One for Them: THE BRUTALIST

Architect László Tóth is in the great tradition of Governor Willie Stark and cult leader Lancaster Dodd and conductor Lydia Tár. He’s a fictional life invented to tell us about his times. The Brutalist, like All the King’s Men and The Master, borrows the structure of the epic biographical picture to sweep us into the middle of the 20th century and interrogate something dark and beautiful and true about the ways in which an era transforms a man and a man transforms his era. Like The Master and TÁR, it builds into its structure a heavy seriousness and sense of formal play. Director Brady Corbet, who also co-wrote with partner Mona Fastvold, starts with an overture and ends with an epilogue, throwing a 15-minute intermission into the middle of a three-and-a-half hour experience shot on VistaVision film. Loading the enormous experience up with the throwback textures signifying importance, he gives it a sense of grandeur and detail in presentation that extends to the precision of its writing and framing. Here’s a sweeping historical fiction about art and commerce and politics and man’s capacity for cruelty—both intimately, and globally—colliding in the life of one man.

It’s a mid-century Americana epic as an inverted Ayn Rand parable, in which the troubled genius man does not selfishly retreat from society, but imposes his artistry upon the very landscape of society as an act of transformation and, maybe, generosity in taking his pain into imposing beauty built to last. Here’s where genius is put into the fleshy stuff of fallible men, where individualism is paradoxically built into the foundation of the totemic and impersonal, where wealth corrupts passions, and passions corrupt souls, even while reaching for transcendence. Three-and-a-half hours is a long time to contemplate these big ideas, and the movie’s reach and scope is matched by its bustling incident and hustling modes. It never feels long. (I would’ve sat there for a few more hours if it remained so compelling.) It feels immense and dense, worth wandering around in, being pulled along with, and left puzzling over its dimensions and implications. Corbet makes full use of every connotation of the title. It’s brutalist as style, the blocky concrete edifices of post-war European architecture, a reaction to earthshaking tragedies transformed into something solid and imposing. It’s brutalist as an adjective, implying cruelty, violence, a lack of feeling.

We follow Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Holocaust survivor who leaves a wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) in Hungary as he immigrates to America, promising to send for them. He struggles in Pennsylvanian poverty—taking odd jobs with an assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), later shoveling coal—until he happens to fall in with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who learns this immigrant was once a brilliant, celebrated architect. He offers to bankroll a dream project, a seemingly fortuitous idea that grows only more complicated and fraught. The movie smartly moves with the deliberateness of a detailed character drama against the backdrop of ambition and ego and historical context. Thus begins an entwining of two families’ personalities and stories—haves and have-nots, privileged and impoverished, the tragic and the thriving. It’s as full of stark contrasts as the structure slowly building over the course of the film. The Brutalist architect and the brutal capitalist, each inflicting their brutalities through whims and wills altering their surroundings, leaving marks on the social and visual fabric of the nation. Here’s a movie about how tragedies personal and political—even, and especially, as they double up—write themselves onto our world and reshape our landscapes, leaving statements so obvious they become inscrutable.

The performers inhabit sequences of supple complexity and densely ambiguous beauty; it’s carried along by a fine filmic sense and a well-blocked interest in coaxing evocative realism around theatrical flourishes and sturdy, slippery visual metaphor. They start to feel like real people, and yet freed by its fictional biopic dimensions, it’s able to become all the more iconographic and symbolic. Corbet’s directorial efforts have so far been a series of solemn fictional biographies like this. His eerie Childhood of a Leader is an imagined origin for a dictator. His Vox Lux is a prickly, provocative tale of a teenager surviving a school shooting and then using that attention to become a troubled pop star. Those films are similarly stately and told in chapters and build with inevitable structures to clear theses. The Brutalist is a magisterial capstone to this trilogy, evolving those preoccupations and styles into something even more rich and transporting and novelistic in incident and detail, yet as showy and satisfying as the most enveloping moviegoing experiences.