The Brutalist
First screened in October 2024
Director: Brady Corbet. Cast: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Isaach De Bankolé, Emma Laird, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Jonathan Hyde, Michael Epp, Salvatore Sansone, Benett Vilmányi, Ariane Labed. Screenplay: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. In Brief:
Absolutely remarkable texture and detail through first half, in story and style. Second dips a bit, but this is art!
VOR:⑤
Even when pacing and focus wobble, Corbet and his team take every available opportunity to make gutsy material even richer and livelier.
Essentially There Will Be Building, though this time the rapacious capitalist grudgingly cedes center stage for as long as he can stand it to a differently charismatic, differently difficult, foreign-born genius. I don't mean that The Brutalist is at root derivative; if anything, it stands out as a recent American movie whose stylistic, thematic, historical, and site-specific preoccupations feel thrillingly unusual. Even the interstitial passages suggest that cowriter-director Brady Corbet and his collaborators can do almost anything with sound, score (!!), editing, cinematography, and design. These kinetic, frequently abstract spectacles invigorate the ear and eye as much as the scenes themselves, even in the pre-intermission half of The Brutalist, when the whole movie fires on a fearsome set of two-story pistons.
As with There Will Be Blood (or The Master, which would have worked fine as a title for The Brutalist), the astoundingly specific world-building and clearly defined historical consciousness of the first half or two-thirds shrink down markedly in the remainder, or else they just matter less, which feels like a loss. Corbet's vision never loses its claim on grandeur, but the movie starts shrink-wrapping itself around some borderline melodramatic confrontations among key characters, losing the wider and even more complicated panorama. Just as much in the style of a Paul Thomas Anderson epic, performances start feeling less directed as the end draws nearer, and also the pace just suddenly whooshes through the final stretches, when so much of the movie's value previously inhered in making its world bigger, richer, and knottier without worrying too much about advancing a plot. After spending so long luxuriating in the movie's successes, ambitions, and hyper-compelling peculiarities, I left the theater thinking more than I wanted or expected to about miscalculations, ambivalences, and very late-breaking story facts that might well have been introduced and explored earlier.
Still, The Brutalist is a sizeable, cinema-specific achievement, even as I fully grasp why the word "novelistic" has started following it around, and that's indeed a good name for some of the pleasures I took in it. I disagree with fellow patrons I talked to afterward who think it ought to have been a miniseries. The Brutalist is about standalone monuments, and the lives people live in the presence and shadows of monunents, whether miserable or majestic. The "event movie" is the right shape for this story, and I love that it feels so personal to Corbet as principal author while also depending so patiently on risky, generous collaboration with on- and off-screen partners.
All in all, a very satisfying night at the movies, even as it grew more uneven. Adrien Brody fans have much to savor. Vox Lux devotees like myself do, too. The Brutalist feels very much of a piece with that previous film's love of intensity and excess, and with its heady conjuration of both a specific historical moment and an individual avatar who feels both emblematic of and idiosyncratic to the world they're trying to grandly, obnoxiously, maybe desperately reinvent. Grade:A–
Awards:
Venice Film Festival: Best Director; FIPRESCI Prize
