Toronto 2024 Review: THE BRUTALIST, A Grand and Unexpected Cinematic Epic

Out of the gate with its Vista-Vision logo and overture, The Brutalist promises the kind of grand Hollywood epic, and old-school cinematic hubris, that more or less went away 40 years ago with Micheal Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America.

 

In recent years, it felt as if that might be forever. Although there have been signs of its revival, particularly with a pair of P.T. Anderson films, There Will Be Blood and The Master. Do three films over the last 15 years make an emerging trend?
In our world of the digital and the overly fixed-in-post, these are rare birds to be cherished. 

Director Brady Corbet, whose previous film, Vox Lux turned some heads a few years ago, leaps ahead leagues in ambition. The Brutalist delivers huge on every technical front: bold, analog cinematography replete with carefully crafted lighting and sophisticated blocking, textured and fulsome period locations, encompassing post-war Europe and a booming, pre-suburban America, a superb and haunting score, with across-the-board stellar performances. 



 

It opens with the narration of letter being written by woman separated from her husband by the Holocaust. She is forced to remain behind, trapped in bureaucratic custody in Budapest, while he managed an escape to America.

 

We see a chaotic press of flesh of refugees in the belly of a ship as they arrive to New York City, the hold all frantic darkness. While her formal letter is read aloud, it provides an encaptivating contradiction to the dangerous chaos on screen. Corbet will continue to use this technique (often with subtle montage) throughout the film.

The scene climaxes with a break into the fresh air, and a visual of The Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, towering and inverted from the camera’s point of view. This will be symbolic, but it takes nearly the full 215 minutes of “Capital C” cinema to realise the implications of that framing choice, when it echoed by upside down cross of light. Suffice it to say, this film has enough visual and aural density in its opening moments to generate its own gravity. 



 

The man is László Toth, a successful architect from the Bauhaus school. He is also a Hungarian Jew in Nazi occupied territory. The woman is his wife Erzsébet. The Brutalist is their complex and often unsettling reunion in America, the land of second chances. The price, no -- the cost -- is the myriad of ways that ambition, commerce, art, and the powerful patronage of the New World is its own kind of tyranny.



 

Toth is played by Adrien Brody, with significantly more wear and character in his face than the last holocaust picture, The Pianist, the one did with Roman Polanski, winning both of them Oscars. I think Brody is even better here, with the gamut of lived emotion appearing across his face. From the first frame, he slips into the character, and is never not anything else until the final frame. It is an utterly committed performance that the actor all but disappears into. And yet, he may somehow be one-upped by a magnificent, imposing Guy Pearce. 



 

As Toth is taken into the household of his brother (and his brother’s new Catholic wife) he stays in their spare closet, and helps to design new pieces for their entrepreneurial furniture business. This eventually lands Toth in the orbit of the Van Buren family, a construction and building family means, whose well read, but dull and opportunistic, patriarch Harrison Lee fully harnesses Toth's genius to build a new kind of community church, a tribute to Brutalism for both the modern industrial community springing up outside of Philadelphia, as well as a legacy structure for his recently deceased mother. 



A man of charisma and genteel composure, in ways that a disheveled Toth with his large broken nose is not, Harrison Lee is also subject to occasional outbursts of rage. There are some echos or comparisons to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of L. Ron Hubbard in the aforementioned The Master, as Guy Pearce delivers a monologue, or enthuses about various plans and schemes.

 

At one point, the pair travel to Italy to source some marble for the chapel at the centrepiece of the concrete under-construction building on a pastoral hilltop, prompting a remark by one to his travelling companion, upon seeing the open-pit mine, “This is magic. Thank you.” It's not just an unexpected line of dialogue, but also is kind of how a cinema-lover might react to The Brutalist.

 

Capital, and those who wield it, have a hunger. America is very much a land of opportunity and prejudice. Spanning nearly 50 years, the story covers the complicated relationship of the Toths to the Van Burens, with all the conflict, betrayal, and compromises of an expensive mega-project.

 

The film itself, about art and architecture and family and money, passion and addiction, is an act of wieldy design, worthy of its expansive subject matter. And yet, the story remains both familiar and unpredictable, simultaneously.

 

This might be the real genius here. There is enough movie here that the big canvas makes loads of time for real intimacy and human grace. The shot alone of an educated and 'free' Erzsébet scolding the Van Buren clan is blocked in a way that is both unconventional, and simply perfect. 

A few of the big narrative transitional moments are shown via the camera zooming along a road at a low angle and high speed. America, for all its openness, and bootstrapping mythology, can be unsafe at any speed. From The Brutalist's magnificent opening credit sequence, to its unothordox and angluar closing moments, witness the arrival of Brady Corbet.