“The Brutalist” is a thick slab of a movie, as starkly imposing as the concrete structures with which it shares certain aesthetic affinities. Two months ago, distributor A24 released a teaser trailer quoting no fewer than five different publications describing the film as “monumental,” thus ensuring that the rest of us critics would be sitting down at our desks next to Post-it notes reminding us not to use that word. (Can I get away with calling it “magisterial” instead?) At 215 minutes — including an overture and intermission — writer-director Brady Corbet’s third feature boldly announces itself as a swing-for-the-fences American epic of immigration and assimilation. It’s about tortured geniuses and the vile money men who exploit and defile them, about the inevitable concessions and compromises of trying to build something beautiful in a world ruled by cruel capital. It is also, most adamantly, a movie about itself.
Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a Holocaust refugee we first see arriving broke and battered at Ellis Island, crammed into the bottom of a ship with the other poor, huddled masses. Back in Budapest, he was a superstar, a Bauhaus-educated architect who designed towering national treasures. Now László’s sleeping in the storage closet of a Philadelphia furniture store owned by his cousin Attila, played by the great movie-stealer Alessandro Nivola. A smooth-talking salesman with a blonde shiksa wife, Attila is all-in on the postwar American dream, glad-handing and patting backs too hard while traces of an Eastern European accent keep giving him away. Nivola is subtly, quietly devastating in the role, plastering a phony smile across his face as he claims to be Catholic for commercial reasons.
László is made of sterner stuff. He’s an artist first and foremost, one who would rather shovel coal than compromise. László longs for his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia, who are still stranded stateless in Austria due to immigration issues, while he cultivates a not-so-secret heroin habit. Brody is perfect for the role not just because those wide, haunted eyes suggest he’s seen things we can’t possibly imagine — remember, the actor already survived the Holocaust once before in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” — but also because there’s something fundamentally aloof and uningratiating about his screen presence. Brody’s career never really took off the way everyone assumed it would after becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Best Actor Oscar, I think because it always feels like he’s holding something back from us. (This isn’t a helpful trait if you’re trying to play romantic leads, but can come in extremely handy when one of your character’s main motivations is kept secret until the epilogue of a three-and-a-half-hour movie.)
The stubborn mystery of László Tóth attracts the attention of one Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr., a millionaire industrialist played with spectacular brio by Guy Pearce. Shortly after seeing the film, I joked that he should be billed in the credits as “Guy Pearce as John Huston as America.” Named after not one, but two presidents, Van Buren snarls with echoes of Huston’s brash, mid-Atlantic intonations and carries himself with such imperious entitlement that he’d probably be insufferable were Pearce not so adept at showing us what a weird little mama’s boy is lurking beneath all that bluster. It’s a monstrously entertaining performance, giving this sometimes stentorian movie a kick in the pants every time he’s onscreen.
Van Buren hires László to build a community center in memory of his mother, a project that will absorb the rest of the film’s running time while driving both men to the brink of madness. On an undertaking of this scale, with this much money at stake, we watch how commercial interests slither in to take precedence over artistic aspirations, as the architect struggles to appease too many masters while trying to maintain the integrity of his singular vision. Hot on the heels of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” here’s another maximalist opus in which an ambitious architectural project stands in for the act of making the movie you’re watching.
I have an outsized affection (shared by very few) for Corbet’s previous picture, 2018’s bitterly sardonic “Vox Lux,” which starred Natalie Portman as a pop star who got famous by surviving a school shooting and writing a cheesy anthem about it. “The Brutalist” is a more classically fashioned, considerably less obnoxious movie. The stunning opening Ellis Island sequence declares its epic intentions outright, calling to mind Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II” and James Gray’s “The Immigrant,” yet slightly askew. László’s first glimpse of Lady Liberty is chaotically jerky and inverted, not so much a welcome as a warning. The trumpet fanfare of Daniel Blumberg’s score is ominous in its grandeur, with stabbing cellos both propulsive and foreboding.
Thick with the heavy, gun-metal austerity of films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Todd Field’s “Tár,” “The Brutalist” sometimes feels like a director trying to will a masterpiece into being. Corbet very nearly gets there. The filmmaking hums with purpose and import, paced at a marvelously brisk clip. (These three-and-a-half hours feel shorter than most 140-minute prestige pictures.) The textures and scale of the film are astonishing, with Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley employing the largely discarded, mid-century VistaVision format, which runs 35mm film through the camera horizontally instead of vertically in order to fit more picture information onto the negative. Alfred Hitchcock used it for “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest,” but in recent decades VistaVision has primarily been a tool for detail-intensive special effects work. Blown up to 70mm, the way I saw “The Brutalist” at an Independent Film Festival Boston screening last November at the Somerville Theatre, it yields an image of breathtaking clarity.
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I’ve written about that screening before, one of my most cherished moviegoing experiences of recent years. At the intermission break, I was convinced we might be watching an all-timer. “The Brutalist” captures something at once eternal and extremely of the moment in its spot-on depiction of how wealthy men who contribute nothing feel a need to surround themselves with genius, to feel like they can own and control it. Rich men only want what money can’t buy, which is why Van Buren becomes so fixated on László Tóth, confounded by his mulish integrity, trying his damnedest to belittle and break him. The movie made me think a lot about Harvey Weinstein and all the ways he would cozy up to great talents and then attempt to humiliate them, sabotaging careers and smearing his dirty fingerprints all over their art just to prove that he could.
Of course, there’s another thing that happens in “The Brutalist” that may remind you of Harvey Weinstein, and that’s where Corbet and company lost me a little. The film’s second half makes disappointingly literal all that was artfully evoked during those first two extraordinary hours. It’s also when we finally meet László’s beloved Erzsébet, played by a too-young and hopelessly out-of-her-league Felicity Jones, the most miscast love interest in a serious movie since Shailene Woodley blundered her way through “Ferrari.”
There’s too much in “The Brutalist” that inspires awe for such missteps to sink it, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the second half left me a little deflated. Yet the fact that a film this ambitious and accomplished even exists at all in this day and age is cause for celebration. (That it was made for a mere $10 million — one-twentieth the budget of ugly greenscreen smears like “Red One” and Marvel superhero slop — is a miracle.) As the movie itself keeps reminding us, such massive artistic undertakings are not for the timid. It’s a stunning achievement. Monumental, even.
“The Brutalist” is now showing in regular engagements at AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport and Landmark Kendall Square. It starts screening in 70mm at the Somerville Theatre and the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Friday, Jan. 10.