Let’s talk about runtimes. I know next-to-nothing about brutalism - my dad’s an architect, which was always my incentive to learn as little as possible about the trade. What little I did understand of the form was its trademark minimalist, cuboid surfaces and its sense of scale, being overwhelming if not oppressive. Consequently, the notion of a 3.5 hour epic about a brutalist architect sounded nothing short of sublime, but similarly tough and perhaps exhausting.
Colour me surprised then, to find that Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is among the more joyous American epics of recent memory, taking a style comparable to the man-made spectacles of creation and disaster seen in There Will Be Blood, and reimagining it with the cadence and play of a Spielberg film. Shot on 70mm and often on location, this is a film that could’ve coasted by on its vivid and layered compositions, plus a literally banging score Daniel Blumberg, but it is the human stories that will truly empower it to resonate for years to come as a new American classic.
Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and immigrant whose efforts to “integrate” into American society see him utilising his skills as an architect to win the favour of wealthy mogul Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who similarly uses him to appear more interesting. Their relationship is the spine of the film’s first half, as László’s partner Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) remains trapped overseas, and through Van Buren, Pearce personifies all the worst and most pig-headed values of capitalist America, which are then impressed onto László.
The titular artist is never humble, but Brody plays his gradual transformation in Van Buren’s shadow from cunning to savage with exceptional precision. By the three hour mark, wherein the soft-spoken László has become a screaming and kicking brute cursed by genius, you won’t be able to mark the point of change, because there isn’t one. Brody’s performance is as elemental as his constructions; his attributes withering away in parallel as his epic project, a shrine, comes into shape.
At the film’s end, as László’s genuinely breathtaking final design is revealed both physically and intellectually, one feels as if they have witnessed its decades of construction in their entirety. Clashing motivations, transformations and flourishes of both love and heartache are at the centre of Corbet’s masterpiece, imbuing every awesome, bellowing image with the kind of power that’ll stand the test of time as well as any monument, while also making you feel as if no time has passed at all.
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