Hype be damned. This overlong film about a fictional Hungarian Brutalist architect Laszlo Toth (dedicated performance by Adrien Brody) in post-war America and his encounter with a millionaire American industrialist Van Buren (Guy Pearce), propagating the view on bigoted white upper class oligarchy is as subtle as "I drink your milkshake!" of Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood.
The Brutalist starts out promisingly with Toth's struggle- a famed architect in his native Hungary who survived holocaust but left his wife and family behind. He has to toil for food and shelter in salvation army breadlines. He lands a job at his sleazy cousin's furniture store which is obviously beneath his talent. After designing Van Buren's library in his mansion in Pennsilvania, the first part of the film before the long intermission is set for Toth's rise in rank in Van Buren's inner circle. So the first half is intriguing enough and performances are strong. But the hinted inner life of Toth - the hidden drug addiction and womanizing doesn't add to anything for the later part of the movie. Are they supposed to show that Toth is no saint? Worse yet, the repeated presaging images of Toth's young niece Zsofia, about how she suffered and how she had to defend herself from groping paws of men, the film relates it to the completely unnecessary and over the top Italian quarry scene, equating the power dynamics of predator and prey - in war and in American capitalism.
As a commissioned work, Toth works on a concrete megastructure, a Christian chapel and public space, dedicated to Van Buren's dear late mother. The Brutalist architecture here has a hidden meaning to Toth and his background as a Jew who survived unimaginable hardship - with the light beaming through the top, giving people hiding down below a signal of hope and reprieve. As long as the fasçade has a giant cross, Van Buren will approve.
The point is made over and over again throughout the film - "Pick up the penny and return it to me," "We tolerate you," and so on. The rich thank you for your intellectually stimulating conversations and your talent and culture that they can afford. But you will never be one of them. But do they really need to go there with that Italian quarry scene? I hate any movie that uses a rape as a some sort of clutch as a plotpoint. And Corbet goes there.
Corbet, along with his writing partner Mona Fastvold (Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) mistake that giving a 3 hrs 35 min runtime and a historical background equal having literary air. Accumulation of these images and narrative threads that goes nowhere don't automatically give the film depth. The old Vistavision 70mm format doesn't add anything to the film’s point so obviously, brutally made. No, Corbet is no major American film director. He ain’t no PT Anderson, who at least has a sense of humor.
