Answer me one question,” demands Harrison Lee Van Buren, the malignant industrialist played by Guy Pearce, towards the middle of The Brutalist. “Why architecture?” He’s posing the question to László Tóth, the visionary immigrant architect at the film’s centre, played with wrought fallibility by Adrien Brody. “Nothing can be of its own explanation,” he responds. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”
In a year when the Academy Awards’ Best Picture nominees have made for rather mealy pickings, it’s hard to find the right way to talk about The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s 215-minute-long period epic. Sweeping in scope, emphatically stylish, and somehow produced on a budget of less than $10m, The Brutalist is the sort of film that compels superlatives. It demands to be taken seriously, at a time when precious few films do. It’s no surprise that it’s a serious contender at this year’s Oscars, in a host of major categories – Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor among them. (Brody’s performance, as the titular architect who migrates to the US to escape the horrors of the Holocaust, has been rightly heralded as a career high.) But it’s hardly a runaway favourite – and this too is unsurprising.
For all its grandeur, The Brutalist is not a particularly accessible film. It’s daunting in length. It’s volatile in its storytelling: broad and purposely over-literal at times, slippery and ambiguous at others. It’s a film that’s dense with ideas, to the point of gigantism, and about so very many things at once – the immigrant experience; the dubious relationship between art and commerce; addiction; America; capitalism; architecture; obsession; Judaism; sex; trauma; Zionism. Not all are afforded equal shrift, but they’re all in there.
Before this, Corbet, a former actor who once played the gawky lead in the live-action Thunderbirds movie, had directed two films: The Childhood of a Leader, which looks at the early years of a future fascist, and Vox Lux, in which Natalie Portman plays a school shooting survivor who finds fame and misery as a pop star. While these films established Corbet as a gifted stylist, neither was able to gird their flair with the necessary substance. The Brutalist, a more classically minded venture in many regards, is the sort of bolshy evolution that few artists ever truly manage. Part of the reason the film coheres so well is simply down to the brilliance of its many parts – first-rate acting from Brody and Pearce (as well as Felicity Jones, also never-better as László’s wife Erzsébet); captivating cinematography; a grand and remarkable score.
For want of a better word, The Brutalist is also a quite literary piece of cinema, a film that rewards not just repeat viewings but close, academic scrutiny. The film’s quarter-hour intermission – arriving 100 minutes in, exactly halfway through the runtime – isn’t just a handy stent to alleviate leg cramps and bladders, but an important signpost for the film’s structural intentions. The two-act structure is used cleverly and meaningfully – mirrors and inversions abound. One example, to illustrate: near the beginning of the film, we see László bid goodbye to a friend, before getting on a bus bound for his American future. He flips his friend a coin for good luck. Near the start of the second act, we see Van Buren make a snide remark about László “talking like he shines shoes for a wage”, flipping a coin at him in cruel humour. It’s the same gesture, with vastly different significance.
For all these reasons and more, The Brutalist would be a worthy winner at this year’s Oscars. It is a film that has enraptured many voters, left others cold – and some will have likely been deterred from even watching it. It’s been over 20 years since a film running more than three hours won Best Picture (Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2003); The Brutalist would be the longest winner of the award since 1962 (when the victor was Lawrence of Arabia). It is a hard film to sell to the unconverted; even writing about it now feels like I’m at risk of misrepresenting it. The solution, then, is just to watch it and decide for yourself. That is to say: what better description is there than that of its construction?
