THE BRUTALIST (2024)
A visionary architect and his wife flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of the modern US...

A visionary architect and his wife flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of the modern US...
Before the elephant in the room trashes me into a spiral-eyed pulp, the question must be asked: what did the producers and distributors see in The Brutalist that gave them the confidence to push it into the mainstream? Since director Brady Corbet’s previous two films had lost money by colossal margins—Vox Lux (2018) barely made 1/8th of the $11M spent, whereas The Childhood of a Leader (2015) failed to make back even 1/20th of its $5M budget—it’s a wonder that this one ever got produced at all, let alone getting released widely on 70mm and IMAX. It’s audiovisually one of the deftest works all year, and it represents a tremendous amount of diligence and dedication that invites you to feel goodwill towards it, yet I cannot in all sincerity recommend it to anyone who values their time (it’s three-and-a-half hours long, with a 15-minute intermission and a short epilogue). It deserves the attention that much better films this year never had a chance at.
Already, you can probably tell the question at the start isn’t the right one; there’s no doubt about why the distributors gave the go-ahead. Soon after the buzz at Venice, where it earned Corbet a Silver Lion, A24 immediately jumped on the bandwagon and assumed the driver’s seat, buying the distribution rights in the US. And why not The Brutalist? Considering Corbet’s two enormous losses, an independently financed budget of $9.6M was no small feat. It may have been only possible through the grants and tax rebates for filming in Hungary, as well as Corbet’s years of painstaking networking efforts in and out of film festivals because the scope that he was looking for with this would have rung the four-letter R-word in the ears of traditional financiers like an air-raid siren.
However, a budget of just under $10M is meagre if a studio is willing to take it on, and together with the prize money it’s going to get, there isn’t as much urgency to make it all back at once. Plus, with a filmmaker in as much financial need as Corbet, the going price must have been a fraction of a typical Denis Villeneuve or a Christopher Nolan production. And if A24 has the guts to hand-hold the mammoth onto the IMAX screens, they can make it glow like a blockbuster, drawing more seats by giving it the status of an “event”. Grandeur sells, but the payoff usually comes riskier and costlier. The Brutalist hasn’t much trouble with either.
Instead, we should be asking: what’s this kind of movie’s appeal to the festival audience? Why did they give the attention it begged for, the key to its success? When people seemed to have welcomed ‘Barbenheimer’ two summers ago, one could tell from Mars looking down with one eye open that, by and large, it wasn’t so much the materials themselves that drove them to the theatres and made them respond, as their sheer sense of scale. Big movies can give off the scent of a Saturday game at the Stadium, attracting swarms. When cinephiles were hammering away at the “future of cinema”, they overlook that nothing of meaning would actually change in the wake, except even more movies down the line getting swelled up into the stratosphere the way the private banks get bloated with gift cheques from the nanny state. See, there is this sense that once a movie becomes too big, it’s too big to fail, so the advertising money has to go up even higher. There’s no room for the in-between anymore: there are only so many spots for overproductions, and what’s left is pitiful, which is what smaller films must settle for, that is, by getting even smaller. Everything is either sized up to the max or humbly waiting in line to rot.
The thing about The Brutalist, though, is that it’s not especially big. $10M is nothing crazy even for an indie film. A slight farce currently in theatres, One of Them Days (2024), has a reported budget of $14M, and it looks nothing like the million bucks that The Brutalist very much is. It’s hard to think of a recent example of an “epic” made in a comparable budget range. Corbet and Mona Fastvold (The World to Come), his longtime co-writer partner, know that they can’t earn the name of “visionary filmmakers” the way they might have in the past: movies are becoming more and more crowded by the day as the technology gets easier to domesticate, and, with the boom of streaming services, the door is closing fast.
The new kids on the block can’t get a fair shake at the “auteur” game now, not with such planet-sized goliaths as Dune (2021) or Oppenheimer (2023); no one’s got the money for it, so they either start modest and work their way up, usually resorting to schlocky horror shows to draw enough of an audience so it wouldn’t be a waste of effort, or go straight to television and streaming. But for a filmmaker like Corbet, who professed that “large format is the past and the future of cinema”, and fancied the “maestros” he once worked under as an actor (Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Gregg Araki, etc.), you can almost taste his bitterness, and you know that he’s not going to let it go so easily. And he has certainly got something out of it. What he’s accomplished here is an economic triumph: a demonstration that you don’t need the size to make an epic if you’ve got the look of one, and the theme of one. What theme is that? Why of course: a grand allegory on—hang on to your hat—the myth and collapse of the American Dream.
