“The Brutalist” ’s Epic Inversion of the American Dream

Not long into “The Brutalist,” the director Brady Corbet plunges us into darkness—a darkness that, although neither formless nor void, marks the film as a creation story. Deep in the hold of a ship that has just arrived in New York Harbor, the camera is propelled deckward, alongside a weary Hungarian Jewish refugee, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), as he pushes his way through the crowd. It’s 1947, and the horrors that László fled in Europe—he survived Buchenwald—seem to coalesce, below deck, in Corbet’s virtuosic shadow play. The weight of the past bears down on László in the handheld jostling of the camera, in the ticking-time-bomb percussion of Daniel Blumberg’s score, and, most of all, in the sombre, disembodied voice of László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he was cruelly separated. “There is nothing left for us here,” she writes to him. “Go to America and I will follow you.”

Now László has done that, and, as he emerges from the ship—out of darkness, light!—and catches a glimpse of Ellis Island, his haggard features twist into a boyishly jubilant grin. Should it alarm us that, owing to the severity of the angle, the Statue of Liberty is upside down? Of all the memorable images captured here by the cinematographer Lol Crawley, this one amounts to a visual thesis: we are witnessing an inversion, even a refutation, of the American Dream. Before the war, in Budapest, László was a much admired architect; adrift in America, trying to claw back some semblance of a legacy, he will, during the next thirteen years, be taken in and ejected, indulged and sneered at, embraced and exploited—and, finally, horrifically abused and cast aside. The patterns of rise and fall are built, with ruthless intelligence, into the movie’s structure. “The Brutalist,” which Corbet co-wrote with the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, runs three hours and thirty-five minutes, and unfolds in two coldly gripping acts: an astounding ascent, a precipitous decline. There is a fifteen-minute intermission, and it’s the only stretch of the picture that even remotely tests your patience.

As László arrives in America, his career glories—and his beloved Erzsébet, stuck back in Hungary with their young niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy)—seem lost to the past. All he has now are his clothes, a persistent heroin addiction, and the faintest of hopes for the future. The movie, for its part, peers relentlessly forward. Crawley’s recurring signature shot is a head-on view of a road or train tracks rushing beneath us, often backed by the quickening churn of the score: the music of industrial progress. László makes his way to booming Philadelphia, where he moves in with a friendly cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has a frosty shiksa wife (Emma Laird) and a furniture store with more supply than demand.

“They are not very beautiful” is László’s honest appraisal of the sturdy, characterless wooden tables and chairs in Attila’s showroom, and the grace of Brody’s performance can be found in his delicate modulation of that line—critical yet forgiving, and reluctant to render too superior a judgment. Still, there is no stifling László’s belief in beauty. When the cousins are commissioned to renovate a personal study in nearby Doylestown—as a surprise gift for its owner, the millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—it is László who transforms the room into a minimalist wonder. And, when Harrison is caught furiously off guard by what these men have done, it is László who calmly stands his ground, certain that beauty will win the day.

He proves correct. After falling out with Attila (the excellent Nivola exits too soon), László finds himself swept up, in a stunning reversal of fortune, into the good graces of Harrison, a self-made titan of industry and a greedy connoisseur of other people’s gifts. Pearce, in a magnificent performance, plays him as a kind of citadel—towering yet human-scaled, his immaculate dress and coiffure barely mussed by the occasional burst of temper or spasm of ego. “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating,” he declares to László, over a snifter of brandy, and although the line gets a laugh, Pearce doesn’t reduce Harrison’s dilettantish pretensions to a joke. Even in the character’s most transparently manipulative moments, Pearce endows him with a seductive conviviality—a bracing largeness of spirit. When Harrison installs László in his guesthouse and tasks him with designing a Doylestown community center, you can’t help but share László’s sense of triumph—or his instinctive yearning, against his better judgment, for his benefactor’s approval.

