It seems premature to christen Brady Corbet's epic The Brutalist a cinematic classic.
Such an accolade usually comes with time, but the film's sweep, scale and echoes from other titles that have earned that illustrious label — The Godfather, particularly, in its first half — means no other phrase will do. Coppola's mafia saga is just over 50 years old and we're still lapping it up. It’s hard to imagine Corbet's film not being watched and admired well into the second half of this century and beyond.
The two films — and, indeed, The Godfather II — are rooted in the immigrant experience. The Brutalist starts with Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor, Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), arriving in America in the late 1940s but leaving behind his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy, also in Corbet’s Vox Lux), who are entangled in immigration red tape. Relying on his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) for work in his thriving furniture business, Toth comes to the attention of Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) by designing a new reading room in his mansion — a surprise birthday present that, initially, goes down like the proverbial lead balloon. On reflection, he recognizes Toth's talents and becomes his patron, employing him to design and build a vast community centre, but the whisper of bigotry in the way he treats his architect eventually becomes a roar, culminating in an act of horrifying violence and darkness.
There's something off about their relationship from the very start, all of it emanating from Van Buren himself. The formality of his language, the condescension running through even his more generous acts — he pulls strings so that Erzsebet and Zsofia are re-united with Toth — and the contrast between his overly fed physique and the lean, once-starving Laszlo makes theirs a relationship of unequals. The irony is that Van Buren is a man of little talent or ability and knows it all too well, but his wealth gives him power. Pearce is superb in the role, using a tone of voice that he revealed at a recent screening is based on that of his friend, the actor Danny Huston. It's probably the performance of his career.
An immigrant story wrapped in a portrait of the building of modern America, Corbet's film speaks loud and clear to the present day — the displaced desperately seeking safety and the chance to rebuild their lives, how they bring their talents and contribute to their new countries. But it also shines a searching light on how they are treated and the extent to which they are accepted. Or not. Van Buren’s son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), lays it on the line when a few too many drinks loosen his tongue and tells Laszlo "We tolerate you".
Resentment, suspicion and envy are always just a sliver below the surface, making a nonsense of the oft-quoted poem on the Statue Of Liberty, the beacon of hope for newcomers to the USA. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." They're never allowed to genuinely belong and the timing of the film’s arrival in cinemas is painfully acute.
The themes woven into the narrative are ambitious and huge. No wonder, then, that the film's running time is three hours thirty-five minutes, which has created headlines in its own right, as has the very necessary intermission. It’s not such a rarity: last year’s Killers Of The Flower Moon ran for three hours twenty-six minutes and also gave most cinema audiences a well-timed break.
Yet at no point does The Brutalist feel over-long or bloated: there is so much to relish in the visuals, the characters and Corbet’s spellbinding storytelling that it just carries its audience along, involving them, thrilling them and, occasionally, deeply shocking them. There are times when it feels like Laszlo should have been a real person and, even though he's fictional, it’s hard not to feel that in spirit he’s a hair’s breadth from being related to Wladyslaw Szpilman, the real-life musician at the centre of The Pianist (2002), Brody’s Oscar-winning performance.
Which brings us to the man who takes centre stage. Like co-stars Jones (spectacularly good as his wife) and Pearce, Brody had a sudden rise to fame but since then has never quite hit those heights. Until now. Agony, hope, devastation, love and all-too-human frailty fill his angular tortured face and frame as he tries to find some semblance of stability, losing himself in the construction of a building that proves to be just as much a weight around his neck as the knotted necklace worn by his wife.
It’s an extraordinary, all-consuming piece of acting in a film that stands head and shoulders above even the very best of this year’s cinema — and will be on our screens for years, if not decades, to come.
The Brutalist is released in the US on 20 December and in the UK on 24 January 2025.
