The Brutalist

 

Like the architectural style at the center of its story, writer / director Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is about unadorned truth, stripping away artifice and falseness to reveal the raw material underneath. It's a large, monolithic masterwork that I feel will stand the test of time.

Corbet uses enormous aesthetic sweep in presenting images of form and space, both interiors and exteriors, which serve as metaphors of the spiritual condition of America and its people. Aspiration and indulgence, racial and cultural supremacy, insecurity and exploitation. There's much to unpack here.

Corbet's outstanding performers -- led by an introspective Adrien Brody as Hungarian concentration camp survivor and architect László Tóth -- are not just full-bodied people but emblems of America and Europe's collective past.

This past is marked by prosperity for some -- as described in the film's brief prologue and in the bristling narcissism of Guy Pearce's nativistic millionaire Harrison Van Buren -- and its startling inhumanity, as revealed in the lives of Tóth, and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), also a camp survivor and journalist, and the continuing pain and indignity the two must endure.

Tóth's jubilant arrival in a town near Philadelphia in the '40s is quickly dampened by his discovery that his beloved cousin Attila, a chilling performance by Alessandro Nivola, has changed his name, converted from Judaism to Catholicism and married a Gentile. Attila explains that it’s the only way to be successful in America, and though Tóth is at first skeptical, he slowly, gradually discovers the truth beneath the surface of superficial cordiality and politesse.

"They do not want us here," he tells his wife, who must use a wheelchair because her health was destroyed by famine and imprisonment. She's reluctant to agree and resists, but finds her husband, contracted by Van Buren to build a cultural center in town, becomes obsessed with work, pulling away from her as if possessed. (Audiences discover in the film's epilogue the reason for his extraordinary meticulousness.)

The Brutalist will undoubtedly test many filmgoers' patience -- it's more than 3 and half hours long, with 15-minute intermission -- and its themes and depictions of cold, emotional, psychological and physical abuse are troubling, disturbing, frightful.

Is it a comment on contemporary matters? Many will make those connections; it's difficult to imagine anyone not seeing this as not so much a cautionary tale as a mirror reflection of the toll unbridled power and pride can take on the human soul. But it might also be read as a celebration of a person's refusal to submit.

Midway through Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2, enslaved warrior Lucius said to another slave as they were being carted into a corrupt and chaotic Rome for battle in the Colosseum, "This city is diseased. " Corbet might be saying the same thing about America.