Film Review: The Brutalist – A worthy Oscars frontrunner

Brady Corbet's historical epic The Brutalist is the top contender to win Best Picture at this year's Oscars. But is this three-hour story of the American Dream as good as the hype suggests?

Film Review: The Brutalist – A worthy Oscars frontrunner

Fittingly for a film about the construction of towering edifices, The Brutalist is a towering edifice in itself. Brady Corbet’s historical epic runs for a mighty 215 minutes, complete with a 15-minute interval – once a commonplace cinematic device, but now a rare novelty. Thankfully, the film is anything but a bum-numbing bore. It’s a colossal, weighty treatise on the immigrant experience, the challenges of creativity, and the myth of the American Dream.

We start with Holocaust survivor architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) arriving in America after fleeing Europe. Tellingly, our first glimpse of America from his perspective is of the Statue of Liberty framed upside down – an obvious but potent symbol for the lies behind the “land of the free”, which proves to be a world where the streets are lined with racism. 

Soon, Tóth falls in with the ultra-rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and his Trump-alike son Harry (Joe Alwyn). He’s tasked with constructing an enormous, ambitious community centre with the Van Buren family’s cash. This job allows him to bring his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and daughter Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) across the Atlantic to join him.

That might seem like a rather scant plot for a film that runs for longer than three hours, but Corbet packs heft and soul into every frame. Just as he conveyed the tortured psyche of a pop superstar in his previous movie Vox Lux, Corbet – who also wrote the script with Mona Fastvold – here reaches deep into the heart of his tormented protagonist, assisted by Brody’s nuanced, pained performance.

The freedom afforded by that runtime allows the movie to unfold at a methodical, elegant pace. There’s an old-fashioned unhurriedness to the storytelling, which enables its internal emotional plumbing to conceal as many secrets as Tóth’s architecture does. Corbet and Fastvold methodically turn over every single stone of the central characters, allowing Tóth to grow from a shy outsider afraid to take up space to a confident creative force.

By allowing the story to unfold over the course of more than a decade, Corbet gives the audience all of the tools to piece together Tóth’s life. His confidence in the American Dream grows and grows, right up until the point that – in the eyes of the American establishment – he forgets his place. The second half of the movie, like any epic rise-and-fall tale, delivers brutality in stark, sudden blasts. Like the architectural movement that gives the movie its title, its approach is clear, utilitarian, and viciously impactful.

But this all circles back to Brody. It’s his enormously expressive face that has to carry the gargantuan weight of the film. There’s a palpable heaviness to Brody’s physicality, conveying the mental, emotional, and physical hollowing-out his character undergoes as the story goes on. He’s hollowed out by America and by prejudice, but also by the demands of his own creativity. Genius, the film argues, comes at a cost. 

The second half of The Brutalist is perhaps weaker than the first, turning the characters played by Pearce and Alwyn into something more like a cartoon than they were before. However, its final epilogue sequence pulls everything together and deals a potent emotional blow, as well as an acknowledgement of the enormity of true creativity as an expression of something elemental: humanity itself.

All of that should be enough to carry The Brutalist to the stage of the Oscars. Whether it emerges victorious or not, it’s the sort of hulking creative monument that Hollywood seldom has room for in the 21st century. Like those towering edifices we spoke about before, The Brutalist has all of the building blocks to stand tall and proud for a very long time.

The Brutalist is in UK cinemas from Friday 24th January.

Header Image Credit: Universal Pictures

Author

Tom Beasley

Tom Beasley Editor

Tom is the editor of Voice and a freelance entertainment journalist. He has been a film critic and showbiz reporter for more than seven years and is dedicated to helping young people enter the world of entertainment journalism. He loves horror movies, musicals, and pro wrestling — but not normally at the same time.

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