Crafting an American Epic is no small feat. It makes sense then that director Brady Corbet wanted his new film The Brutalist to be three and a half hours long. While he thoughtfully builds in a fifteen-minute intermission, it only heightens the quality differences between its halves - the first an enthralling, fascinating commentary on the immigrant experience and the second a meandering story that becomes too heavy-handed with its metaphors. Still, a strong performance from Adrien Brody, beautiful cinematography, and an excellent first half means The Brutalist gives its audience plenty to think about.
With the first part titled “The Enigma of Arrival, 1947-1952”, our protagonist Lázló Tóth, a visionary architect and Holocaust survivor, emigrates to Philadelphia in the late 1940s to pursue the hallowed American Dream. Thanks to a cousin already there (Alessandro Nivola), Tóth can eke out a meager existence until he is employed by industrial magnate Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a man enamored with Tóth’s brutalist architectural designs as well as becoming a patron to an artist. New money loves nothing more than to emulate old money. As Tóth and the audience will find out, tying your future to a wealthy patron is rarely smooth sailing, even if Van Buren’s wealthy friends can help Tóth get his wife Erzébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) plane tickets to America.
Visually, the first half is stunning. The filming style often reflects the mood of a scene. Chaotic camera movements mirror Tóth on the boat passing Ellis Island or partying with women and drugs. Shots are downright sumptuous, reflecting America’s prosperity and energy. The music by Daniel Blumberg is bombastic, reminiscent of Aaron Copland in its simplicity and harmonies. It immediately places you in an epic story where the audience feels ready to take on these challenges alongside Tóth.
While the immigrant story is a familiar one, the visuals and music give it a fresh patina, further polished by Adrien Brody’s weary but good-hearted Tóth, grateful for his cousin’s help and selfless in helping a man and his young son in the bread line, a man that later becomes his lifelong friend Gordon (Isaac De Bankolé). Pearce does an excellent job embodying his patron Van Buren, a mix of Brad Pitt’s bravado in Inglorious Basterds and Daniel Day-Lewis’s menace in There Will Be Blood. Joe Alwyn gamely attempts the younger Van Buren, with a distracting American accent. It’s unknown if it was a bad attempt or purposely done to embody new money.
As the first part winds down, Tóth finds himself tasked with creating a community center on Van Buren’s land, named in honor of Van Buren’s beloved late mother. The partnership not only reflects the long history of the patron-artist relationship, but serves to illustrate the immigrant-American relationship, placing Tóth into the lion’s den of capitalism, wealth, and the darkness that often lies beneath the opulence. This dichotomy is further heightened as Tóth explains why he is a brutalist — an architectural style known for minimalist designs made of simple materials. To him, frivolity is meaningless and temporary. His austere buildings are “meant to survive”, no doubt a reflection of his own Holocaust history and in direct opposition to the excess of the American wealthy.
Before you know it, The Brutalist reaches its built-in intermission, again placing the film and its audience in the past. In its first part, the film was visually and aurally stunning, with an immigrant story that felt nuanced. Unfortunately, the second half titled “The Hard Core of Beauty, 1953-1960”, flounders in comparison. New characters muddy the waters while subtle metaphors become explicit parables. Unfortunately, Corbet struggles to “land the plane” in the third act, resulting in a weak final act that brings down the quality of the film as a whole.
In the second part, Tóth’s wife Erzébet (Jones) and niece Zsófia (Cassidy) arrive from overseas. Built up in the first half to appear like the demure wife behind the genius, Erzébet is full of surprises — arriving in a wheelchair due to her osteoporosis and just as much of a mad, highly educated genius as her husband. This dynamic becomes a focus of the second half — a wrinkle in the story that ends up more distracting than impactful. It’s clear Corbet has no idea what to do with these women. Although Jones and Cassidy try their hardest, these characters are two-dimensional, representations of the crone and maiden more than three-dimensional human beings, both terrorizing Tóth in separate ways.
Tóth’s outlook is similarly grim when it comes to work. His relationship with his patron Van Buren has extreme highs and lows, fired at one point just to be courted back. Embedded in this relationship is how immigrants are viewed by Americans — always outsiders. No matter how talented he is, no matter his artistic genius or worth as a human being, he will always be less than the wealthy Van Buren, more a toy that illustrates a man’s modern taste in art than a human being.
This relationship, between an artist and his patron, is diluted by other elements of the second half. For instance, sex scenes become more common, each one stranger and more pointless than the last. Rather than add to the plot, they feel unnecessary, simply there to make the viewer uncomfortable. Erzébet is introduced too late and thus her struggles often feel disjointed from the film we were previously watching. There is a great sequence that takes place with Tóth and Van Buren exploring the marble in Carrera, only for Corbet to disrupt the trip with a jarring, heavy-handed scene that turns subtext into text. The film continues to flounder on, culminating in an epilogue that once again feels heavy-handed, a director unsure how to finish his American Epic.
There is so much to love about The Brutalist. In a film that runs three and a half hours long, that seems inevitable. It is great to see Adrien Brody in a drama like this, escaping the symmetrical world of Wes Anderson. The first half of the film truly sings in its beauty and grandeur, promising its audience that the long runtime is worth it. Unfortunately, that goodwill dissipates in the second half. Perhaps the first half may qualify as an American Epic, but the second half leaves the audience wanting more.
