The Brutalist (Photo – Focus Features, Universal Pictures)
How do you judge a film of epic length that is not an epic?
The Brutalist
Directed by Brady Corbet – 2024
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
In the case of The Brutalist, a new film by director Brady Corbet, pretty much with a lukewarm response: praise for the photography, landscapes and artwork rendered in detail-rich VistaVision, and kudos for the acting, mainly Adrian Brody as Laszlo Toth, a Bauhaus-trained architect who emigrates to the USA in the late 1940’s. (He is seen in the film’s opening sequence pushing and shoving and finally getting a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty which, protruding upside down from the top of the screen, hints at ambiguity in this particular immigrant experience.)
Brody’s co-star is Guy Pierce, as Harrison Van Buren, a capitalist with visions or delusions of grandeur who learns of Toth’s European, architectural past and enlists him to design a structure to be part library, church, and community center, truly a shining house on a hill. Costs versus artistic vision struggle before ground is even struck. This is basically the first ninety minutes of the movie.
The slow, almost stately pace of this first part, full of social observation and character development, seemed more fitting to a two-hour film than one much, much longer.
In the movies second part the building rises and is often photographed at an angle to suggest Golgotha, as if on this particular hill Toth will be metaphorically crucified, working for the rapacious Van Buren.
It seems that the film, like Van Buren’s overwrought vision of a multi-use facility, wants to be many things at once, and I felt its various components were done if not better then certainly more concisely before. As a story about an artist and his sadistic patron it doesn’t have the cultural vitality of Ivan Szabo’s 1981 Mephisto; as lingering trauma from the Holocaust Sidney Lumet’s 1964 The Pawnbroker and Paul Mazursky’s 1989 Enemies: A Love Story are equally powerful and of a digestible run time.
It’s a great movie, however, about the building process, we see designs, sketches, mock ups, scaffolds, and marble quarries in Carrera, Italy where Toth learns of Van Buren’s brutality amid scarps of stone that look like snow.
Maybe I’m the problem. If you’re going to make a 3 ½ hour movie, I remember Dr. Zhivago or The Ten Commandments, films with an epic sweep proper to their length.
Somehow sitting that long for a story of a driven architect with personal problems and a bad boss tested this reviewer’s patience.
Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Santa Anita 16, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Regal UA La Canada, and Laemmle Glendale.
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