Editor’s Note: The following story contains mentions of sexual assault. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org.
Brady Corbet, an actor turned writer/director, has seldom conceded to subtlety. In case the viewer doesn’t grok the critique of American culture cajoling artists into commodifying their pain in Vox Lux (2018), a voiceover at the end reveals that the pop star lead character experienced a near-death vision of striking a deal with the Devil. A similarly blunt visual metaphor dominates the opening of Corbet’s latest, The Brutalist (2024). As Hungarian Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) climbs to the deck of the boat bringing him to the United States, both Daniel Blumberg’s score and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camerawork become increasingly chaotic, culminating in a jouncing upside-down image of the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps the American Dream is not all it’s promised to be?
The Brutalist has grand designs. It is the first feature in decades to be shot in VistaVision, the film format used for old-school epics like The Ten Commandments (1956). It’ll be exhibited on 70mm prints at select venues during its theatrical run, and its 215-minute runtime includes an intermission separating its two individually titled acts (“The Enigma of Arrival” and “The Hard Core of Beauty,” respectively). The story follows László, an architect, struggle over many years to complete his magnum opus, a mixed-use community center in a well-heeled Philadelphia suburb. He constantly clashes with his wealthy funder, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), and struggles alongside his wife (Felicity Jones), another survivor, to bury their lingering trauma.
The movie’s tropes concerning the alienation of immigration, the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish-American experience, and the friction between artists and patrons are all familiar, if not well-trodden. It is frustrating that the film can’t always trust the audience; most risibly, there is a rape scene in which the aggressor’s words to the victim make unambiguous the symbolic meaning of the assault.
Still, Corbet does find ways to open some of these ideas for fresh probing. This is perhaps best exemplified by Blumberg’s score, which is both grandiose and discordant, redolent of the work of Corbet’s former collaborator Scott Walker, to whom the film is dedicated. And the use of a throwback celluloid process isn’t some vanity move; VistaVision’s wide field of view is appropriate for a movie so concerned about people within spaces generally and architecture specifically. The film stock’s color tints do the most work of any single element to convincingly transport the audience to the story’s midcentury setting. One sequence surveys a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy with a majestic sweep that’s legitimately awe-inspiring on the big screen.
Most intriguing for those invested in art history and architecture, Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s script is also engaged with Brutalism and its emotional valences. In the dance between a camera and built spaces, Brutalism offers myriad possibilities with its emphasis on monochrome, its pronounced angles and cuves, and of course, the sheer hugeness of many of its public works. Historically, cinema has invoked imposing Brutalist edifices as an easy shorthand for villainy. Real Brutalist buildings and Brutalist-styled fictional ones are the backdrops for dystopias, overwhelming bureaucracies, and/or simply impersonal institutions in films ranging from Orson Welles’s Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962) to A Clockwork Orange (1971) to 1984 (1984) to Equilibrium (2002) and many, many more. The poster for Frederick Wiseman’s documentary City Hall (2020), set in Boston’s infamously controversial Brutalist civic center, references the well-known Jaws (1975) poster, with a corner of the building taking the place of the shark.
Even when Brutalism is not overtly sinister, filmmakers find that its expressive qualities lend themselves well to an uncanny if not outright alien effect. High-Rise (2015), an adaptation of the novel of the same name about society crumbling within an isolated apartment complex, renders J.G. Ballard’s description of five towers that look like fingers grasping skywards as Brutalist structures. “It looks like the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event,” says one character. In Last and First Men (2020), the Brutalist spomenik war memorials of the former Yugoslavia represent humanity from billions of years in the future. In The Brutalist, László ideates his community center as an exemplar of Brutalism’s proletarian spirit, marrying its proposed function in the region to its scale. Van Buren, for his part, is simply impressed with the form’s enormity, and cares only about the building being an appropriately ego-boosting monument to himself and his revered deceased mother.
All these philosophies come through without the words “Brutalism” or “Brutalist” ever actually being spoken within the film, and with minimal explicit discussion of László’s philosophy or reasoning. (Although if one wants to nitpick, the furniture he designs during the film’s first hour is much more generically Modernist than Brutalist.) There’s another potential meaning to his work that’s advanced at the end of the film, positing his blueprint as a very literal expression of his time in a concentration camp. The validity of that interpretation is left for the viewer to intuit. The greater point, echoing Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1977) is that regardless of an artist’s intention, they are helpless to affect the shape of their legacy. “No matter what the others try and sell you,” one character says in the haunting closing line of the film, “it is the destination, not the journey.”
The Brutalist (2024), directed by Brady Corbet, is screening in theaters nationwide beginning December 20.
