The following notes on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. The Brutalist makes its Madison Premiere on Thursday, January 23, 2025, at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free.
By Josh Martin
As a figure in film culture, director Brady Corbet seems to provoke fascination and skepticism in equal measure, much of which can be chalked up to his unusual background. An American actor born in Arizona, Corbet became a favorite of the European festival circuit in supporting roles, appearing in films by Gregg Araki, Lars Von Trier, Michael Haneke, and more throughout the 2000s. Clearly inspired by the work of the serious, epoch-defining artists under which he was shepherded, Corbet parlayed his accumulated highbrow cultural capital into a second act as a director. However, Corbet’s first two features kept him on the periphery of cinephile culture, his work programmed by the major festivals and widely touted by some for its boldness while dismissed in the same breath by others.
Corbet vanished for six years after Vox Lux (2018), his portrait of a Faustian bargain between the Devil and a school shooting survivor-turned-pop star, but whispers of an ambitious project continued to circulate. In this time, Corbet’s long-gestating third feature The Brutalist languished in pre-production and was extensively recast, with Joel Edgerton, Marion Cotillard, Mark Rylance, and Sebastian Stan all key principals who departed the film at one point or another. As Corbet recalled in a recent discussion with Screen Daily, the film shot some sequences in September 2020 in Venice, only for principal photography to be delayed for nearly three years by the COVID crisis in Poland. To Corbet’s limited coterie of devotees, this mysterious endeavor increasingly seemed like a magnificent mirage.
Instead, the end result, through some miracle of funding, timing, and Corbet’s own self-professed persistence, is a mammoth picture with an expansive scope. The film follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who arrives in America in 1947 after surviving the Holocaust. Corbet introduces us to Tóth in the damp darkness of an arriving ship, docking in New York Harbor. Captured in a handheld long take, Toth navigates the cramped and disorienting space of the boat, all while a letter from László’s wife Erzébet (Felicity Jones), long presumed dead, is read in voiceover. Suddenly, a door opens and a flash of light is visible, in perfect conjunction with the swelling of Daniel Blumberg’s score. As Tóth and the spectator alike gain their bearings, a potent image (so potent that it has dominated the film’s marketing campaign) comes into focus: an upside-down view of the Statue of Liberty.
The enormity and bravado of the film’s much-discussed opening sequence is a fine table setter for this 215-minute epic, shot in the long-dormant widescreen VistaVision format. Grandeur is the name of the game here: Corbet’s third feature comes equipped with an overture, a timed fifteen-minute intermission, and a sweeping, decades-spanning narrative. By virtue of the sheer guts it takes to make a film like this on a reportedly meager $10 million budget, with little mainstream institutional support, The Brutalist has become that rare arthouse cinematic event. It is the kind of movie that everyone plugged into film culture simply must see, if only to be able to chip in on the increasingly fervent discourse.
By way of this self-fashioned event status, Corbet now finds himself at the very center of global film culture, taking home the prestigious Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and gaining steam in the thick of an awards race as wide open as any in years. Like The Godfather (1972) and There Will Be Blood (2007) before it, The Brutalist is a self-fashioned Great American Movie, an account of the complex shades of the American experience in all its expansiveness and tragedy. In other words, as the critic Adam Nayman suggests in his measured review, Corbet is “making a beeline straight for the canon” with this project. As a result of such ambition, The Brutalist is now inevitably functioning as a litmus test for the bona fides of its newly ascendant auteur. Naturally, the inherent binary of that sort of referendum does not do justice to the actual idiosyncrasies of The Brutalist, which is a far more complex, strange, and difficult experience than critical chatter might suggest – a Brady Corbet specialty.
The film’s virtues are formidable and considerable. The limits of assimilation form one of the central queries of The Brutalist, exploring László’s relationship to Judaism and the hostile environment of his new homeland. Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold’s compendium of characters forms something of a broad gradient, with László’s eager-to-please cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and Erzébet’s Jerusalem-bound niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) existing at the polar opposite ends of the immigrant experience. But for all the film’s overt thematic probing of the American Dream, The Brutalist is predominantly concerned with the thrills and restrictions of artistic creation. There is immense beauty and comfort in the early scenes that find Tóth on his first architectural assignment in America, with Corbet preferring quick, hurried jump cuts and close-ups to ground the viewer in the sheer pleasure he takes from his own craftsmanship.
Such pleasure is complicated by the arrival of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy benefactor who gravitates to László, mesmerized by his Bauhaus background and the modern cachet his style of architecture offers. The vast majority of the film’s three-hour-plus running time is dedicated to the fraught relationship between the ambitious Tóth and beneficent yet parasitic Van Buren, who commissions our protagonist to build a community center in honor of his mother in rural Pennsylvania. The relationship between the two, expertly accentuated by Brody and Pearce, provides some of the most “persuasive and intellectually stimulating” material in the film, to cheekily borrow Van Buren’s condescending turn of phrase.
As the end credits roll on The Brutalist, following a second half defined by financial woes, László’s deepening heroin addiction, and repeated clashes with a violently vindictive Van Buren, Corbet ends with a pointed and fitting needle drop: the Italian disco group La Bionda’s “One for You, One for Me.” As the song’s title is repeated over and over again, it gains further potency as an ironic statement on the platonic ideal of artistic collaboration, a balance which the film suggests may be fraudulent. One need not squint to see the parallels between László’s decades-spanning project and Corbet’s own opus, each beset by questions of money, collaboration, and practicality. Yet despite this ironic prodding, the film still holds a romantic view of artistry. When asked by Van Buren to explain his love for architecture, László argues that his structures are “devised to endure… erosion,” to stand tall amid the violent tides of history. Such a statement seems to have some resonance for Corbet: in crafting a VistaVision epic with bold style and grander ambitions, The Brutalist, like László’s architectural masterworks, aims to endure.