Tackling the notion of the “American Dream” and the artist being haunted by their art – two well-worn clichés – The Brutalist manages to bring the gravity of legacy to a decade-spanning tale.
The film tightly follows fictional architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as he moves through the reality of postwar America. Arriving from Hungary to New York and then Philadelphia, Tóth first lands with a cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who offers him a cot to sleep on in the back of his shop and a job building furniture. While this stay is brief, Tóth takes lessons on how to assimilate into American culture and the risk of trust, in addition to getting to design a pretty innovative library for an intensely wealthy man.
While the initial response to the library was explosive and quite negative, the homeowner, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) revisits and revises his reaction and seeks out Tóth. The two men forge a bond over modern architecture and discuss tough topics intelligently. Tóth’s life through and after the war interests the ultra-wealthy Van Buren, although his interest stops short of both empathy and exploitation. The scenes of these two men getting into weighty discussions are some of the more organic and captivating scenes throughout The Brutalist. And it is a fairly lengthy film.
Coming in at three and a half hours, or 215 minutes not counting the intermission, The Brutalist avoids feeling like a slog or an overly ambitious epic. In its essence, it is a story of the American Dream and the non-linear journey of post-WWII Jewish immigrants from Central Europe, but we never have to suffer through long cliché drone shots across rolling hills of grain speckled with cowboys. It is much more personal than that.
As Tóth and Van Buren grow closer and their lives further intertwine, they start to work on a project together. A major undertaking, the idea for a large Brutalist-style building in a small Connecticut town turns into the men’s opus. Tóth is the driving creative force behind the creation, and Van Buren the money behind the man.
Watching Tóth become obsessed with his design peels back another layer of his complicated character. In fact, most of the characters in the film are artfully crafted to feel more than just two dimensional. But Brody’s performance meshes gracefully with co-writer/director Brady Cobet’s intent on giving him the time and space to slowly introduce us to Tóth. He is both a man who is changing in his new environment, and a man who seeks to change the literal landscape of that new world that surrounds him.
The filmmaking on display here is monumental. Light and dark feature heavily in Brutalism, and those contrasts are represented both literally and metaphorically, as the film’s text and references are reflected on screen and in the script. It is difficult to over-praise The Brutalist for being effortlessly impressive, because it deserves all the praise it has coming for it.
Balancing hard times, hard emotions, and slabs of hard concrete, The Brutalist is an impassioned expression of artists and the complication that is America. Its inertia eases the story along. It unfolds in its own time, methodically building a world and building a building.