The Brutalist review adrien brody

The Brutalist is as much a beautiful, ambitious epic as it is a miserable, self-important failure

2.5 stars out of 5

The Brutalist opens with an extended tracking shot. Moving through a dark claustrophobic space, crowded with people, it’s difficult for the audience to situate themselves. Evoking László Nemes’s Son of Saul, there’s a sense of aching despair to the sequence. As characters move towards the light, we imagine the untold horrors that have thrust them into this situation. Sickness and death hang around the edges of the frame. Unlike Nemes’s technical beauty, the sequence possesses a hand-held ugliness that feels unaesthetic, at least in classical terms. Where are these people going? The characters reach the light and we have our first context clue: the Statue of Liberty in cold, bright light, hanging upside down.

The Brutalist isn’t without value. It’s a film that imagines, through the experiences of architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a realer, harsher version of the American immigrant experience — particularly that of Jews resituating in the country in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Its ironic tagline, “Welcome to America,” suggests a not-so-hidden history of oppression and exclusion endemic to the American identity. In broad strokes, the film attempts to invoke the clarity and imagination of brutalism through modernist optimism — a pathway towards redemption.

The Brutalist review
Alessandro Nivola and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

As a vehicle for these ideas, though, The Brutalist often falls short. It has undeniable ambition: It’s a decades-spanning epic shot on VistaVision on a (relatively) minuscule budget of $10-million. It aspires to encompass not just a life but the sprawling cruelty of the mid-century American project and the continued echoes of the unrepentant greed, waste and pettiness of the plastic golden era’s impact on the lives we live today. 

The film stumbles through these ideas with a kind of awkward unfamiliarity. The movie leans heavily into cruelty, which connects to its thesis, but the ugliness of this perspective feels cheap and easy rather than embodied. Structuring so much of its narrative and themes around the concepts of László’s brutalist style does little to illuminate the movement or shapes of that experience. Only through a rather clumsy epilogue do we get the full context of the project; it feels necessary but also as ham-fisted as the film’s worst impulses. The unfriendliness of this world, filled with the cheap but shiny surfaces of respectability and perceived moral value, lacks a paradoxical gentleness and fragility. Too much of the film operates under this same tone of miserableness. 

Much of the first half of The Brutalist almost works. The set-up is generous, and watching László situating himself within the American project has a few wistful moments of passing beauty. There’s a tenderness to the film’s casting, which privileges faces, that invites the audience to imagine the hopes and dreams of its characters. There are beautiful images, though I’d argue that, as with many contemporary films, the movie only half-commits to compelling framing. Considering the undertaking of adopting VistaVision, a mostly obsolete process, much of the film lacks a modernist or visionary rigour to justify the decision outside of the stubborn vigour of ego. The opening sequence is a good example of a strong concept that ultimately isn’t particularly original or accomplished, though I’m sure an argument can be made that, following the sparseness of brutalism itself, ostentatiousness gives its way to pure form.

The second half undoes any goodwill of the first, though. László’s small victories collapse under the weight of telenovela-like tragedies. The trajectory of the film feels like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, an epic treatise on pain and suffering, that seems to revel in its sadism without rooting it in real experience. The Brutalist crumbles under the weight of an ambition that doesn’t seem to match the scope or experience of its makers, floundering increasingly under the pressures of how to handle big ideas or challenging events in a way that feels authentic or meaningful. The film hits a crescendo in a last-act dinner sequence that completely falls apart aesthetically, morally and ideologically. It’s a complete disaster even though it’s ostensibly the thrust of the entire project — a grand confrontation and affirmation of identity that ends up feeling cheap despite the efforts of its cast. 

The overall experience watching The Brutalist is one of increased exasperation. The movie fails to construct any real meaning, leaving a lot of the heavy lifting to the audience. The ideas are there but they don’t coalesce and the film ends up feeling incomplete, and often rushed. Some sequences, such as a sojourn in Italy marked with hallucinatory imagery and unrestrained violence, are stronger in concept than execution. The idealization of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, conceptually, can be understood within a greater context of the state’s ultimate failure, but within the actual text, remains an uncomplicated beacon of hope. For a film so critical of the U.S., it fails to account for much nuance in its approach to the wider world. It’s a movie that often feels myopic to a fault, failing to account for the messiness of reality. 

Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist

Perhaps my biggest frustration with the film ends up being how much of it serves as a kind of metaphor for the artistic process itself. The film’s final scene draws strange parallels between the character’s journey and that of filmmaking; one that feels clumsy and self-serving. Even if it’s merely intended as a metaphor for brutalism, it doesn’t particularly ring true. It’s a movie that only seems to half-understand the scope of its ambition. The last sequence, which offers new context to László’s obsessions, almost feels like a thematic “gotcha” but still doesn’t actually delve into the weight or complexity of its allusions. 

What we’re left with is a film that signals its own importance in every way, but fails to measure up to it. The performances are uniformly strong, with Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce rising to the cream of the crop. The score is magnificent as well. The movie’s scope endears a certain commitment from the audience that often means that they’ll piece together meaning to justify spending nearly four hours glued to their seats. ■

The Brutalist (directed by Brady Corbet)

The Brutalist opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, Jan. 17.


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