Has there ever been a more tired thematic set-up? As you can already guess, at the centre of it all has to be a man of misunderstood genius, who has his hopes and dreams for a better life in the promised land, and who is wronged and exploited in his pursuit of them. He has to be an immigrant, leaving behind a poor, devastated Europe after the war. He has to be a survivor, with the traumas and guilt complexes from years of persecution and torment. He must also have a destination: that “shining city on a hill”. As a former Bauhaus architect László Tóth, Adrien Brody can command the entire screen with just his high-bridged, aquiline nose, faintly crooked but formidably bent. His László has survived the horrors of a concentration camp, and he hopes to “make it” in America, the land of his dreams.
Corbet has real finesse in the way he composes and blocks his shots, but he doesn’t define his material at its core, so his construction has no integrity and his story and characters don’t come into shape, like in A Real Pain (2024) earlier this year. There’s a massive void in László that Brody has to fill. And since Corbet’s idea of a character stays at the level of sketches concocted out of several architects’ biographies and his own life, Brody, unsure of the impression and personality called for, falls back on his Władysław Szpilman role from The Pianist (2002), trying to mould it around the edges and array as much verisimilitude as he can, erecting a monument on mud and quicksand.
It’s not easy being a poor Hungarian Jewish immigrant rebuilding your life in a foreign land, knowing that there’s no use for your old talent but to sell your blood and sweat for a miserly sum. Luckily for László, he has a furniture store owner cousin in Philadelphia he can turn to, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who married Catholic and considers himself assimilated, for room and board and work. What László discovers through the course of roughly a decade and a half, however, is that even when he does get his chance to put his talent to use, he remains at the mercy of the rich and powerful, with a string attached to him and a tag that says “You’re Mine”. He perceives them to be the true face of America, and his feelings towards America rest or fall on how he’s treated. As his patron, the blue-blooded industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, whose name seems concocted out of two Presidents and a Confederate general, becomes America’s representative. László’s talent is so singular it alienated the jealous Attila and tantalized the uppity Harrison, who was at first furious at the surprise house renovation that his son Harry (Joe Alwyn) hired him for until he drew unexpected limelight on the new library he hated and read up on the guy who made it happen. He then found László shovelling on a pile of coal, sat him down at a diner and hired him right then and there. With his help and connections, László was able to get his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) out of the iron curtain that’s fallen on Hungary, as the first chapter “The Enigma of Arrival” comes to a close.
Gradually, through the second chapter, “The Hard Core of Beauty”, we learn that László has no actual worth to Harrison except as something to tout in front of the world, that he can be ditched back to where he came from just as fast as he’s hired. But Harrison is intimidated by him anyway, by his uncompromising vision, individuality, and by his self-confidence. In this staggering cast, only Guy Pearce seemed to have any radiance. He strategically mistimes Harrison’s emphases when trying to impress others with his supposed breadth of knowledge, and his East Coast elite smooth talk is ever so slightly offbeat, but enough to throw you off balance. When he lost it and threw a barky tantrum, I lost it myself. Pearce has the same self-consciousness that Brody has with his Freudianized method bravura, but he’s aware of it—he knows we can sense that he knows he’s in a movie, to put it as simply as the fourth wall and his star persona permit—and he uses it to transcend into the character’s insecurity. He knows that Harrison is a life-sized act. There’s a parodic air around his assertive tone and brooding appearance which suggests a deeper emptiness and a desperation to hide it under a veneer of power. What’s sad, though, is that he can’t sustain his energy to the end. Sadder, he isn’t the one to take the blame.
Often when a director gets big, they no longer conceive of a work in terms of acting, and filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott rarely engage in characters to begin with. They don’t often sketch and shape them beyond symbols, representations, and ideas. They leave that to the seasoned, expensive, award-winning actors they hire. It’s never an individual problem; the industry has rotted to its core. Institutions like the Academy, with their resume-boosting power, congratulate and encourage sensational showiness rather than grace or texture. There was not a single performance this past year that transcended beyond the materials the actor was given; I mean it’s an utter disgrace that the Academy didn’t even nominate Daniel Craig, who came close to disappearing into the self-amusingly tormented William Lee in Queer (2024). (I don’t know anybody serious about film who still pays attention to the major awards with great interest and enthusiasm.)
