“The making of a good building,” observed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “is a great moral performance.”
Like many notable quotes about architecture, it speaks to grandeur, permanence, scale. One imagines Lázló Tóth, the visionary Hungarian architect who escaped the Holocaust and sailed to the United States to find his American Dream, would heartily agree.
But don’t go looking on Wikipedia. Tóth, played with deep soul and unrelenting intensity by Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist,” is actually fictional, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, so richly realized is his story in director Brady Corbet’s audacious new film. Though not for everyone, it’s a film that can justifiably be described as “epic” in ambition and design. And, wouldn’t you know, ambition and design are precisely what the movie’s about.
Of course, that’s not all. “The Brutalist,” which takes its name from the raw style of architecture that Tóth creates, is also about the incalculable trauma that followed World War II. It’s about the immigrant experience, and it’s about what happens when the American Dream beckons, then fails. It also explores a different dream: the artist’s dream, and what happens when it meets opposing forces, be they geographic displacement or cold economic calculus.
Not to mix our arts metaphors, but it’s fair to say a story like this needs a pretty big canvas. Corbet, working with co-writer Mona Fastvold, definitely gives himself that, shooting in VistaVision, with its expansive field of view; dividing his film into movements like a symphony; and finally, allowing himself a whopping three hours and 35 minutes, including a built-in intermission. The parallels with architecture here seem clear. Make a building, or make a movie — but if you’re thinking small, go home.
“The Brutalist” spans 30 years in the life of Tóth, whom we first meet in a terrific sequence, darting through darkness. It soon emerges these are the chaotic alleys of an immigrant ship. He’s been left with nothing, but still lucky: unlike more than half of fellow Hungarian Jews, he’s survived the Holocaust. His first view of the United States is the Statue of Liberty towering above the deck — filmed upside down, a choice we’ll understand better later.
Tóth heads to Philadelphia, where he’s greeted by cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who’ll let him work at his furniture store. Attila also bears monumental news: Lázló’s beloved wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) has survived her own ordeal in the camps, and is alive in Europe. (Just watching Brody receive this news is a vision hard to shake — the actor, himself the son of a Hungarian refugee, is doing his best work here since his Oscar-winning performance in “The Pianist.”)
A fortunate break comes when Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the haughty, aristocratic son of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, comes looking for help renovating a library for his father. The perfectionist Tóth begins creating a modernist gem, with daylight shining from above onto a single elegant reading chair and lamp (at moments, this movie’s a great advertisement for architecture school).
But then Dad himself — an impeccably clad, impossibly dapper yet explosive and ultimately monstrous character played to the hilt by Guy Pearce — shows up too early, infuriated that his library’s been torn up. He expels the cousins and they don’t get paid. Tóth ends up in a church shelter, shoveling coal by day.
But the elder Van Buren comes to see his error, especially when the press picks up on his library. Soon, Tóth is dining with the wealthy at Van Buren’s palatial Doylestown estate, and learning that Van Buren has tapped him to build a vast community center atop a hill to honor his mother.
The film’s second part opens with Erzsébet arriving in America, along with Tóth’s niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). Erzsébet, given a sensitive, intelligent portrayal by Jones, is suffering deeply from the physical effects of the war. She also quickly sees the darker side of the Van Burens. But Tóth is stuck, mired in a project that will take years, a living hostage to the Van Burens on their estate, fighting for every phase of the project and darned near going mad — on top of a drug addiction stemming from the war — as Van Buren demands cuts and compromises, including the height of his building.
A beautiful – and horrible — sequence comes in the exquisite marble quarries of Carrara, in Italy, where Tóth travels with Van Buren to choose a final piece. The beauty is in the filmmaking. The horror is in what transpires between the men — and it’s arguably an uncomfortably jarring note, given how suddenly it seems to arrive out of the blue.
A coda, decades later in Venice, reveals something profound about why Tóth was so insistent about the measurements of his Doylestown creation. And so, yes, it takes more than three hours for us to learn the full truth about Tóth’s vision.
Not all directors can pull off such a feat and make it worth our while. “The Brutalist,” like its protagonist, is not without flaws or incongruities or indulgences. But it hardly seems accidental that one of the film’s key lines tells us it’s the destination, not the journey, that matters. Corbet went big here — really big — and it paid off.
“The Brutalist,” an A24 release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 215 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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