The BrutalistReview: Adrien Brody Towers in a Wobbly Epic About Art vs. American Might

Mar. 15, 2025

New in the New World: Brody, right, and Alessandro Nivola.Photo:Lol Crawley

Lol Crawley

More importantly, perhaps, is the revelation that 36-year-old director Brady Corbet is that most worshipped kind of filmmaker, anauteur.(Put it this way: Who’s more celebrated, Philip Johnson or Quentin Tarantino?)

Corbet’s 3-hour-35-minute epic, which comes with an intermission, is a challenging, daringly ambitious take on 20th-century history, and clearly built on a foundation that has nothing to do with franchises or superheroes. The movie is its own rare, complete thing, sprawling and raw-boned. Don’t expectThe Brutalist IIor a prequel,Monsieur Belle Epoque.

Still, isBrutalista masterpiece, as it’s almost routinely described? Is it on a level withMartin Scorsese’s 3-hour-26-minute (and intermission-free)Killers of the Flower Moon?No, not really. In fact, you could just as fairly callJesse Eisenberg’s compact, modestA Real Paina masterpiece, even though in scale his movie and Corbet’s are as different as a castle and a tool shed.

But the interiors need to be examined, as well.Real Painis surprisingly and expansively dark, a buddy comedy that reveals itself to be about the American-Jewish legacy of the Holocaust — a theme that’s integral toBrutalisttoo.

But eventually you lose your way on the journey inward, as the dim rooms and passageways multiply. You may even begin to think about finding an exit sign. Which, as you know, is a fruitless endeavor in a castle.

But enough of this analogy.The Brutalist’s first half, at any rate, is flawless. Absolutely flawless.

Attila, who has the smiling hucksterism of a salesman without much talent, encourages László to design and oversee a quick, simple commission. He’s to install a reading room/library in the mansion of a rich businessman, Harrison Lee Van Buren.

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Van Buren has no interest in László’s commanding air of intellectual superiority and authority — until an article inLookmagazine flatters him as a millionaire with a becoming taste for modernity. Now he embraces László, commissioning him to build an immense concrete community center that will incongruously house both a gym and a church. What, no petting zoo?

This opening section is carried off with great, brisk energy and a cleanly defined narrative that speeds along with the ease of an automobile on a fresh-paved road (an image of confident American dynamism that recurs throughout the film).

But it’s Brody, aGolden Globe nominee for best actor in a drama this year, who’s truly extraordinary. His performance possibly surpasses his work inThe Pianist.His face is capable of a tragic, suffering sensitivity and exalted artistic inspiration, as well. He looks as if his mother had insisted that he play Franz Liszt’s heroically difficult piano sonatas since the age of 2. (Actually, in a long wig he might resemble Liszt.) As he did inPianist,he manages to represent an entire era.

In the film’s most moving scenes, you’re tempted to cry along with him — possiblyforhim — as he tearily discusses the principles of architecture and his passion for them.

Brody with Felicity Jones.Lol Crawley

They’re both intriguing, novelistic characters, full of fine detail and offering subtle, intelligent observations, but they distract from the central drama of László’s endless frustrations with his massive building project and Van Buren, who’s both anti-Semitic and sadistic.

If László had written the script, these women would have been regarded as ornamentation, a festooning, and probably would have been removed. Instead, their presence tips the narrative into something both more melodramatic and more conventional, with blazing showdowns and a climax of moral retribution worthy of Thomas Hardy’sTheMayor of Casterbridge.

Instead, the film winds down with a pretty epilogue (this film has everything, including a brief “overture”!) that reveals the fascinating private meanings László has built into his design for Van Buren. But this feels like a footnote more than a proper coda. Why couldn’t the information have been incorporated into the movie’s framework? It’s not as if the screenplay couldn’t accommodate an additional scene or two. Or six. Or 16.

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The film includes a quote from Goethe — “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” — that suggests director Corbet is after a grand, defining statement about the blind spots of republicanism, capitalism and any number of other -isms. But that statement never really crystallizes.

Meanwhile, the connection between the man and his vision, so richly present in Brody’s performance, has been compromised, damaged, perhaps lost. ImagineThere Will Be Bloodwithout oil,Oppenheimerwithout the bomb, or evenTárwithout Mahler.

You come away, rather, feeling thatThe Brutalistis an allegory about a brilliant director’s battle to complete his or her visionary epic without Hollywood interfering and mangling the whole thing in its money-grasping mitts. That putsThe Brutalistin a league withFrancis Ford Coppola’s extravagantMegalopolis.

So where does all this leave us? With the thought that Corbet is indeed a significant new talent, and that we can expect something genuinely mega from him in the future.

The Brutalistis in select theaters now.

source: people.com