The popular movies of Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter are the basis and template for modern American films, the roots of whose styles can’t be traced to literature and plays like Sidney Lumet’s or Orson Welles’, and that certainly carries over to the acting. When is the last time in American cinema that we saw an actor truly pouring themselves into their role with the kind of sensitivity that connected us from that part of our feeling we hadn’t touched or knew existed, like Katherine Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962)? Many foreign films still do, in Iran and South Korea in particular, where films are scaled not too big or too small. I’m thinking of Yalitza Aparicio in Roma (2018), Taraneh Alidoosti in Leila’s Brothers (2022), Paul Mescal in Aftersun (2022), and Park Ji-Min in Return to Seoul (2022). It’s common practice now to do bravura acting simply as a way of covering up the emptiness in personality underneath—the same way how the Fellini-esque lack of narrative focus here is taken to be a form of arty depth rather than the showy incoherence it actually is—and if nothing else The Brutalist suffers the most from this: Harrison is such an empty shell he is all but emptiness incarnate; and when he’s exposed of his crime at the end, he’s all but disappeared, evaporated out of the frame like he never existed. (Then there’s the Clorox Bleach brand of “acting” of Emma Laird, Raffey Cassidy, and Isaach de Bankolé.)
Harrison gave László a task: to build a community centre on a hill that he owns—a church, a theatre, a library, and a gym all rolled into one, using whatever material László thinks fit. It’s concrete and steel for László, whose memory inside Dachau stayed with him. The film’s thesis is that the cold “brutality” in form (“brut” in French means “raw”) is a projection of repressed, unresolved wartime trauma, and it represents an existential loss of faith and purpose, manifested in the colourless exteriors that recalls the interiors of a gas chamber. America was his last hope for him to reclaim anything spiritually. So far so good. What’s missing is the movie.
You don’t have any idea what this man, who’s seen war and death, went through to identify with his experience; we don’t even see his hidden traumas in his dreams. The “city on a hill” that doesn’t shine bellows for irony and poetry, but it has no ring to it. Sometimes a filmmaker can get so carried away by their axial plan of a “fable” and all the technical flourishes to decorate it with, that more basic elements of dramaturgy and characters are pieced together tactlessly, to act more as a functional support for that unsophisticated and often beguilingly garbled “plan” than to stand on their own. The first chapter’s title is all but a joke: there’s very little sense of culture shock or mystery coming to America—no “enigma” in the “arrival”—because the movie has to do everything for us, with images (a classic film-school-student syndrome).
In tackling a subject like disillusionment in the American Dream, it probably helps to know the fantasies and preconceived notions of what that life might look like before the disaffection can take on a fuller emotional significance. Well, what do we get? An upside-down Statue of Liberty. We know, we know: a foreshadowing of the irony that is the “American Dream”. But besides the compositional stunner, are we supposed to feel anything beyond that? I don’t think so: the power rests in being overwhelmed by the imagery, not in any emotion or attitude. Instead, the only real clue is a passing comment László made on Attila’s house (“It’s starting to look like America on television now”). What does America look like on his television? It’s anyone’s guess.
Vice versa, what is the American Dream if not an attempt to escape from the reality of poverty and powerlessness people found themselves in Europe and keep on seeing in America? When a food bank closes as the rations run out, we only hear others grunting, not bellies growling. We don’t know what it means to go hungry in 1940s America because the film doesn’t either—only what it looks like. The Brutalist’s conception is too lofty with “ideas” and too polished with “style” for the rawness of general human experience (a common virtue of mediocre historical biopics). Our educated hero is too different from the average Joe for us to find him in the depth of such trivial affairs as struggling with the means. I mean, that entire scene’s purpose is to introduce a side character, Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), who doesn’t have much presence in the rest of the film anyhow except only when concerning our hero’s journey. We don’t feel the despair that’s shown.
All the wear and tear of the shabby clothes and the makeup dirt on László’s face have no resonance because they’re not dramatically or emotionally grounded. There’s no sense of stakes. You’re not involved in the characters’ lives as ordinary humans, and they don’t seem to be either. The charity poorhouse that László finds himself in is a huge joke. Beyond it being improbably clean and orderly (he wakes up in an undershirt that looks as white as new), it’s the film’s way of telling us that our guy is in a serious state of destitution, without showing us what that entails. It’s a sly visual exposition, a “show to tell” (or rather, “tell by show”). The movie is too afraid to drag him down with these poor bums, so instead we get heroin addiction as a proxy for everything he suppressed and endured. Doesn’t seem much more than a put-on does it?
