‘The Brutalist’ Turns the American Immigrant Story on its Head

Brady Corbet’s staggering drama The Brutalist turns the American immigrant story on its head—literally. When Buchenwald survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) emerges from the bowels of a crowded steamer ship to witness a glimpse of Lady Liberty, it’s bobbing upside-down in the skyline, then goes sideways, askew, almost daring those huddled masses yearning to be free to come ashore and not crash on the rocks. 

Forcibly removed from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and thousands of miles from his hometown of Budapest, László, a once-acclaimed Bauhaus-trained architect, has arrived in New York with nothing at all but the simple hope of building a better future.

THE BRUTALIST ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Brady Corbet
Written by: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
Running time: 215 mins

His cousin Attlia (Alessandro Nivola) is his only lifeline, a carpenter-salesman in small-town Pennsylvania with a middlebrow furniture store called Miller & Sons. “No Miller,” László says, puzzled. “No sons.” Attila, who speaks without an accent, admits he made up the name and the family so he’d blend in more smoothly. And he happily gave up Judaism when he married his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). “She is Catholic,” he says. “We are Catholic.” 

László, ever grimacing, with a broken nose that healed badly, speaks with a heavy accent and a weary cadence, but maintains a steady focus. He embodies an uncompromising perseverance; Attila’s easy renunciations trouble him. And, when a business deal tests their bond, Attila is all too quick to believe the lies. 

 So begins László’s education in American capitalism, where standards of excellence clash with bottom-line pettiness; and hard-forged integrity, along with artistic genius, is one of the few assets that a millionaire’s wealth can’t buy. Not that it stops Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist who made his fortune during the war and now wants the world to revere him as a man of fine taste.

László built him a dazzling home library that Van Buren at first despised—at least until Look Magazine made it the centerpiece of a photospread. Now Van Buren wants to be László’s deep-pocketed benefactor, and even pulls strings to reunite Erzsébet with László. 

Erzsébet, crippled by osteoporosis from wartime malnutrition, quickly assesses the situation, and knows they must tread lightly around these powerful people. Van Buren envies László’s gifts, but also resents them. László has no respect for anyone who questions his vision. It’s a combustible dynamic. And—to paraphrase a kindred cinematic classic—there will be blood.

Ambitious, audacious, intimate, sprawling, The Brutalist uses architecture to construct a monument to survival: a personal story writ large, fortified by pain and sanctified by love. Brady Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold have beautifully structured the arc of their character study into a gripping tale that gallops through its two-part, 215-minute running time. 

Corbet, who started his career as an actor for European directors like Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier, has a way of telling stories that feel out of time—especially since all of the movies he’s directed so far have been historical fictions. His films’ closest analogue would be Paul Thomas Anderson’s period pieces, the ones that use classical production design and filmmaking techniques—he shot The Brutalist in the outdated but gorgeous high-resolution VistaVision format—to study 20^th century events with a modern sensibility. 

His film is a series of conversations, vacillating between the confessional and the didactic, but he never forgets to compose visually. Punctuating all the talk are arresting moments of mammoth spaces—Pennsylvania steel town factories, towering civic structures, marble quarries in Italy, vast caverns of stone—that consistently dwarf its characters. The cinematography consistently reminds the viewer that the world is overwhelming, and life is a struggle not only to stand out but to keep from being crushed. 

The Brutalist strives for grand statements about individuals and institutions, the personal dynamics that affect financial power structures, the ability of functional concrete spaces to inspire transcendent awe. But it never forgets to ground its lofty goals in flesh-and-blood foibles. Van Buren is no simple money-bags villain; he has contradictions and a tender vanity that make his fatuousness almost forgivable. And László, a neglectful husband, almost humorless, shamefully nursing a heroin habit, has his own self-destructive impulses. 

Erzsébet does her best to keep them all together, including her effectively mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) who made it through the concentration camps just as they did. Zsófia points to a different way forward, one where their future rests not on 800,000-square-foot architectural visions but on the deceptively simple task of continuing the family. 

Corbet’s previous two films, Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, both show how history impacts people for better or for worse—and how they can impact history right back. The Brutalist is about all those manifestations of legacy: the ways in which the world molds, deforms, and reshapes what we do, who we are, and what we leave behind.