{"id":10725,"date":"2025-04-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10725"},"modified":"2025-04-07T14:53:31","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T18:53:31","slug":"the-brutalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/08\/the-brutalist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brutalist."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brady Corbet\u2019s The Brutalist<\/em> is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It\u2019s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brody plays L\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzs\u00e9bet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zs\u00f3fia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. T\u00f3th survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila\u2019s furniture store, although Attila\u2019s Catholic wife clearly doesn\u2019t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting T\u00f3th in charge. T\u00f3th\u2019s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks L\u00e1szl\u00f3 out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. T\u00f3th\u2019s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project \u2026 and that\u2019s all before the intermission, before Ersz\u00e9bet and Zs\u00f3fia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brutalist<\/em> is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022\u2019s T\u00e1r<\/a><\/em>, that feels so specific that it\u2019s easy to forget that L\u00e1zsl\u00f3 T\u00f3th never existed. Brody is as good as ever \u2013 and I\u2019d argue he\u2019s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel<\/em> or Midnight in Paris <\/em>\u2013 as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film\u2019s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The padding in The Brutalist<\/em> is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the T\u00f3ths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There\u2019s a brief shot of L\u00e1szl\u00f3 and some workers carrying a model of the community center he\u2019s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of L\u00e1szl\u00f3\u2019s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven\u2019t seen before, underscored by the character\u2019s infirmity and Jones\u2019s own petite stature. (She\u2019s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn\u2019t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with L\u00e1szl\u00f3 grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she\u2019s alive but can\u2019t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn\u2019t. It\u2019s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well \u2013 the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I\u2019m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist<\/em> is how inhospitable T\u00f3th finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant\u2019s taunts during the attack. I don\u2019t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that\u2019s the best I\u2019ve been able to make sense of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brutalist<\/em> is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I\u2019ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018\u2019s Never Look Away<\/a><\/em>, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist\u2019s life, although even that one doesn\u2019t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody\u2019s performance is remarkable \u2013 and I didn\u2019t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren\u2019t half his size \u2013 and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I\u2019m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it\u2019s over 200 minutes long, and if you\u2019re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I\u2019m not entirely sure The Brutalist<\/em> does that; even so, it\u2019s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brutalist<\/em> earned ten nominations at this year\u2019s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I\u2019ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren\u2019t nominated, Nickel Boys<\/a><\/em> for Cinematography and Challengers<\/em> for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones\u2019s character isn\u2019t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film\u2019s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door<\/a><\/em>. I have The Brutalist<\/em> in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I\u2019m Still Here<\/em>), but I wouldn\u2019t have picked it over Anora<\/em><\/a> for Best Picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brady Corbet\u2019s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It\u2019s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1441,1462,1445,1449,1440,1442,1443,114,161,215],"class_list":["post-10725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-2025-best-actor-nominees","tag-2025-best-cinematography-nominees","tag-2025-best-director-nominees","tag-2025-best-original-screenplay-nominees","tag-2025-best-picture-nominees","tag-2025-best-supporting-actor-nominees","tag-2025-best-supporting-actress-nominees","tag-epics","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10726,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10725\/revisions\/10726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}