Being an American Dream allegory, it feels like a Hollywood saphead’s idea of what failure means in America. Like everything else, the “themes” are overtaken by images with little meaning beyond superficial beauty. They’re mere gestures. The light of the cross shone on the inside of László‘s “community centre” is supposed to mean the faith in God that made up his core being. Yet what does religion mean to him really? Does he even know? In critic Richard Brody’s critique, “Corbet’s characters have traits rather than minds, functions rather than lives; they’re assembled rather than perceived.”
Later, we find out that László doesn’t have to starve if he’s not reliant on the Van Burens. The squarely, painterly camera frame tracks him down to a beautifully glistened office where he’s working on his designs for a firm in New York, as the music sings his hymn. Who is the joke on now? Does this mean that he has attained limited but promising job security? What does that do for his prospects? Certainly, it presents more possibilities than ever before, at the very least. Right? Welp, thematic self-confirmation wins the day: the racist snob that he already is, Harrison turns out to be a sexual predator. It’s not a bad contrivance, but not a bold one either. The twist doesn’t feel earned. Would the Italian sequence have been there at all if it weren’t for that revelation? It’s rather naïve for a supposedly socially conscious film to rely on abject villainous monstrosity for a character to embody the evil of a system or a class, rather than something more inherent and common in that system, such as wage theft, or artistic sabotage.
Okay, if you insist on winning the was-it-plausible-for-him-to game, I’ll let you have it. But it’s even sillier to have one man’s, or maybe an entire family’s, antisemitism as evidence that Jews are not welcomed in America. After two near-death incidents, László and Erzsébet leave the Van Burens to wrestle with their own conscience, and set sail for Israel. And herein lies the biggest joke in the whole movie: in rejecting the American Dream, the film is, consciously or otherwise, justifying the Zionist Dream. No, I don’t think Corbet or Fastvold is a Zionist. But is the film? In interviews, Corbet suggested that László had a more successful life there than in America. The idea is that ethno-nationalism offers an alternative to racial conflicts and hatred: the appeal of going to Israel is that László will be, in theory, living with equals and being treated as equals. Corbet’s own quote-of-the-day wisdom—“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”—squib loads and explodes in its own face. If anything more complex was ever suggested in that epilogue, no one took any notice, so there’s no ground to refute criticisms of Zionism. (If you must give the ending the benefit of the doubt, though, and if you’re familiar with Corbet’s Childhood of a Leader, you’re free to interpret it as something to the effect of: when America failed the Jewish immigrants, a more sinister but less alienating option presents itself. Although that is not supported by anything in the film, nor Corbet’s own words.)
It’s a joke in a different sense too: László and Erzsébet can find refuge in another state when their lives and creative pursuits here seem to be going nowhere, but where are Corbet and Fastvold going? Art has no borders. It was probably a mistake for them to have projected as much of themselves into this as they did. The movie was their “exorcism”, so they say, an effort to sort out their feelings and attitudes working in as rigorous an art as film, and their inescapable subservience to the world of capital for any success. It’s certainly no surprise that the lives of architects, who commanded labour-intensive projects on a large scale and dealt with intricate structures and aesthetics, appealed to them: their work reminds them of a film production. It’s even less of a surprise that they went with Brutalist architects. As a design philosophy, Brutalism had a will to power, to defy conventions and authorities for something spectacular in a new sense and direction. That’s what any artist who isn’t ashamed of the label strives towards.
But their result is a rather ham-fisted piece of self-congratulation. Brutalism, as they have posited themselves in this film, is a reaction to the design ethos and traditional ideals of beauty that contributed to the havoc and the breakdown of society in the two World Wars, and the Holocaust no doubt had an effect. If László and Erzsébet’s traumas from the atrocity failed to strike a chord (they rarely even mentioned it), and if the movie has a hard time linking the post-war psychology and architecture as an “intrinsic” interrelation, it may be because (1) Corbet doesn’t want to dramatise trauma, with the legit fear that the memories would overshadow everything else and become exploitative by making heroes out of ordinary people (“If you believe in the good stuff, you have to believe in the bad stuff too”, he said in a podcast), and (2) the film comes from a place that’s as far from any trauma of dehumanisation as your or I: Corbet and Fastvold’s struggles extend as far as creative hurdles, which don’t reach anywhere near the rim of what the Holocaust meant to an entire people. So, having lacked the interest to tap into psychology, perhaps they shouldn’t have made their counterparts in the movie concentration camp survivors. But then the connection between Brutalism and trauma would collapse. In which case, maybe they should have pursued the general Jewish post-war experience with more of the “brutal” honesty that Brutalist architecture expressed.
