Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is the movie that Babylon fans wish it was — an insanely ambitious epic about art, the twentieth century, and the American project. (I see your Margot Robbie dancing with a snake, and raise you one Guy Pearce monologue about getting revenge on his grandparents.) The film feels like it was made specifically for my weirdo friends who won’t stop talking about Primo Levi, and I loved almost every minute of it.
However, it must be said: There are a lot of minutes in The Brutalist. Coming into the Venice Film Festival, the film’s three-and-a-half hour runtime was one of the two things anybody knew about it. (The other was that it would be shown in 70mm.) Adrien Brody stars as fictional Hungarian Holocaust survivor László Tóth, whom I will henceforth refer to as The Brutalist, who attempts to rebuild his life in America by building a monumental cultural center in the Philadelphia suburbs. Like its hero, the movie strains for greatness — literally, in the case of the film print, which weighs a reported 300 pounds.
If you ask Corbet, this obsessive focus on the film’s length is misguided. “It’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages, versus 100 pages,” he said at the film’s Venice press conference. However, when presented with a three-and-a-half hour film about Brutalist architecture, I think it’s entirely reasonable to have questions. So, in the interest of beating the drum for The Brutalist:
A Mostly Spoiler-free Breakdown of How The Brutalist Spends its 215 Minutes
30 seconds: The Statue of Liberty appears upside-down, to represent the skewed promise of the American Dream.
5 minutes: Depressing handjobs.
2 minutes: Increasingly ironic mid-century PSAs hailing the commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a beacon of liberty and commerce.
10 minutes: The Brutalist’s assimilated American cousin, played by Alessandro Nivola, does weird cuck stuff. This too represents the skewed promise of the American dream.
23 minutes: The Brutalist demonstrates his fierce independence, but not in like a gross Ayn Rand way.
2 minutes: The Brutalist visits a jazz club with Jim Jarmusch regular Isaach de Bankolé that symbolizes the promise and excitement of the postwar era.
1 minute: The Brutalist watches vintage pornography.
12 minutes: Joe Alwyn wears a series of classic period suits so unflattering that the Menswear Guy may be driven to move to the Shetland Islands and take a vow of silence.
27 minutes: The Brutalist pulls off a series of Bauhaus-inspired architectural feats worthy of being recognized at the Venice Biennale, you might say.
8 minutes: Guy Pearce bellows derisively about modernist architecture.
22 minutes: Guy Pearce bellows enthusiastically about modernist architecture.
13 minutes: The Brutalist’s niece, played by Vox Lux’s Raffey Cassidy, glares silently into the camera, too traumatized from the horrors of the war to speak.
6 minutes: Detailed discussions about the local politics of Doylestown, PA, which is strangely hilarious if, like me, you spent significant amounts of time in Doylestown, PA to get extra credit for German class.
5 minutes: Painterly shots of the landscape around Doylestown, PA, which turns out to look a lot like Hungary.
2 minutes: Debates over the relative merits of various building materials.
12 minutes: Veiled anti-Semitism.
15-minute Intermission (which comes with a handy countdown clock that the audience in my screening enthusiastically counted down from 10)
7 minutes: The Brutalist is reunited with his beloved wife Felicity Jones, and it’s terrible.
2 minutes: Debates with local contractors over the height of the ceilings in The Brutalist’s masterwork.
1 minute: Period-inappropriate pubic hair.
9 minutes: A sojourn to a quarry in Italy, where an anarchist marbleman enthuses about how many Fascists he has killed.
2 minutes: Naked anti-Semitism.
14 minutes: The Brutalist makes a series of bad decisions vis-a-vis heroin.
2 minutes: Unforeseen misfortune.
4 minutes: After a time jump, the Brutalist’s niece now speaks. No explanation is given.
2 minutes: A montage of Venice, which may or may not have helped get the movie into Venice.
6 minutes: A flash-forward where an older actress plays Cassidy’s character and then Cassidy plays that character’s daughter, which also happened in Vox Lux.
30 seconds: The stark beauty of The Brutalist’s vision is revealed.
Roll credits!
