Film review – The Brutalist

My notes on The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s third feature as director – which he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold –shows rare epic-level ambition and a willingness to be complex, troubling and difficult.  There will be arguments.  In the aftermath of World War II, Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody, referencing his role in The Pianist – to which this is almost a spiritual sequel) arrives in America in the hold of a ship, seeing the Statue of Liberty upside-down.  He bounces from his assimilationist cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who employs László in a furniture business he calls ‘Miller & Sons’, to millionaire Charles Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who is infuriated by the minimalist library László has installed in his mansion – unable to have a real opinion until Life magazine acclaims the design.  We’re told Van Buren loves reading, but we suspect he just collects valuable first editions.

With his wife (Felicity Jones) and silent niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) – who have undergone untold traumas in and since Dachau – stuck in Europe, László becomes a heroin addict to cope with physical and spiritual pain (he’s taken a mighty hit to his mighty nose) and is willing to work construction or as a draughtsman minion if he can’t pursue his calling.  Van Buren wants to erect a community centre in tribute to his mother, who died offscreen before we could meet her but is a presence throughout, and dragoons László as its visionary, only for the project to run into trouble from the outset.  We see the difficult spot László is in as he is dominated by the subtly mad tycoon.  When László suggests adding a swimming pool to the gymnasium-library-theatre-chapel, Van Buren simply says he can’t swim and the idea is dropped – if a thing doesn’t impinge on his consciousness, he isn’t merely not interested but essentially doesn’t think it exists or deserves to.  But an architect must be a visionary diva and László finds himself in conflict with the lesser mortals on the project, including the penny-pincher (Michael Epp) called in to reduce costs – in a film full of quotable moments, László’s put-down stands out (‘everything ugly, everything cruel … most of all everything ugly is your fault’).

After a mandatory fifteen-minute interval which plays over a wedding photograph crucial to the plot – it’s the evidence which brings László’s family over from Europe – the second half shows how limited even an immigrant’s great success in America is, pithily put as Van Buren’s son (Joe Alwyn) snarls ‘we tolerate you’ at the admittedly spiralling architect.  The project is abandoned, years pass, a lawsuit is settled, big things happen offscreen (the niece now talks!), news headlines mark the passing years, the niece’s husband (Bennett Vilmanyi) wants to move the already mulitply-displaced family to Israel, and László is back on the community centre.  A trip to Italy with Van Buren to find a marble altar in a monumental quarry gives a sense of the permanence and scale of marble even set beside concrete (László’s favourite material).  After a binge-like community party, Van Buren gives an almost insensible László a stark lesson in how the rich use the creative for convenience then deny it all (I was reminded of a key scene from Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) … and the repercussions lead to an ambiguous finish (maybe evoking Once Upon a Time in America) which has Van Buren disappear into his own monumental structure, which will eventually bear his name rather than his mother’s.

At key points, speeches fill in backstory – Van Buren talking about his family, a single mother and grandparents he eventually humiliated; a speech in 1980 at an architectural Biennale where the Older Zsofia (Ariane Labed) explains the personal story László embedded in the community centre design – but we also get impressionist montages and a real sense of the physicality of nature (a windy hillside where the building will go up) and human endeavour (I wondered whether the Van Buren centre owed something to the modernist castle Boris Karloff erects over a battlefield in The Black Cat, 1934).  With Stacy Martin, Isaach De Bankolé, Jonathan Hyde, Peter Polycarpou and Emma Laird, and diegetic tracks from Spike Jones and Dinah Shore.