The Brutalist, at least for me, was a movie that came out of nowhere.
While it’s been an inescapable presence this awards season, either between its Golden Globe wins or the recent revelations that the film used AI to supplement actor performances, I personally didn’t hear of the movie until fairly recently. I don’t tend to follow international film festivals like the ones at Venice and I had never heard of Brady Corbet whatsoever until The Brutalist began its limited-release run. It’s been lauded by plenty of critics and has been deemed a modern American epic. I will admit, I wanted to like it simply because I love a good epic, but I also can’t deny I was a bit cautious the more I heard about the movie.
While I never got “Oscar bait” vibes from The Brutalist, it seemed too good to be true. Sure, my favorite movie of 2023 was Oppenheimer, a movie in which you can make the same commentary regarding critical acclaim, an exceptionally long run time, and its framing as a modern-day epic. Still, whereas Oppenheimer backed up all of its acclaim with one of the strongest casts ever assembled for a film of that caliber, The Brutalist was really banking on its status as a movie for movie lovers. This kind of film, at least according to those who love The Brutalist, doesn’t get made anymore and is meant to be a callback to historical epics of the 50s and 60s with its ambitious scale, pacing, score, and filming techniques.
I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that while I wanted to love The Brutalist and was indeed enjoying myself when the movie began, the longer it went on, the more disinterested and cold I became towards it.
The Brutalist
Director: Brady Corbet
Release Date: December 25, 2024 (Limited Theatrical), January 17, 2025 (Wide Theatrical)
Rating R
Beginning in the 1940s and spanning several decades, The Brutalist centers on Hungarian architect Laszlo Thoth (Adrien Brody), who emigrated to the United States following World War II. While life at first isn’t exactly what he envisioned, mostly working at his cousin’s furniture store, he eventually has a chance encounter with the Van Buren family and its patriarch, Harrison (Guy Pierce). Impressed with Laszlo’s work, Harrison commissions him to construct a massive complex in Doylestown, PA that will contain various facilities like a church, library, theater, and gym. It’s a monumental effort, pun fully intended, and the majority of the film centers on the construction of this massive building, Thoth’s growing drug addiction and anger as the project continues, and the struggles Laszlo undergoes trying to bring his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) to the States.
Given that the movie runs just over three and a half hours, including an intermission, there’s a lot of ground to cover with Laszlo’s life. We witness the moment he enters Ellis Island and keep a close eye on him from then on. Whether it’s small moments like him having a hook-up with a prostitute to major moments like a party he attends in Italy with Harrison, this is a film that’s almost entirely defined by Adrien Brody and his performance as Laszlo. Thankfully, Brody does a good job with it. It’s not astounding or transformative, but given just how long The Brutalist is and how Thoth is the driving force of everything in the movie, it’s an impressive performance that deserves the nominations it’s getting.
And look, instead of making constant references to all of the awards and nominations that The Brutalist is earning, I’ll just come out and say that from a technical perspective, it does deserve a lot of acclaim. It’s a wonderfully made movie that feels both grand and minimalistic. Seeing the credits pan across the screen during the film’s overture and introducing the cast and crew with a horizontal pan as a car drives across the roads of Pennsylvania looks classy, with the film’s booming bass score also enhancing the grandeur of it all. It’s a film that firmly believes the story it’s telling is grand in scope and scale, but is ultimately still a personal journey of one man trying to live the American Dream.
Copyright: A24
The Brutalist comments on a lot of elements from the post-WWII era, but the largest one is undeniably the realities that immigrants face upon entering the United States. While the opening shots of the film see Laszlo look wondrously up at the Statue of Liberty upon sailing to Ellis Island, the inverted presentation of it is a clever mission statement for the film. It’s an inversion of the American Dream and how it’s inspirational, but to foreigners like Laszlo, it’s twisted. While the film does show Laszlo being able to continue his passion for design and architecture, American characters will frequently remind him of his status as an other. Whether it be Harrison’s occasional remarks about Laszlo’s class to Harrison’s son outright stating that people only “tolerate” Laszlo, it sends a reminder that is still true to this day – all are welcome, but if you’re not American, you will always be reminded of it.
Its themes like this which make The Brutalist such a worthwhile watch for its first half. Everything is constantly building and escalating at a natural pace. We see Laszlo slowly begin to move up in the world and make a name for himself, getting the life that he so desperately wanted when he arrived. If this review was based solely on the first act of the film before the intermission, then I would easily herald it as one of the best films of 2024. But I’m not, and that’s because Act 2 exists.
It’s not that Act 2 is bad. Brody still does a great job with the material, and the cinematography is stellar, but events are sped through nearly incomprehensibly. The movie erratically jumps from scene to scene and forgets to impart key info to the audience to help make those moments shine. Again, The Brutalist is told over the course of several decades, but when one scene ends with a tragedy and the very next scene resolves said tragedy years later, it makes those plot points feel weightless. Then you reach the finale which just kind of… happens. It’s a weird sequence of scenes and character moments that don’t quite come out of left field, but are presented in a way that will leave you asking questions not because Corbet left it open to interpretation, but because the movie flat-out doesn’t make it clear what’s going on.
Copyright: A24
It makes the second half of the film all the more frustrating since all of the pieces were present in the first half. The characters were solid, the writing was good, the performances were all great, and Act 2 was set to keep the quality up. Then it simply didn’t. I don’t know if it was because of rewrites, a lack of funding (the movie only had a $10 million budget), or if Corbet bit off a bit more than he could chew, but the last half hour just kind of flounders around until the movie ends. It’s pretty ironic because the film’s coda is a character looking directly at the audience and saying that the destination is what matters most and not the journey. If that’s the logic The Brutalist is going by, then the destination is a meandering and confusing mess that ruined the journey leading up to it.
I didn’t hate The Brutalist, however. Again, from a technical perspective, the movie is fantastic and Corbet knows what he’s doing, though his use of AI to modify his actor’s performances is a bit sketchy to me. That being said, The Brutalist may be a bit too ambitious for its own good. It’s certainly not a bad movie, but by the end, the weight of the narrative begins to crumble as the movie sputters to a conclusion that doesn’t really have any meaningful resolution.
I’ve heard people saying that The Brutalist is an apt metaphor for filmmaking, and if so, then it’s a perfect encapsulation of the experience of watching itself – it’s the story of a man who has grand ambitions and ideas for a project, but due to a lack of compromise and ego, results in disaster and the project coming out way past schedule in a world that marvels at the wonder of it all but is ultimately disappointing except to those who claim to be experts in the field.
