corbet’s 3.5 hour immigrant drama aims to be a new American epic. Shot on VistaVision, a mid-century 35mm film stock that hasn’t been used for a feature film in decades, the grandiosity of The Brutalist is baked into its format. Reportedly made for a budget of just 10 million dollars, Corbet’s ability to use such an ostentatious format, and make such an outwardly ambitious with verifiable movie stars represents an artistic coup, one that the film is arguably too aware of.

The film tells the story of Lazlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a Bauhaus-educated architect and Holocaust survivor. In Corbet’s superlative opening scene, Toth’s arrival in Ellis Island is depicted through a handheld shot which emerges from darkness to the image of a vertically inverted Statue of Liberty, an image that portends The Brutalist’s stance on the American Dream. Hopping on a train to Pennsylvania, Toth works for his cousin, who has changed his name and married an American woman, dabbling in an assimilationist self-effacement in his attempt to make it in this new country.

Eventually, Toth crosses paths with Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a bureaucrat who commissions a community center dedicated to his late mother. An indulgent monument to Van Buren’s wealth, this monstrosity of a building combines four facilities into one, including a gym, a library, a swimming pool, and as a concession to the state, a Protestant prayer room. It’s not a practical community center, and the entire film is constructed around the tension between art and commerce. Van Buren’s desire to be the sort of artisan to commission a great artwork conflicts with the project’s economic and pragmatic deficiencies while Toth’s craft is dependent on the financial support from both Van Buren and Pennsylvania’s Christian townspeople, each with their own sets of demands. Toth’s design and construction of the building, in the eponymous brutalist style, which was deemed not Germanic enough by the Third Reich, becomes his life’s work.

If The Brutalist never lives up to the brilliance of its opening hour and a half, it’s because Corbet’s film suffers from an clunky didacticism, hammering home its themes via dialogue and overtly metaphoric gestures. There’s something cheap about the way Corbet’s characters regularly scream that none of the Americans they meet in this rotten country want them there, or in the way Corbet literally stages an academic presentation that explains how the community center reflects Toth’s experience in the concentration camps. In fairness, Corbet complicates The Brutalist’s explanatory epilogue, but the sequence as a whole is indicative of The Brutalist’s desperate stabs at depth. It’s written to a fault. For example, the journey to the United States incurs amateurishly symbolic scars on Toth, his wife, and his niece, and in the worst misstep, the film climaxes with an act so outlandish and obviously metaphorical that it derails the film. There’s an air of desperation to The Brutalist that undercuts the self-evident defiance of the architectural style it aims to mirror. It’s a film whose content never lives up to the outward ambition of its form.