Writing in the mid-1950s, architectural critic Reyner Banham observed on the Hunstanton School, one of the earliest complete works of Brutalist architecture:1
“Whatever has been said about honest use of materials, most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash or patent glazing, even when they are made of concrete or steel. Hunstanton appears to be made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and is in fact made of glass, brick, steel and concrete. Water and electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the wall, but are delivered to the point of use by visible pipes and manifest conduits. One can see what Hunstanton is made of, and how it works, and there is not another thing to see except the play of spaces. This ruthless adherence to one of the basic moral imperatives of the Modern Movement—honesty in structure and material—as precipitated a situation to which only the pen of Ibsen could do justice.
In visual terms, the movie is admirably meticulous but far from extraordinary. If we follow the Brutalist philosophy strictly, with all the exposed structures and raw materials, The Brutalist could’ve used much more documentary aesthetics of Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies, High School) or the neo-realism of Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine) and Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open City), than homages to the more artificial works of Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson like Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Master (2012). The beauty of Brutalist structures isn’t on the surface, like in this film, but rather, it comes from within. No paint or lacquer, a stripped-back decor.
‘Image’ seems to be a word that describes anything or nothing. Ultimately, however, it means something which is visually valuable, but not necessarily by the standards of classical aesthetics. Where Thomas Aquinas supposed beauty to be quod visum placet (that which seen, pleases), image may be defined as quod visum perturbat—that which seen, affects the emotions, a situation which could subsume the pleasure caused by beauty, but is not normally taken to do so, for the New Brutalists’ interests in image are commonly regarded, by many of themselves as well as their critics, as being anti-art, or at any rate anti-beauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word. But what is equally as important as the specific kind of response, is the nature of its cause. What pleased St. Thomas was an abstract quality, beauty—what moves a New Brutalist is the thing itself, in its totality, and with all its overtones of human association…
Nevertheless, this concept of Image is common to all aspects of The New Brutalism in England, but how it works out in architectural practice has some surprising twists to it. It requires that the building should be an immediately apprehensible visual entity; and that the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by experience of the building in use. Further, this form should be entirely proper to the functions and materials of the building, in their entirety. Such a relationship between structure, function and form is the basic commonplace of all good building of course, the demand that this form should be apprehensible and memorable is the apical uncommonplace which makes good building into great architecture.
If you’ve seen the pictures of the Hunstanton School, you’ll know just what this means: honesty in constitution isn’t all beautiful in application as it’s usually advertised to be when you Google “Brutalism”, but the building is nevertheless visually distinct and clear, easily discernible as to its structure and its inner-workings. But for Corbet, particularly in how he photographs his scenes and locations, it’s obvious that it’s the external appearance he finds compelling, not any inner beauty or overall unity stemming from utilitarianism in function. When Attila was telling Laszlo to leave, his face was in shadow. It’s a clever decision, but it’s too obvious in its trickery: László’s face was lit up, and since we don’t know where that light came from, such a stark contrast becomes distracting. We grow conscious of that shadow as a device, rather than it sinking into our perceptions. Other times, the film’s stylistic flourishes don’t come out of the material, so they’re just exercises, which goes diametrically against the Brutalist philosophy that this film seems to be so fond of.
Then some shots patently looked like they were there just to look pretty, to beg for your awe: László looking down at the sparks flying; the imposing image of the giant yellow crane at a construction site; the triangle of László, Gordon, and Harrison at a heap of coal with a concentration-camp-like building in the background, etc. Like in some out-of-place and meaningless location shots in Vox Lux, Corbet likes his faux-Wellesian angles too much. Brutalism is about structural beauty. Each part is economical in purpose, and they add to a greater whole. They’re clear and identifiable. The Brutalist loses its clarity quickly in the second chapter, with inconsistent ellipses and threads that lead to nowhere, still less the cut-and-dried narrative structure. They are also “machines with no superfluous parts” we’re told, and yet The Brutalist is filled with them, often with a needlessly sluggish pace that seemed deliberately long to stretch itself into the epic length they so desired. (For a minor offence, did anyone keep count of how many steps Erzsébet took when she was on her way to the Van Burens to deliver her message near the end?)
