The Brutalist‘s Hard Edges

THE BRUTALIST. Although the nerd wires have been hotly humming for what seems like years, the arrival of Brady Corbet’s prospective magnum opus has felt decidedly anticlimactic here in the hinterland. Granted, most small towns lack a 70mm projector to do justice to the movie’s vaunted, arcane Vista Vision format, and the matinee crowd with which I watched it was fuller than some (double digits!), though the young Turks of the cinema were decidedly not in attendance. This probably speaks as much to the fractured, dissolute culture of movie fandom in 2025 as anything else, but it also made me wonder, during and after, who The Brutalist is really for. The immediate answer is its makers, of course, as the movie plays more grandiose and self-congratulatory than anything that wasn’t commissioned by a propaganda department. But I should backtrack; perhaps my contrarianism is obscuring the point.

Corbet began his movie career as a young actor, working in an astonishingly curated series of projects with exceptionally well-regarded (if not widely known or hugely commercial) directors, including Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, among others. And then, a decade ago, he began co-writing (with Mona Fastvold) and directing his own particular, anachronistic — some might say pretentious — work. Due to now irrelevant problems of distribution and access, I missed The Childhood of a Leader (2015). Vox Lux (2018), intriguing in its iconography, just seemed like a lot; I’ll have to circle back to it at some point.

Anyway, after a relatively brief gestation period as a writer/director, Corbert (again collaborating with Fastvold) broke some brains and gave a legion of indeterminately aged fanboys problematic fetish erections when The Brutalist began making the festival rounds last year. Vaunted for the self-imposed challenges of its production — relatively low budget, period setting, the aforementioned Vista Vision, whereby a large format film negative moves perpendicularly through the camera gate — as much as for the ambition of its storytelling, the movie emerged as a cause celebre for a specific type of cineaste.

Setting aside my reactionary cynicism, if only for a moment, there truly hasn’t been a movie like this (or at least a widely distributed American one), in some time. Comparisons have been not unfairly drawn to There Will Be Blood (2007) — with which it shares very little, beyond controlled aesthetic ambition and historical fiction — because they simply don’t make them like this anymore, nor did they ever. The Brutalist exists as the product of a re-imagining, marrying modern sensibility and technique to a long-ago setting and then shooting it with rarefied, antiquated equipment. It’s a flex beyond flexes, as the kids might say, and I wonder if it really works.

Beginning in 1947, The Brutalist follows the struggles of László Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian refugee who finds brief asylum with his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in Philadelphia. Toth, of course, is a gifted architect whose designs were deemed un-Germanic as the Reich swept across Europe. But he is also a kind and sensitive person, struggling to reunite with his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy), who, due to post-war bureaucracy, have been unable to leave the continent.

Struggling with the xenophobia of his adopted home, Toth eventually finds himself folded under the wing of a vastly wealthy American industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, Sr. (Guy Pearce) and his questionably motivated family. Toth is commissioned to design a community center to honor Van Buren’s late mother, and his introduction to the gristmill of American commerce begins.

Now, The Brutalist spans half a century and, of course, runs over three and half hours, complete with overture and full 15-minute intermission. It’s a big, old confrontational work of cinema and seems clearly self-referential in its intoning of the relationship of business to art. Further, Toth becomes the definitive tortured artist, so caught up in his imaginative work and the physical construction thereof that he risks alienating everyone around him and sacrificing what little security he has. And, of course, the notion of benefactor as potential bad actor lurks in every shadowy corner.

In fairness, this is an impressively imagined and constructed work, from the costuming and production design to the surprisingly modern way Corbett and cinematographer Lol Crawley move their self-consciously outdated camera. While I occasionally found Brody’s performance to be straining for authenticity, it’s probably better to try too hard than not hard enough. And the surrounding cast, although some disappear into the sumptuous background, is committed to the work with admirable elan. Pearce has been in the news a lot and with good reason, but I think he’s been great in everything he’s done.

For all the folderol, The Brutalist doesn’t, for me, occupy the same sort of rare space as the movies that changed my life. This speaks as much to my own jading as to the work itself but a part of the struggle, despite the movie’s genuine achievements, is in its highly modern self-reflexiveness, which seems at odds with the story as it wishes to tell it. R. 215M. BROADWAY, MINOR.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.

This article appears in The Humboldt County Fair is at a Crossroads.