Closing out an epilogue that, in turn, caps the 3.5-hour experience that is “The Brutalist,” a certain character looks straight to the camera to deliver a kind of valediction. “It is the destination, not the journey,” they say, though the sentiment doesn’t wholly ring true. Far from it, for the journey is every bit as enthralling in this American epic of assimilation, immigration and industry, while the peculiar rhythms and idiosyncrasies of director Brady Corbet’s storytelling make the film a real standout of this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Split between two chapters, bookended by overture and epilogue and divided by an intermission, “The Brutalist” could be described as novelistic in both form and function. Following a digressive approach more common to the page, Corbet and co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold (who directed the 2020 Venice standout “The World to Come”) embroider a sprawling narrative with quirks and asides, using a decades-spanning Treatise on American Themes as a concrete structure in which to pour more personal obsessions.
Corbet makes this clear right from the start, opening his tale of a Jewish-Hungarian Holocaust survivor with a direct visual link to another film of that type, “Son of Saul.” The shaky camera recreates the exact aesthetic approach laid out by László Nemes as it follows a man through cramped quarters, shooting from behind with the narrowest possible depth of field as Yiddish and Hungarian murmurs overtake the soundscape. But where “Son of Saul” started in the depths of hell and only burrowed further down, Corbet’s visual lift decisively breaks when our guide emerges from the hull of a boat to the sight of Lady Liberty.
The man is Bauhaus trained architect László Tóth, and he shares an uncanny likeness with fellow survivor Władysław Szpilman. That Adrien Brody links the two is no small accident of casting – indeed, as that opening overture makes clear, Corbet is very much playing with existing iconography. This interest extends far beyond the Shoah, mind you, because the new world this immigrant discovers is that of Saul Leiter and Edward Hopper and the countless other midcentury modernists that Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley conjure onscreen.
After one less-than-successful evening at a Bowery bordello, Tóth hits the road for Philly where his only American kin reside. Only somewhere along his own path, cousin Molnár (Alessandro Nivola) became Miller – and a Catholic to boot – and herein lies first of the film’s Big Themes. Though László is a composite of several artists and émigrés, his circumstances echoes those of the Hollywood founders from a generation prior. Does assimilation require self-erasure? Can a total artist whose craft and creed are inseparable up and switch from building synagogues to cathedrals in order to better fit in?
The filmmakers, to their immense credit, allow such questions to linger before Corbet and Fastvold offer answers of their own. Indeed, “The Brutalist” lingers in all aspects, opening an ornate window into the post-war boom and taking sweet time to admire the view. The film’s first chapter moves at an unhurried pace as Tóth stumbles into his own success story. Addicted to heroin and hollowed by grief — for the life he can never reclaim, and for the family still stuck in a purgatorial displacement camp back in Europe — our architect doesn’t scream All American go-getter, but he’s an artist and sometimes opportunity knocks.
Such visits occurred with greater regularity during the rising tide of the American empire, lifting immigrants and industrialists alike. Asked to build a small library for a local businessman made affluent by the war, Tóth follows his muse – heeding that call of art for art’s sake – and delivers a marvel. And if at first oleaginous oddball Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) can’t quite see the beauty laid before him, that nouveau riche temperament soon softens when members of his social set purr at his good taste.
With Tóth’s wife and niece stuck in the old world, the first chapter captures this odd dance of seduction between the two men. Reigning over his world with matinée idol mustache and a John Huston drawl, Van Buren (a name that evokes presidential grandeur) sees in Tóth the poetic spark that can be purchased but never owned; weighed down by all the pain of “The Pianist” given another two decades of hard knocks, Tóth delights in WASP-y effervescence – and the promise of a rich benefactor to support his work. And soon they get to work dreaming up brutalist monument to their shared greatness.
Tóth’s improbable rise reaches its peak at the start of chapter two, once he greets his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) freed from Europe with the help of Van Buren’s powerful friends (it only took a few phone calls, wouldn’t you know). But if one European eccentric is “tolerated” in the words of Van Buren’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn), three make company – changing the terms of the WASP-y noblesse oblige. As he tracks a growing disillusionment shared by all parties, Corbet’s visual references move towards more 1970s inspirations. Aping “The Godfather,” Corbet swaps catechism for Yom Kippur, while a trip to Italy – ostensibly to scout for marble – sends the two men into a Bertolucci film, with all the deviance and sexual violence that comes part in parcel.
Taken as a whole, “The Brutalist” both mourns and celebrates American ambition –the ambitions of an immigrant class trying for a new life with no guarantee of success, and the ambitions of a filmmaker filling a canvas with a lifetime of obsessions.
“The Brutalist” is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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