Others, however, do not approve—certainly not Harrison’s treacherous young failson, Harry (Joe Alwyn), though his daughter, Maggie (Stacy Martin), is made of gentler stuff. There are also the people of Doylestown, who scarcely bother to hide their hostility toward the Jewish outsider in their midst, or their suspicions of the sharp, clean lines and modular elements of his brutalist style. Tensions mount further as the second half begins, in 1953, and Harrison arranges for Erzsébet and Zsófia to be reunited with László, at last, in Doylestown. The two women, initially welcomed, soon affront their hosts with their pesky independence of mind and spirit. They have survived far worse than the Van Burens of the world, and they are, if anything, even less inclined than László toward compromise.

If László Tóth reminds you of Howard Roark, then Corbet, clearly having a Rand old time, is already a few steps ahead of you. Like Roark (played by a grave Gary Cooper in King Vidor’s juicily grandiloquent 1949 film version of “The Fountainhead”), László is unswerving in his allegiance to his vision, resisting every effort to curb his ideas and refusing to coddle the fickle, foolish whims of public taste. What makes László the more interesting character is that, however stubborn and exacting his judgments, he doesn’t allow genius or hubris to define him. Nor can he be reduced to his addiction, his war trauma, his love for his wife, his devotion to Judaism, or his uncertainty—as other Jews flock to Israel—about where that devotion begins and ends. When you think back on “The Brutalist,” it is not László’s arrogance but his thoughtfulness that is likely to stick with you—that, and the soft lilt in his hard scrape of a voice, like a cushion laid over gravel.

Brody hasn’t been this good, or had a role this powerful, since his Oscar-winning performance as the Polish musician Władysław Szpilman, in “The Pianist” (2002). There are moments when Corbet’s film suggests a sequel: after surviving the Holocaust, where does an artist go next? Encountering “The Brutalist” for the first time, I wondered if I were watching a bio-pic, so entranced by the flow of the story and the pointillist precision of the details that I couldn’t help assuming the underlying truth of the material—the integrity of the foundation. I should have known better; Corbet delights in concocting ersatz case histories, submerging fictional characters in the tides of real-life catastrophe. His first feature, “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015), wove a chilly-creepy origin story for a fledging Fascist. The darkly entrancing “Vox Lux” (2018) dreamed up a pop diva named Celeste—a patchwork of inspirations (Madonna, Lady Gaga), birthed in a cauldron of American tragedy.

“Vox Lux” was about the sinuous, cultish connections between musical celebrity and terrorist violence, with Celeste as their pop-supernova hellspawn. “The Brutalist” similarly regards László’s arrangement with Harrison as a Faustian bargain—and not much of a bargain, really, as the years stretch on, delays set in, budgets skyrocket, and László begins to slip and stumble, and on ever more precarious slopes. A stunning passage brings Harrison and László to the mountains of Italy, where gargantuan slabs of marble await their man-made destiny. Perhaps it’s no surprise that here, in the face of such natural beauty, the drama shrinks and contracts, not fulfilling Corbet’s overarching ideas so much as literalizing them. A resonant, thematically nimble story—about the predations of capitalism, the obstacles to cultural assimilation, the inherent imbalance of the patron-artist relationship, and the plunder and violation of Jewish-immigrant genius—suddenly feels trapped in stone.

No matter. “The Brutalist” is an American epic of rare authority, and what gives it its power, I think, is what lends some buildings their fascination: a quality of dramatic capaciousness and physical weight, a sense that what we’re seeing was formed and shaped by human hands. Modernist aesthetics may be Corbet’s subject, but Hollywood classicism, as a style, suits him well; you can feel him surrendering, as he has seldom done before, to the sweeping pleasures of the well-told tale. And yet his flair for provocation persists in the film’s scorpion sting of a coda, which brings forth a new interpretation of László’s legacy: one that essentially recasts his work as stealth propaganda, a Zionist Trojan horse. Some viewers might take this attempted reclamation at face value, though only if they miss the bitterly sardonic chill of Corbet’s tone, or the contradiction in the interpreter’s own words, reminding us of the cold inscrutability of László Tóth’s masterworks: “They indicate nothing, they tell nothing, they simply are.” ♦