At times, it seemed like the only reason Corbet was drawn to Brutalism was how he thinks he identified with being spat on by the rest of the art world as being too avant-garde. But even here, nothing comes out of his influence. “I think it’s the combination of minimalism and maximalism that I find appealing. It’s not middle-brow. It’s very radical.” But his The Brutalist is painstakingly middle-brow, and very much not radical either. Corbet has no gift for sensuousness: the way the film is cut and paced does not lull you in; it mostly just slogs along, and when the second chapter begins it seems to have nowhere to go but down. It’s an unchallenging, unoriginal, inoffensive work. Everyone’s lauding it, because it’s designed to be likeable, and it knows what kind of edifice attracts the prestige audience. The only “brutality” is in the length.
Brutalist architecture, at its core, was also designed to illuminate and uplift the humans in its environment:
The former, only remembered for having put the idea of the street deck back in circulation in England, is notable for its determination to create a coherent visual image by non-formal means, emphasising visible circulation, identifiable units of habitation, and fully validating the presence of human beings as part of the total image—the perspectives had photographs of people pasted on to the drawings so that the human presence almost overwhelmed the architecture.
Yet The Brutalist is so lacking in human elements it might’ve served better as a parody of its own name. The camera gives too much weight to the buildings, and the humans come under its weight. And the narrative is psychologically superficial for such a psychological and human premise it sets for itself. It’s shallow not because the film doesn’t explain its characters, but that, besides everything I’ve already touched on, it refuses to bring us into their inner lives. There comes a point in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) when the darker undertows of frustrations and confusions in Sonny (Al Pacino) sweep us down with him into his fears and anxieties, yet you can’t pin them down exactly; but they’re unmistakably there, because we’ve felt it with our own nerves. It doesn’t get invalidated simply for lacking the capacity to verbalise it meaningfully. When László bursts into tears in The Brutalist, the film told us how to feel. We’re not trusted to find our own ways into his suffering, so we’re always kept at an emotional distance.
By making László the epitome of the failure that is the American Dream, the film gestures towards a larger relevance, if the dinner table conversation at Gordon’s house, virtuously and obtusely inquiring about their conditions, didn’t make it clear enough. Yet it’s virtue signalling. Corbet and Fastvold either lack the insights that dig deeper than “talking points”, or they were simply more interested in portraying themselves as victims of the system who emerged victorious. But the inevitable comparison between them and a whole society (and Holocaust survivors) still seemed maladroit and irresponsibly self-important.
“It’s not the journey, it’s the destination.” I love some cinephiles’ silly guessing game at what the freak bird attacks in The Birds (1963) mean when they weren’t meant to mean anything. I likewise enjoy knowing how they misinterpret this line in The Brutalist as ambiguous or ironic. A twist on the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, it seemed to be what many poor, hardworking people believe sincerely. So does Corbet, when he explained in an interview that what he’s working towards is where the real value lies, manifesting in László’s paving the way for his offspring’s success and happiness, rather than the process which he laments as “painful”. This is what it gets in a movie when it can’t sort out its attitude on a thing. Is the American Dream the big lie or not? What exactly has László found for his offspring? How did he achieve whatever the film thinks he did? By suffering?
I have to agree with David Lynch on this—it’s a bad sign when an artist feels like a pain when making art. To borrow his example, Van Gogh suffered, but that wasn’t why he made great paintings; it was elation in the creation process. His exact phraseology was “The more you suffer, the less you want to create.” There are always those who care more about the recognition than the art itself, and when you hear someone who says they ultimately care more about the result than simply having the pleasure of translating one’s vision creatively, a red flag is hoisted up the staff. Corbet and Fastvold may or may not be one (or two) of them, but The Brutalist doesn’t do them much justice as a monument to their pains.
USA • UK • CANADA | 2024 | 215 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • HUNGARIAN • ITALIAN • HEBREW • YIDDISH
director: Brady Corbet.
writers: Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold.
starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé & Alessandro Nivola.