The Brutalist review: Brady Corbet’s monumental achievement

The Brutalist has been much garlanded already as the awards season gathers pace. At Venice, creator Brady Corbet took the Silver Lion for best director. At the Golden Globes, it won Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor. At the Baftas, it was nominated in nine categories. The Oscars seem likely to follow suit.

Yet the film, which traces the postwar career of an imaginary Jewish Hungarian refugee architect in America, is a peculiar production: not merely massive but overtly overbearing. No less than 215 minutes long – three hours and 20 minutes of film, plus a 15-minute interval with a soundtrack – it covers the years from 1947 to 1980, in two pretentiously titled parts (The Enigma of Arrival, The Hard Core of Beauty), plus an epilogue. It is filmed in Vistavision, an extreme widescreen, high-resolution format developed in the 1950s, favoured by Hitchcock but not used for a feature since the 1960s.

Even more disconcertingly, The Brutalist is imperiously conceptualised too. You soon realise this is not a film primarily interested in character and narrative like most. “That, for us, comes later,” Corbet has said. “We start with a theme and an era.”

It’s the third film Brady Corbet, 36, has made with his partner, Mona Fastvold, after a precocious career as an actor, in which he was cast by directors of the stature of Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier and Olivier Assayas, before getting behind the camera.

His debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) established his approach. Set in France in 1919, it portrays the dysfunctional upbringing and malevolent behaviour of a small boy whose authoritarian American father is orchestrating the disastrous Versailles settlement. In a brief coda, “A New Era”, years later, the boy is revealed as having grown up to be a fascist dictator. Although he is not specifically Hitler or Mussolini, the lesson is clear.

His second, Vox Lux (2018), assaults the era of celebrity. In “Act One: Genesis”, a teenage girl survives a Columbine-type school shooting in 2000 and becomes famous after singing at the memorial service, swiftly converting this celebrity into pop stardom. By 2017, in “Act Two: Regenesis” she has become an alcoholic monster, and the worse she gets, the more popular she becomes. Again, there’s no immediately recognisable target, but parallels with some contemporary celebrities are unmistakable.

Both these films bombed at the box office, Vox Lux took just $1.4m on a budget of $11m. Seven years later, though, here’s The Brutalist, another history lesson, even more outsized in ambition.

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Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody, fantastically angular, intense and contained, an even greater performance than the role in The Pianist for which he won an Oscar) makes it to America in 1947, leaving behind his wife and niece. He is taken in by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a furniture shop in Philadelphia. They are commissioned to rebuild the library of a local tycoon, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, formidable), arranged as surprise for him by his entitled son Harry (Joe Alwyn).

László creates an exquisite modernist design but when Harrison sees it, he is enraged and refuses to pay. László becomes a labourer and addicted to heroin, living in a hostel. But, after the library has been featured in a glossy magazine, Harrison realizes László was a famous architect in Hungary before the war and repentantly seeks him out, welcoming him to his estate.

Harrison then commissions László for a vast utopian community centre on a hill near his house, in memory of his mother. László models an uncompromisingly hard-edged, cubic building but a catastrophic accident causes Harrison to cancel construction in a rage again. Only years later, in 1958, does it resume. Apparently reconciled, László and Harrison visit the quarries of Carrara together, to select the marble for an altar for the project – and, in a hallucinatory sequence deep in the tunnels, Harrison grotesquely assaults the befuddled László, revealing both his latent anti-Semitism and weirdly sexualised contempt.

In the epilogue, the elderly László is vindicated, his integrity and his life’s work celebrated at the first Architectural Biennale in Venice in 1980. So here’s an imposing epic of the American Dream, tracing the difficult path of the immigrant and artist under the raw capitalism of this period. It’s not just about building a building, though, “it’s also a movie about making a movie”, Corbet himself underlines, as if we could miss that. Like it or not, it’s a towering achievement: to be seen.

“The Brutalist” is in cinemas on 24 January

[See also: The end of Generation Rock]