‘The Brutalist’ movie overview: Adrien Brody bolsters Brady Corbet’s overwhelming edifice on the American Dream

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is the form of undertaking that appears willed into existence by sheer conviction alone. A stark, unflinching, and rigorously designed meditation on ambition, energy, and the immigrant expertise, the movie unfolds with the similar prolonged grandiosity as the clear, concrete constructs its protagonist spends his life erecting. Running a formidable 202 minutes and shot on 70mm movie inventory, Corbet’s third function is each an ode to and an interrogation of the American Dream as a delusion that invitations reinvention whereas exacting a brutal toll.

The story charts the decades-spanning fictional lifetime of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who arrives in postwar America with little greater than his expertise and an indomitable perception in his work. He isn’t, at first look, a very malleable émigré — his accent stays thick, his sense of self resolute — however America, as Corbet suggests, has its personal methods of sculpting the displaced into the shapes it requires. Brody, in his most arresting efficiency since The Pianist, performs Tóth as a person whose very options appear designed for endurance: the gauntness of his face, the unwavering gaze, a skeletal body that bends however by no means fairly breaks underneath the weight of historical past and trauma.

The unremitting cinephile in Corbet constructs the movie with an virtually scientific precision, favouring static, geometric compositions that mirror the structure at its coronary heart. The digicam not often strikes until compelled by narrative power, and emphasises on the pressure between human frailty and the immovable buildings left behind in our wake. But if The Brutalist looks like a monument chiseled on celluloid, a lot of that credit score belongs to cinematographer Lol Crawley and composer Daniel Blumberg, whose work elevates Corbet’s imaginative and prescient from an austere “intellectually stimulating” train to one thing genuinely operatic. 

A nonetheless from ‘The Brutalist’
| Photo Credit:
A24

Every shadow lends the movie a haunting physicality, making the areas really feel cavernous, imposing, virtually detached to the individuals inhabiting them. Shot in VistaVision, Corbet’s photographs really feel heavy with intent, as if carved out of stone. And Blumberg’s breathtaking rating looms over, a spectral presence of groaning strings and fractured melodies that evokes the loftiness of ambition and the quiet, gnawing terror of its value. Together, they flip The Brutalist into one thing mythic — an edifice, constructed to final.

Central to Tóth’s rise (and inevitable undoing) is his benefactor, tormentor, and finally one thing far worse — Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, who commissions the architect to design an institute in his mom’s honour. Their relationship is transactional, merciless, and exploitative, and Van Buren feigns curiosity in Tóth’s creative integrity to pursue the methods wherein he could be managed. Pearce performs him as a person so assured of his personal energy that he finds real amusement in the struggling of these beneath him. His interactions with Tóth, crammed with condescending reward and veiled threats, evoke a twisted paternalism.

Corbet’s script, co-written with Mona Fastvold, is dense and unrelenting, crammed with sharp observations on artwork, commerce, and the limits of resilience. At its greatest, it captures the intoxicating lure of artistic ambition — the perception that nice artwork can transcend circumstance — whereas concurrently exposing the brutal actuality that artwork is usually at the mercy of those that finance it. The movie’s title, then, is loaded: brutalism as an architectural motion was outlined by uncooked, purposeful design, however Corbet is extra all for brutality as a situation of existence, significantly for individuals who are disposable, making an attempt to construct one thing everlasting in the world.

A nonetheless from ‘The Brutalist’
| Photo Credit:
A24

If there’s a design flaw in The Brutalist, it’s the method wherein its eclipsing scope typically diminishes its characters and turns them into symbols greater than individuals. Felicity Jones, as Erzsébet, Tóth’s long-suffering spouse, is given little to do past voicing motive and frustration. She is the foil to his obsession, the one who sees the system for what it’s whereas Tóth stays entranced by what he desires it to be. Yet her moments of company really feel preordained, as if she too is merely one other define in Corbet’s blueprints.

The Brutalist is a movie about exile — from one’s homeland, one’s personal story, one’s personal work. By the time the epilogue arrives, Laszlo’s previously mute niece, Zsofia, now speaks with the simple confidence of somebody who has inherited historical past, smoothing the jagged edges of her uncle’s struggling right into a tidy billing of perseverance. 

Laszlo is silent, his physique frail, his voice now stolen by time. Zsofia inscribes his legacy vicariously and reduces his struggling to an ethical fable. Her fixation on the “destination” over the treacherous highway it took to get there echoes the tidy ethical certainties which have weaponised previous horrors into present-day coverage, and commandeered the voices of the useless to put declare to land, legacy, and the malleability of historical past. His last creation has metastasised into one thing else totally — co-opted, commodified, and, in the most damning irony of all, used as a monument to insidious beliefs he by no means believed in. 

It’s not a movie for the impatient, nor does it make concessions to accessibility, however The Brutalist, warrantsconsideration, rewards scrutiny, and lingers lengthy after its last, unsparing frames. Corbet has crafted one thing distinctive: a movie super and unyielding in each type and philosophy. It is, in each sense, a monolith that refuses to crumble underneath its weighty ambitions.