‘The Brutalist’ Is a New Great American Masterpiece

Imagine a film archivist scouring an underground vault in Burbank or a cave in Butte, Montana, and discovering a few dozen dusty film canisters tucked away in a corner. Reels of some long-lost project from Francis Ford Coppola, or Bernardo Bertolucci, or Michael Cimino circa the mid-1970s reside in these tins, bearing all the hallmarks of the big-canvas epics these auteurs made in their heyday. The performances are reminiscent of that decade’s brooding Method-ists and screen chameleons — think Pacino, De Niro, Cazale, Streep. The moody, inky cinematography appears to be the work of the “Prince of Darkness” himself, Gordon Willis. The recreations of 20th century American life playing out over several decades suggests a meticulous attention to detail. It’s as if you’re viewing a time capsule from a bygone era of filmmaking.

That’s the feeling you get when watching The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s tale of a Hungarian architect fleeing to the U.S. near the end of WWII and ends up choking on the American Dream. Clocking in around three-and-a-half hours (including an overture and an intermission) and displaying the scope, excess and ambition of the New Hollywood mavericks’ shoot-the-moon projects, this throwback to the days when giants roamed the earth and ruled single-screen theaters is like a gift from the heavens. The actor-writer-director labored with love for seven years on this mutant hybrid of The Fountainhead, The Conformist and The Godfather movies, and it should be met with an equal amount of awe and admiration. It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve. If it’s not a new Great American Masterpiece™, the kind that takes advantage of what the medium has to offer, it’s as close to one as we’re likely to get in 2024.

We’re not trying to damn this movie with overly enthusiastic praise, though it is the kind of work that inspires an intense passion in those who love it — a group that now includes the jury of this year’s Venice Film Festival, which gave Corbet the Best Director prize, and A24, which announced this morning it had picked up the film for U.S. distribution before it’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th. Not do we want to suggest that this is yet another fetishization of a particular vintage aesthetic, even as we acknowledge that the cinematography by Lol Crawley and the production design by Judy Becker purposefully channels the Me Decade’s bruised, moody reimaginations of our nation’s postwar landscapes. (That it was shot in 35mm, and will show at the New York Film Festival in a 70mm print in October, only stokes the fires of comparison.)

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What makes The Brutalist so enthralling is that Corbet & co. isn’t just trying to resurrect a look so much as a subgenre: the excessive, summa cum laude personal epic. His previous work as a director, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), suggested a filmmaker whose enthusiasm for bleak, feel-bad arthouse cinema was stronger than his abilities to add anything new to it. His latest is a major leveling up, less an attempt at imitation than a bold stab at trying to match past touchstones. Corbet and his cowriter Mona Fastvold toiled seven years on this. Every second of their work shows onscreen.

And not even those older grand masters would have the stones to introduce their main character via a long, claustrophobic close-up of him pinballing through a ship’s dark passageways before he emerges on deck to witness the Statue of Liberty — tellingly filmed upside-down. The man is Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). Before the war, he was a celebrated Hungarian architect who studied at Bauhaus. After the war, Tóth was another Jewish immigrant who escaped the camps and came to the U.S. to seek sanctuary. A cousin, Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), and his wife (Emma Laird), take him in. They run a furniture-making business in Pennsylvania, dubbed “Miller & Sons.” Atilla’s surname has been changed to something less Eastern European and more “Catholic.” The sons are fictional: “People here like a family business.” The accent is barely discernible. Welcome to assimilation, American style.

Atilla has been contracted by a rich client, Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), to redo a library in the house of his father, noted industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). It’s supposed to be a surprise gift for Dad. Lázsló is enlisted to design it. The end result is a modernist landmark, though when Harrison finally sees it, he throws a fit and kicks them out, refusing to pay. Many months later, the tycoon tracks down Tóth, shows him a photospread in Look Magazine devoted to this extraordinary room, and apologizes. He doesn’t just want to praise his work and compensate him for his labor. The older Van Buren wants to hire the architect to build a massive community center that will put Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on the map. This dream project will help Tóth finally bring his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), from Hungary to America. It will also make him a virtual slave to Harrison, financially and spiritually, and drive this genius to the edge of madness.

Befitting of a film called The Brutalist, there’s an extraordinary amount of stark, pro-structuralist architecture on display, and anyone with a weakness for that school of design will find themselves uncontrollably drooling over the blueprints, constructions and concrete-and-marble monuments the film treats like great works of art. The buildings are the only things minimalist about this movie, however. Corbet is trying capture a chunk of 20th century America via grand gestures and a VistaVision-lensed frame, incorporating elements such as jazz, drug addiction, the lifestyles of the rich and toxic, the immigrant experience and the legacy of the Holocaust on those who barely survived it.

You can trace bits of the lives and careers of Louis Kahn and Marcel Breur in Lázsló Tóth’s DNA, though Brody — who hasn’t done work of this depth and conveyed such emotional devastation since The Pianist — is adding his own colors and shades to this broken man’s psychological makeup. It’s one of those performances that makes you rethink an actor’s entire filmography. There’s not a weak link in the ensemble, though it’s tough not to single out Isaach de Bankolé as Tóth’s longtime right-hand man and Guy Pearce, whose titan of industry is a true monster. We’re convinced that, among the many tributes to himself, there’s a degree from the Daniel Plainview School of Raging-Id Magnates resting somewhere on Van Buren’s impeccably built mantle.

There will be blood, unsurprisingly, as well as violence, violations, self-destruction, and tragedy of both the intimate and the overarching, sociological kind. A coda suggests that monumental achievements can’t help but eventually be recognized for what they are, even if the cost of producing such works sometimes leaves human husks in its wake. As for The Brutalist, we can only imagine what Corbet, Brody and all of their collaborators went through to turn this dream into a reality. But it’s easy to recognize it as a bold, visionary, sweeping work of art right now.