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NYFF 2024: The Brutalist
Alessandro Nivola and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist took seven years to realize, a process he understandably seems to have found traumatic—both the film and interviews he’s given about it are about how financiers are monsters. Per Corbet, The Brutalist “was made for under $10 million. But I still need millions of dollars. That’s very complicated because it means I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals.” Process is text: Anyone who’s ever worked for an equally oblivious and imperious rich person, one whose underlings can only work out how their near-impossible plan of action can (barely) be executed while the wealthy taskmaster is out of the room, will nod in recognition at Brutalist’s embodiment of that troublesomely eternal figure.
Professionally vaguely defined magnate Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) is the millionaire patron to displaced Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who arrives penniless at Ellis Island in 1947 and makes a downwardly mobile slide to construction site obscurity. Harrison elevates him with the plum commission of a community center that’ll serve as a memorial to his late mother, for which he’s ready to invest $850,000 of his own money, while local government is willing to contribute additional funds as long as a church is included. László protests that this’ll mean that the space (already slated to include a library, lecture hall and gym) will actually be four buildings in one; tasked with financial oversight, Buren’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) responds that he thought the architect would “like a challenge.” Unfortunately for his own peace of mind, László actually does and sets about trying to realize the structure, even if that means deferring part of his fee back to the budget. (Passion project!)
That building is an overt metaphor guiding us through this capacious, 215-minute film, so what are the four thematic spaces of The Brutalist? The artist-patron relationship is one, and Corbet’s been clear that another is how the experiences of immigrants and artists are analogously disturbing to the norm: “if someone moves into a suburban town in America and they don’t look like everybody else—because of the color of their skin or because of their beliefs or traditions—everybody wants them to get the fuck out. With Brutalism in the 1950s, when people were erecting these monuments, many people wanted them torn down immediately.” That analogy is shaky, provocative, possibly trivializing but also potentially generative, and is embodied within the history of several Brutalist architects (Corbet cites Walter Breuer). The third thematic space is Zionism, a potential refuge for László and the wife and niece who join him in the second half, all of whose lives are shaped by concentration camps and their subsequent xenophobic/anti-Semitic othering in the US. Israel’s development is heard in the radio news broadcasts that chronologically situate the narrative; if the film’s fourth metaphorical space is an examination of trauma, it’s possible to read László’s family’s urge to escape to the new nation-state as an extreme manifestation of resulting self-destructive, irrational behavior.
That’s an admittedly punchy interpretation I wouldn’t hold Corbet to, but Israel’s background-to-foreground throughline offers an unexpected subtext for a movie whose broad enterprise is otherwise very familiar: to make a long epic that is, in capital letters, About America. In this respect, both the movie’s general arc and specific incidents are shockingly close to Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, including a look derived entirely from his recent features. PTA has decided that since the few remaining 35mm film stocks in production are so tight as to be almost grain-free, the texture he wants can only be achieved by shooting on that format, then blowing it up to 70mm; the resulting softly pixelated look of Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza is distinctive and very much of this time, not the periods they’re set in. Likewise, The Brutalist’s appearance isn’t of the 1947-1960 it’s primarily set in, a gap especially clear whenever Corbet cues up archival newsreels from the time. I’m told that 35mm prints of The Brutalist are both sharper and better-looking than the 70mm version, whose 13 reels have quickly become a synecdoche for the film in all its literally bulky ambition: Shipping them is an expensive pain, but the cans photograph well on social media, and a video went viral of the projectionist pumping his fist when the last reel ran through the projector at the Venice premiere. Corbet prefers the 70mm blow-up, and I have no doubt that blu-rays and DCPs will make that soft and grainy version the default of digital record.
It’s hard to register The Brutalist as anything other than a gloss on There Will Be Blood and The Master. Like the latter, The Brutalist a) begins in imageless darkness, backed by a swelling orchestral score, before introducing a main character on a ship returning to America after a traumatic World War II experience b) who immediately has a conversationally revealing encounter with a sex worker c) then meets a socially established rich person whose influence will initially shape their life for better, then for far worse; both films also include a scene where one protagonist’s wife gives her husband a handjob to keep his attention agonizingly captive while she delivers a monologue about what he needs to do for both their benefit. The There Will Be Blood of it all comes through in the construction of Tóth’s Institute, whose slow erection upon a desolate hill is this film’s equivalent to Daniel Plainview’s oil derrick and the settlement that springs up around it (“Prospectors Arrive,” I thought), as well as the plot’s diagramming of the uneasy relationship between capitalism and the self-righteous American Christian variety of religion, and the corrosive influence of both.
Emulation is as valid a starting point as any, but neither the dialogue nor visuals are as sharp as the antecedents’. Since we’re clearly in the realm of overt metaphor and abstraction, verisimilitude is not a factor; every line should be a potential epigraph, every shot an event. But while PTA can write showy eccentricity all day, this film’s writing is literary but less memorable, and its weaknesses undermine the performers. Pearce is immaculate but the material isn’t as sharp as he is; when Harrison holds court at a party in a long monologue, the camera slowly dollies in as he speaks, suggesting his hypnotizing presence—but his speech is simply too diffuse, like listening to someone bad at telling anecdotes spinning one out. That may indeed be true to the experience of patiently listening to rich people, but this is a stylized product. Let’s entertain!
The images, while handsome enough in their lighting and settings, aren’t particularly attentive to proportions or general composition and err on the side of blandness. That’s unintentionally ironic for a film about an iconoclastic architect and his heavily symbolic building, one whose conception wasn’t necessarily Corbet’s own. “When I was a child growing up in New York, I remembered our local synagogue, which featured a Star of David overhead that you couldn’t see from the ground,” production designer Judy Becker states in the press kit. “It was a huge moment for me when I realized that the Institute should be in the shape of a cross, towering above the building’s lower feature, which look like concentration camp bunkers.” Perhaps this is like Martin Scorsese’s well-known gift for synthesizing all his collaborators’ ideas into his own vision, but it could also explain the film’s inchoateness regarding architecture, which is explicitly both what the film is about and vaguest on. That’s because The Brutalist is a very specific complaint about the evils of trying to make a living as a filmmaker, a struggle the film suggests is also a larger, albeit undefined, metaphor that’s surely weighty and significant. The act of simply attempting to achieve something is presented as laudable in and of itself, so it’s appropriate that The Brutalist’s budget didn’t allow for an actual structure to be built, an absence serving as the film’s final inadvertent metaphor: a large project without a resulting object.
