Review: Magnificent and massive, The Brutalist is the best film of 2024 | Canada Voices

The Brutalist

Directed by Brady Corbet

Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce

Classification N/A; 215 minutes

Opens in select theatres, including the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, Dec. 25; expands to other cities Jan. 10

Critic’s Pick

“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its own construction?”

This question is posed roughly a third of the way through The Brutalist, and is not so much the skeleton key to unlocking director Brady Corbet’s gigantic new touchstone of American cinema as it is a crowbar.

How The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet made the most monumental film of the year

As uttered by a Hungarian-Jewish architect named Laszlo Toth, the cube query intentionally confounds the person at the other end of the conversation, a brash American industrialist who has neither the intellectual nor spiritual capacity to separate form from function, ideas from meaning. Laszlo’s line isn’t quite a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but it does sharply and poetically define the grand stakes of Corbet’s achievement, the very best best film of the year: The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.

There is nothing coy about Corbet’s confidence here, which makes the ambition all the more brazenly enveloping. Divided across two parts plus an epilogue, the 215-minute film announces its gargantuaness immediately, when Laszlo (Adrien Brody) emerges from the pitch-black belly of a ship’s hull in New York Harbor to glimpse the Statue of Liberty, the monument captured in a canted angle to mirror both the sea-sick reality of cross-Atlantic immigration and the inverted nightmare of the American Dream. With composer Daniel Blumberg’s thunderous score swelling and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camera tilting and swirling, Corbet gets to play the unabashedly proud maximalist, sweeping his audience out of the dark and into the bright, blistering, blinding light. Welcome to the West.

It is 1947 when Laszlo arrives on America’s shores, our hero having survived the concentration camp of Buchenwald but losing contact with his wife, Erzebet, and his young niece, Zsofia, in the horrifying process. A Bauhaus-trained architect back in Budapest before the Nazis deemed his concrete-strong creations “not Germanic in character,” Laszlo is now a rattled man, lost but not broken. Not yet, any way.

At first, he finds refuge in Philadelphia, where his well-assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has married a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Catholic girl and set up a furniture shop where thrifty newlyweds can point to pictures in Better Homes and Gardens magazine and request cut-rate imitations. But Laszlo is too ambitious – or too restless – to sit back and build coffee tables. And a few months into this new life, his artistic spirit gets to be finally unleashed after Attila’s crew is commissioned to build a home library for a wealthy captain of industry, who is given the illustriously WASP name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).

Initially, Harrison is enraged by Laszlo’s ultra-modern design for the space, with bookshelves masked by diagonally unfolding wooden slats and a lounge chair imagined with a spare Mies van der Rohe-esque beauty. But after researching Laszlo’s work back in Hungary – and receiving a splashy photo spread in Look magazine that lavishes praise on the unique room – the millionaire becomes enamoured with the impoverished architect, introducing him into his circle of power brokers and gatekeepers.

Soon, Harrison asks – well, assigns, really – Laszlo to design a massive community centre near his estate in the borough of Doylestown, just north of Philadelphia. Combining a theatre, gymnasium, library and chapel, the hillside structure – which Harrison intends to name after his late mother – will be a monument to stand the test of time. But as Laszlo begins the years-long process of erecting the structure – a journey that is both aided and complicated by the eventual arrivals of Erzebet (Felicity Jones) and Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) – tensions surface between the conflicting worlds of the artist and the benefactor. Between the persecuted “other” and the blue-blood elite. Between those who have a soul, and those who have long ago sold theirs.

Co-written with Corbet’s partner in art and life, Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist’s screenplay is a wonderfully layered, knotty creation. On the surface, its narrative is a straight line, pointing away from Laszlo’s traumatic past and toward his promising but clouded postwar future. Yet trap doors abound, compelling audiences to constantly reassess the journey the filmmakers are taking us on. And once Erzebet enters the picture, the perspective doesn’t quite so much flip as it does deepen, beautifully and painfully.

A former actor who has worked with some of the Europe’s finest filmmakers – for a stretch of time in the 2010s, Corbet was cast as the go-to American dude in the films of Mia Hansen-Løve, Olivier Assayas, and Bertrand Bonello – Corbet wrests remarkably deep performances from his cast, which is all the more impressive given that he was shooting at a rapid clip, sometimes upwards of 10 pages of script a day.

Brody, perfectly wounded as Laszlo, has not been given such a meaty opportunity since Roman Polanski’s similarly themed The Pianist. Jones, who has already and regrettably been pounced upon by some critics as an inferior substitute to Corbet’s original choice of Marion Cotillard, matches her on-screen husband nearly beat for beat, especially during a pivotal bedroom scene that generously evokes memories of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. (P.T.A. fans will need to give themselves a hand when they spot it.) And Pearce has never been better as Harrison, barking out dialogue like a rabid Charles Foster Kane. “I find our conversations … intellectually stimulating,” Harrison tells Laszlo, the compliment arriving with a threatening purr.

Of course, Harrison’s idea of stimulation would be crushed by what Corbet and Fastvold create here, with every element of their film serving a distinct, sometimes conflicting purpose. Up to and including the 15-minute intermission that separates the film’s two halves. The audience-breather tactic is not only exceedingly rare to see these days – the last time I can recall a movie deploying one was the 2015 “roadshow” release of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight – but also laced in this case with deep, sorrowful meaning. As a countdown clock ticks by on-screen, audiences are shown a static image of Laszlo and Erzebet’s wedding, the couple photographed in front of a Budapest synagogue. Is the timer reminding us how many seconds we have left before the movie resumes, or establishing an expiration date for the pre-war life of European Jews?

The in-your-face ambiguity extends to the film’s epilogue, a decades-later flash-forward that at once answers the grand mysteries of Laszlo’s earlier cube proposition while upending assumptions of how anyone’s life – including our own – will be remembered, honoured, or re-contextualized.

And yet, in a film filled with moments designed to stir, there may be no more haunting and ultimately provocative sequence than the one that lands late in the second half, in which Laszlo and Harrison descend into a maze of marble in the Italian town of Carrara, with only one of the men confident of the way out.

The Brutalist is its own labyrinth. Lose yourself in its construction as soon as you can.