When The Childhood of a Leader premiered at the 2015 Venice Film Festival, you had to wonder where Brady Corbet could possibly go next. There was just something wonderfully distasteful about it all: a 27-year-old American speculating on Europe’s darkest days with such brazen energy. Corbet went one better with Vox Lux‘s festival debut in 2018, switching to the States and trading the rise of a dictator with a young woman’s rise from school-shooting survivor to international pop star. Time and history do another spectacular, melancholy dance in The Brutalist, a film with faint echoes of Andrei Rublev‘s monumental ambitions and rich shades of Paul Thomas Anderson’s American myth-making. It might be the best film of the year.
The film premiered in Venice, making it three in a row for Corbet and also a trilogy of fictional biopics: each focusing on a different kind of greatness (infamy, celebrity, artistic genius), each forged in violence and trauma. As promotional materials suggested, The Brutalist (which Corbet wrote with his partner and collaborator Mona Fastvold) stars Adrien Brody as Lászlów Tóth, a Hungarian Jew, Holocaust survivor, and Bauhaus-trained architect (and one of the most compelling characters in recent cinema) who arrives in the United States and begins an unlikely friendship with a wealthy industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). On Van Buren’s insistence and dime, they hatch a plan to build a modern, multi-purpose pantheon for the people of Doylestown, a waspy enclave just north of Philadelphia where the dinner party set are soon enamored with Tóth’s harrowing stories and cultural caché––though you have to wonder for how long. Over 215 minutes (plus a built-in 15-minute intermission) the film suggests the breakdown of an ideal, perhaps an entire way of life, through the building’s Sisyphean construction process.
In Corbet’s miraculous introduction, a musical overture is disrupted by a dizzying climb: first Brody’s face, enveloped in shadows in the belly of a ship, then a race to the deck with Lol Crawley’s 70mm camera barely keeping pace. For a few dark moments it’s difficult to make out what’s going on––then, all of sudden, the score surges, the men reach clear sky, embracing as the Statue of Liberty breaks into the frame from above them, the New World turned upside-down. Mere moments in, we are already given a taste of what Corbet’s film will ultimately say about the American dream. For the opening act, Tóth moves in with his assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who already sports a new name and religion, and begins work in his furniture shop but soon gets the feeling that his modernist sensibilities may not be welcome. The relationship with Van Buren (who he meets after being given a chance commission to refurbish his library, producing a light-filled space that makes the pages of Life magazine) offers hope of artistic freedom and upward mobility; but soon ego, envy, and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. Corbet allows this mood to slowly fester away, building to a metaphor that is about as vulgar as it is cruelly effective. It is probably best to leave it there.
There is a debt owed here to The Master and There Will Be Blood, but Corbet’s reach is no less grandiose, nor is the strength of many of his collaborators. Perhaps the biggest question that hung over the film’s production was how the director would fill the void left by Scott Walker, a truly singular composer. That task fell to Daniel Blumberg, a regular collaborator on Fastvold’s projects who has produced a score that, working in fluent conversation with cinematographer Lol Crawley, is probably the most significant factor in this film’s ecstatic transcendence. The Brutalist is less-than-perfect (for all his charms, Guy Pearce is no Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis) but it offers an all-too-rare reminder of how it feels when this artform is at its very best, and that has less to do with the scale of its ambitions than how effectively it combines movement, emotion, and sound. There are moments in this film (just wait for the marble quarry in Carrara) that I will carry with me in much the same way I carry the sunset dance from Lee Chang-dong’s Burning or the great wave in Pacifiction: the kind of things that help you remember you why you fell in love with this thing in the first place.
The Brutalist premiered at the Venice Film Festival.