“Corbet’s screenplay fails to articulate what it has on its mind, leaving behind a remarkably cold and distant film that is a gorgeous, almost gothic experience to go through but leaves you pondering whether its sumptuous style can overcome a lack of substance for which there was definitely room.”

Bremerhaven, post-war Europe. László Tóth (Adrien Brody, in brilliant form), a Hungarian Jew, survivor of Buchenwald, grapples through the darkness and into the light: he has found passage to America. He has been separated from his wife Erzsébet, survivor of Dachau and herself trying to find her way out of the old continent with her niece Szófía, whose mother, Erzsébet’s sister, has fallen victim to the Nazi scourge. The two manage to correspond through letters. After a short stint in New York, László moves to join his cousin Attila in Pennsylvania, who lets him sleep in a back room in his furniture store. When they get hired by the son of a local billionaire (Joe Alwyn) to remodel a study into a library, László’s talents and background as an architect come to the forefront. After a rocky start to their relationship the billionaire in question, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), commissions László to build a big community center, to both cement his legacy and enlarge his already considerable ego. And so starts a decades-long tug of war between a powerful man and a compassionate but flawed dreamer, a man who battles addiction and loneliness, and is seen as weak by an ‘opponent’ who envies his talent.

Halfway through The Brutalist, after a 15-minute intermission that shows the Tóth family in happier times, László is finally reunited with Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and Szófia (Raffey Cassidy). For a time things are looking up, as the sharp and equally well-educated Erzsébet finds her footing despite being wheelchair-bound due to osteoporosis, a byproduct of gruelling years in the camps. But there is always the idea that the Tóths are outsiders, being Jews in Christian country. “We tolerate you,” says an irritated Harry, the next Van Buren in line, at one point. Just like Gordon (a beautifully solemn role for Isaach de Bankolé), a black man that László befriends and that becomes his closest confidant, László is used as long as he benefits the Van Burens. Harrison treats them with full egards, but once construction starts there are signs of mistrust, and when a freight train with building materials explodes Harrison halts the build and in a fit of rage fires László. It will not be the last time the two face off for the cruel game of dominance Van Buren wants to play, culminating in a defining moment while scouting for Carrara marble in Italy, when Harrison finally forces László to submit in the most animalistic way possible. It definitively breaks both their ties and László himself, but he will have the last laugh.

Brady Corbet’s third film at the helm (after 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux), the wildly ambitious yet somewhat unfocused The Brutalist shows that the young American director hasn’t lost his singular vision. Where other directors might take the story of László Toth and not let it balloon to a 215-minute runtime, Corbet takes his time to create an epic, decades-spanning character drama starring an extraordinary Adrien Brody. This is bold filmmaking, a film with grand gestures and full use of sight and sound to signify the oppression Brody’s László is submitted to and the walls he runs into. The closer the megalomaniacal multi-purpose building on top of a hill near the Van Buren estate comes to completion – its massive towers reaching into the sky like fingers trying to grasp the fire of the gods (though in this country, probably a singular god), a symbol of American expansionism and capitalism but also eerily reminiscent of a tomb – the more the film’s images and sound also become a representation of the battle between Tóth and Van Buren. It is impossible not to think of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, which features a similar struggle between Daniel Day-Lewis’ Plainview and Paul Dano’s Eli. There is no ‘milkshake’ line in The Brutalist; instead, the final straw that ends the central relationship in the film is far more sinister and cruel. Pennsylvania steel and Carrara marble, both shot in imposing ways and coming together in the edifice on the hill, that expression in concrete of Van Buren’s God complex, almost become a character of their own. Lol Crawley’s cinematography, Steve Single and Szabolcs Gáspár’s sound design, and the at times bombastic, overpowering score by Daniel Blumberg, with shades of the ‘nervousness’ of Mica Levi’s work for The Zone of Interest, all come together in some truly impressive moments of capital-C cinema. Shot on old school VistaVision cameras and projected at 70mm, the film looks sumptuous but also rich in darkness; if the projectionist can keep it in focus that is (at the press screening that unfortunately wasn’t always the case).

Sadly, this impressive work behind the camera is in service of a film which is rich in undercooked ideas. The most clarity comes from the Tóths’ Jewish heritage: their background as Holocaust survivors, for which the dark, stumbling opening scene is such a powerful metaphor, is compounded by archive material explaining the founding of the state of Israel and a scene in the late ’50s in which a now pregnant Szófia expresses that she and her new husband want to return to the promised land to affirm their Jewishness. This is combined with the regular reminders that the high regard the Tóths are held in is a façade; they are still regarded as ‘different’ and feel almost like some sort of personal pet project of Harrison Van Buren, apart from the power struggle between the two men. Corbet’s message about antisemitism and the persecution of Jews even in the so-called ‘land of the free’ rings loud and clear. But when it comes to what it wants to say about unbridled capitalism or American exceptionalism (which, certainly within the timeframe, boils down to white and Christian American exceptionalism), the film’s ideas become muddled and unformed. Clearly The Brutalist wants to say something about these themes, but it never truly forms a thesis, leaving it to vagaries and shifting a lot of the responsibility onto the audience filling in the large gaps it leaves in this regard. This is a film that aims to be an intellectual conversation starter, but forgets to make an argument for it.

While more clarity in the film’s screenplay and more focus on its messaging could have lifted The Brutalist into masterpiece territory, what is left now is a beautifully made and singular film that has Corbet’s imprint all over it, but one that doesn’t justify its long runtime when it spends so little of it developing its ideas, only to make a time jump to a coda in which Ariane Labed as the now older Szófia verbalizes what the film couldn’t say through its story. The cast, and in particular its central trio of Brody, Jones, and Pearce all deliver memorable performances, even if the character writing for Pearce’s Harrison Van Buren lacks a little nuance. Both Brody and Jones deliver career-best work, or as near as could be, with the former’s melancholy being a perfect fit for a bent-but-not-broken man whose pride remains fierce through all the hardship and humiliation he has to suffer. It is a towering performance of a fragile, proud, complex man, a well-rounded character with prickly edges and a compassionate core. Jones only shows up halfway through the film, after the intermission that shows her wedding, but leaves a big impression when she (literally) stands up for her husband and forces Van Buren to face his horrible crimes. It is the kind of scene awards shows like to feature as a clip to underline a nomination, and if The Brutalist makes it to those stages Jones, as well as Brody, should surely show up to receive their plaudits. Their performances elevate a film that builds and builds, but then gets lost in its own dark maze of thoughts. To call it a misfire would do a disservice to Corbet’s unique voice as a director, a voice in American cinema that has to be cherished, an auteur in the truest sense of the word. It would also diminish the superlative efforts of Corbet’s collaborators, both in front of and behind the cameras. No, the trouble with The Brutalist lies solely with Corbet’s screenplay, co-penned with partner Mona Fastvold, which fails to articulate what it has on its mind, leaving behind a remarkably cold and distant film that is a gorgeous, almost gothic experience to go through but leaves you pondering whether its sumptuous style can overcome a lack of substance for which there was definitely room.