It’s been weeks, and there are images from Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist that haven’t left me. It’s an exquisitely crafted film, shot with care on VistaVision, a largely obsolete 35mm film format that hadn’t been used in the full production of a movie in decades.
This is a large, dense film. In a strange way, it reminds me somewhat of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis but without the camp and bad green screen. It’s audacious, ambitious, visually distinctive, and structurally unique.
Like Megalopolis, The Brutalist is an American epic. It’s about an architect, a visionary, and in many ways, it’s about filmmaking itself—art-making itself—and the ways that art interacts with commerce, the obstacles and sheer manpower that it takes to erect a building or create something like a film.
It’s also an immigrant story, about people who come to America to build monuments and achieve the greatness promised by the American Dream.
I still don’t know what to fully make of The Brutalist, but I do know that it’s been haunting my brain ever since we walked out of the Paramount Theatre in Austin, where we had the pleasure of seeing it projected on 35mm.
The experience was fantastic, and seeing a movie that was shot on film projected on film is, bar none, one of the best ways to experience a movie like this. It not only looked amazing, but the material quality of the projection made it feel like watching the past come to life, which is exactly what you want in a historical drama.
Set in the post-war period, the movie follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody at his best), a Hungarian-Jewish architect, the titular brutalist, who makes his way to Philadelphia to build a life after being separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who are still in Europe after the Holocaust. There, his life becomes entangled with rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who recognizes his talent for building and gives him a project.
The film is structured in two parts, with a built-in 15-minute intermission in between, as well as an overture and an epilogue to bookend the whole endeavor. Structurally and formally, it’s one of the most striking movies I’ve seen in a long time.
The use of a near-forgotten film format, the length and distinct two-part structure, the inclusion of an intermission—all of these elements are a kind of cinematic brutalism, emulating in a way the architectural movement that gives the movie its title.
Brutalism was and is an architectural movement borne out of the tumultuous mid-century, a reaction directly in response to modernism and post-war architecture. The name is largely thought to have come from the French term, “béton brut,” meaning “raw concrete.”
Concrete is one of the staples of brutalism, which was largely centred around creating functional buildings out of sturdy and cheap materials, left unadorned to expose their material qualities. The principles of brutalism emphasized simplicity, structure, and material honesty. At its inception, it was built on a utopian ideal of utilitarianism.
As a movement, brutalism was short-lived and has something of a contentious legacy, with its large concrete structures often deemed cold and ugly. Its legacy is, however, far-reaching, found in everything from Soviet housing blocks to underground transit systems to city halls and libraries and cultural centres around the world.
Personally, I find a lot of brutalist architecture to be beautiful in its own way. Brutalism is a blank canvas and an open question. It’s both utopian and dystopian, minimalist and maximalist, all at once. It’s confrontational. Of course, it was doomed to fail. Of course, it fell out of favour.
But the best architecture, like the best cinema, invites you in, asks you to make your own interpretation, makes you feel something. That’s exactly how I experienced The Brutalist. I was captivated and moved by it. I was left with an open question.
I realize I’ve said little about the actual movie so far, but it’s a movie that I don’t think I can really do justice by simply telling you about it.
It’s not a perfect film. The first half moves and breathes more fluidly than the second half, which gets a bit lost in the fog of its own ambition, somewhat akin to Tóth himself. But I can say that I was never bored during its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, which is a rare feat.
Adrien Brody also gives what is surely one of the best performances of the year, while Guy Pearce steals almost every scene he’s in.
There’s beauty, humour, and darkness here in spades. In fact, some beats are bleak to the point of almost being borderline melodramatic, but the film somehow never buckles under the weight of those choices.
If the end result has its rough edges, like raw concrete, the whole of it—long and dense and difficult, but still beautiful and balanced—is something you can’t help but admire.
Verdict
The Brutalist is big, bold, and beautiful. I loved so much about it, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since leaving the theatre. It’s one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve seen all year, and it takes big swings in a way that I can’t help but respect. If you want a sweeping historical epic about people in all their flawed humanity trying to build things that will leave their mark on the world, portrayed by some of the best actors we’ve got, then this is one movie you don’t want to miss.
Shea Angus