The Brutalist—At Least, Half of It—Is as Exhilarating as Any Movie You’ll See This Year

What separates a genius from the rest of us schmoes? That’s the question Brady Corbet—a prolific actor who’s gradually building a career as an inventive, out-there director—mines in The Brutalist, the story of a fictional mid-20th-century architect who, though acclaimed in his homeland of Hungary, finds himself scrambling to rebuild his life in the country he feels fortunate to have escaped to, the United States. Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, who has survived imprisonment in Buchenwald and made the tumultuous passage to New York: we get a point-of-view shot that captures what it might have been like to disembark from a crowded steamer and see the Statue of Liberty all topsy-turvy and sideways before you. She looks great, like someone who’s actually happy to see you. László will soon find out just how unwelcome he really is, though by staying true to his outsized vision, he will eventually achieve outsized fame—and it will take a runtime of three hours and change (with a 15-minute intermission in between) to lay all of this out.

The Brutalist, playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival, is almost nuttily ambitious. In his third feature as director, Corbet does nothing by half measures, which doesn’t mean everything he tries is 100 percent successful. The Brutalist is half a great film: the hefty chunk of movie leading up to that intermission is as exhilarating as anything you’re likely to see this year—there’s a Rite of Spring brashness to it. But in the second half, its bold, angular lines soften into something more oblique and conventional, even though some of the plot elements are quite harrowing. It’s as if Corbet, along with his regular co-writer Mona Fastvold, used all their best ideas in their master-builder climb to the top, without figuring out how they might climb down.

But we live in an age when it’s hard enough to make even half a great film. And no matter how you cut it, The Brutalist is a spectacle, the sort of movie that can turn an afternoon into an event. Corbet divides the story into three sections, plus an epilogue, beginning in 1947 and winding up in 1980, at that year’s Venice Biennale, the first devoted to architecture. The film opens with that suitably jarring, shaky-cam arrival at Ellis Island. This is where we get our initial glimpse of Brody’s László, disembarking with a friend; their first order of business is to relieve some sexual tension. As a winsome beauty goes to work on László, she asks him why her ministrations aren’t doing the trick. “It’s the space above your brow that’s a problem,” he says, looking down at her upturned face. “There’s something I don’t like.”

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It's a cruel thing to say, but it’s also quintessential architect-speak. These are people with firm ideas about what they like and don’t like—aesthetic choices are their lifeblood. But for László, there’s something else: he and his wife, Erzsébet, were forcibly separated and sent to different camps during the war. She’s trapped in Austria—along with the couple’s niece, Zsofia, who has some health problems that demand special attention—but László doesn’t yet know that they’re still alive. When he finally reaches Pennsylvania, where he's reunited with a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), he learns that both are alive. His relief breaks through in a flood of tears; Brody makes you feel both their heat and their restorative coolness. He's wonderful in this role.

Attila and his Connecticut blonde wife (Emma Laird) run a custom furniture business; their specialty is ugly brown wood stuff. Attila gives László an empty storeroom to sleep in, and allows him to help with the business, though László’s pride prevents him from accepting more than that. In line at a soup kitchen, he meets a single father, Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé); the two will form a long-lasting bond. This is how Corbet inches forward with László’s story, which really kicks into gear when he and Attila accept a quickie commission from a rich skinflint, Joe Alwyn’s Harry Lee Van Buren. Harry wants to surprise his millionaire father with a refurbished library. Can they do it in a week? László takes charge, taking a stuffy old space and creating a glorious, half-moon shaped reading refuge with adjustable sliding bookshelves and, in the center, a single, swoonworthy chrome-and-leather lounge chair reminiscent of Le Corbusier. The future has arrived.

Then papa bear Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, in a fine, flinty performance) arrives home early. He hates this surprise, and blasts László and Atilla with his anger; young Harry refuses to pay them. Attila sends László off on his own, telling him he must fend for himself. Fast-forward a few months: it turns out Harrison's futuristic reading room has been featured in LOOK magazine, marking him as a man of taste and vision. He digs around and learns that László was a very big deal back in Hungary; in his eyes, that further burnishes László's star. He finds László, who's toiling away nobly at menial construction jobs, and offers him the chance of a lifetime: the opportunity to design and build a community center in honor of Harrison’s late mother, to whom he was devoted. The building, to be the pride of Doylestown, Pa., must contain a library, a gymnasium, an auditorium, and a chapel. László fulfills this impossible mission by designing a spare, elegant edifice that can do it all.

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That’s barely the beginning of The Brutalist. The story that follows doesn’t just map László’s rise, fall, and eventual re-ascent: it’s a thumbnail history of the last half of the 20th century, a meditation on the realities of being an outsider and a Jew in postwar America, a detailed treatise on the way rich people can sometimes giveth, though in the end they’re much more likely to take away—and we’re not just talking about money. The Bauhaus-trained László is so ahead of the curve, he’s almost out of sight. That’s what makes people hate him, and even fear him. The Brutalist strives to explore the best and worst of human behavior, and just about every gradation in between.

Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) eventually make it to New York, and though László has long dreamed of reuniting with them, their arrival demands that he shift his thinking. It also cramps his style: he seems to care, at times, only for creating monuments to himself. But he’s also hardworking and principled. At one point, Harrison fawns over him by asking, “Why architecture?” László doesn’t have an easy answer, but rather one that branches out like the veining in a fine slab of marble. His work had been deemed “un-Germanic” by the Reich; now, he wants his buildings to stand tall and spark protests, so that humans may strive to effect change. But on a more intimate scale, he suffers: he’s an on-again, off-again junkie, having gotten hooked in order to relieve the pain caused by injuries he sustained during the war.

The first half of The Brutalist is so dramatically robust that you almost can’t wait to see where it’s headed. Corbet and his cinematographer Lol Crawley love big-picture shorthand and skewed camera angles that probably shouldn’t work but somehow do. Instead of showing us a train headed for a crash, they build a sense of dread by sending the camera zipping along a set of train tracks, followed by a magnificent overhead shot of a plume of normal engine smoke erupting into a fireball explosion. Daniel Blumberg’s music is just as evocative, both exhilarating and unmooring at once: he goes for chunky symphonic shards of sound, building and releasing tension with, say, a flutter of woodwinds or plucked strings. (Corbet has dedicated the film to the late singer-songwriter and record producer Scott Walker, who composed the monumentally far-out scores for Corbet’s previous films, the extraordinary fascist-in-training drama Childhood of a Leader and the uneven but imaginative pop-star parable Vox Lux.)

The Brutalist does demand some patience, as well as a good chunk of your time. And it really starts to wobble near its wrap-up, using a single event—admittedly a traumatic one—to explain why László has suddenly become an obsessive tyrant, rather than just a demanding perfectionist. We don’t see him reveal his secret torment; that apparently happens during an especially tender moment with Erzsébet. The movie feels as if it’s in a rush to finish, and by that point, your patience might be running out, too.

Yet we need filmmakers like Corbet, who thinks in big visual loops rather than tiny shapes designed to fit neatly on a laptop screen or the back of an airplane seat. The Brutalist was shot with VistaVision cameras and projected here in Venice in glorious 70mm format. Not everyone—in fact, very few—will be able to see it that way. But if we can’t dream big, why bother at all? The Brutalist is a kind of crazy space church, designed specifically for the communal moviegoing experience. It's a place to gather and give thanks for all those things we never expected to lose.