‘The Brutalist’ review: An epic exercise in ambition and grandeur

“To make a good building,” noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “is a great moral achievement.”

Like many notable quotes about architecture, it speaks of grandeur, permanence, scale. One imagines that Lázló Tóth, the visionary Hungarian architect who escaped the Holocaust and sailed to the United States to find his American dream, would agree.

But don’t look at Wikipedia. Tóth, played with deep soul and tireless intensity by Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist”, is actually fictional, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, so richly realized is his story in director Brady Corbet’s bold new film. While not for everyone, it’s a film that can rightly be described as “epic” in ambition and design. And wouldn’t you know, ambition and design are exactly what the film is about.

Of course, that’s not all. “The Brutalist”, which takes its name from the raw architectural style that Tóth creates, is also about the unfathomable trauma that followed the Second World War. It’s about the immigrant experience, and it’s about what happens when the American dream beckons and then fails. It also explores another dream: the artist’s dream, and what happens when it meets opposing forces, whether geographical displacement or cold economic calculation.

Not to mix up our art metaphors, but it’s fair to say that a story like this needs a pretty big canvas. Corbet, working with co-writer Mona Fastvold, certainly gives himself that by shooting in VistaVision with its expansive field of view; divide his film into movements like a symphony; and finally allows itself a full three hours and 35 minutes, including a built-in intermission. The parallels to architecture here seem clear. Make a building, or make a movie – but if you think small, go home.

“The Brutalist” spans 30 years in Tóth’s life, which we first meet in a terrific sequence that travels through the darkness. It quickly turns out to be the chaotic alleys of an immigrant ship. He has been left with nothing, but still lucky: unlike more than half of other Hungarian Jews, he has survived the Holocaust. His first sight of the United States is the Statue of Liberty towering over the deck – filmed upside down, a choice we will understand better later.

Tóth goes to Philadelphia, where he is met by cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who lets him work in his furniture store. Attila also brings monumental news: Lázló’s beloved wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) has survived her own ordeal in the camps and is alive in Europe. (Just watching Brody receive this news is a vision that’s hard to shake — the actor, himself the son of a Hungarian refugee, does his best work here since his Oscar-winning performance in “The Pianist.”)

A lucky break comes when Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the haughty, aristocratic son of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, comes looking for help renovating a library for his father. The perfectionist Tóth begins to create a modernist gem, where daylight shines from above a single elegant reading chair and lamp (currently this film is a great advertisement for the architecture school).

But then Dad himself—an impeccably dressed, impossibly dapper, yet explosive and ultimately monstrous character played to the hilt by Guy Pearce—turns up prematurely, furious that his library has been ripped apart. He expels the cousins ​​and they don’t get paid. Tóth ends up in a church hostel and shovels coal during the day.

But the elder Van Buren comes to see the error of his ways, especially when the press picks up on his library. Soon, Tóth is dining with the wealthy at Van Buren’s palatial Doylestown estate and learns that Van Buren has tapped him to build a large community center on top of a hill to honor his mother.

The second part of the film opens with Erzsébet arriving in America with Tóth’s niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). Erzsébet, given a sensitive, intelligent portrayal by Jones, suffers deeply from the physical effects of war. She also quickly sees the darker side of the Van Burens. But Tóth is stuck in a project that will take years, a living hostage to the Van Burens on their estate, fighting for every phase of the project and close to going crazy – on top of a drug addiction stemming from the war – as Van The cage requires cuts and compromises, including the height of its building.

A beautiful – and terrifying – sequence comes in the exquisite marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, where Tóth travels with Van Buren to select a final piece. The beauty is in the film production. The horror is in what happens between the men – and it’s undoubtedly an uncomfortably jarring note, given how suddenly it seems to arrive out of the blue.

A coda, decades later in Venice, reveals something profound about why Tóth was so insistent about the measurements of his Doylestown creation. And so, yes, it takes more than three hours for us to learn the full truth about Tóth’s vision.

Not every instructor can pull off such a feat and make it worthwhile. “The Brutalist,” like its protagonist, is not without flaws or inconsistencies or indulgences. But it hardly seems a coincidence that one of the film’s main lines tells us that it’s the destination, not the journey, that matters. Corbet went big here – really big – and it paid off.

“The Brutalist”, an A24 release, has not been rated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 215 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.