The Brutalist Review

The Brutalist is one of the leading contenders for the 97th Academy Awards, having earned 10 nominations as of this writing.

László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to America after the Second World War. Despite being a celebrated architect in Europe, László survives to earn a living in Philadelphia. He gets an opportunity to work for Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist. However, László faces personal and professional challenges, from trying to get his wife and niece into America to his vision for a large project commissioned by Harrison.

The Brutalist is a film that audiences would come out thinking, ‘They don’t make them like that anymore.’ It was a throwback to epics of the 1950s and ‘60s. It is a three-and-a-half-hour historical drama that spans a long period of time as the main character experiences many highs and lows. It was so traditional that it had a 15-minute intermission. Some lengthy modern films, like Killers of the Flower Moon, could have done with an intermission.

This long-run time was usually reserved for historical epics: films like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and El-Cid. They’re war epics, not usually dramas, although they have been expectations like the James Dean film Giant.

The Brutalist can be described as an immigrant version of The Fountainhead. The Brutalist borrows a lot of elements from Ayn Rand’s novel and László did mirror Howard Rourk. László was a revolutionary architect that was disrespected and forced to work as a labourer before attracting a rich benefactor. The second half of the film showed László fighting for his artistic vision against restrictive forces. There were people who didn’t understand his genius.

The Brutalist was also about the immigrant experience. László had to restart from the bottom. He first job was for his cousin’s company; a man who had assimilated by adopting an American accent and anglicised his surname. László did initially have support from his cousin and local Synagogue, but that slowly fell away as he drifted deeper into poverty. László and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) suffered from double discrimination because they were foreign and Jewish and their talents were underutilised in America. Harrison’s prejudices were slowly revealed despite his willingness to hire László. The Brutalist was a story about a man who was trying to fulfill the American Dream, but reality hits hard.

This was a film that had a cast filled with talents and they were firing on all cylinders. Brody looks like he’s the front-runner to win the Best Actor Oscar (for a second time), and Jones and Pearce stand a decent chance to win in other categories. Joe Alwyn was wonderfully loathsome as an arrogant and aggressive nepo baby. He’s a character audiences will love to hate.

While The Brutalist was proudly an old-fashioned epic, there were some modernisations. The film was rated 18 in the UK because of drug use, sex scenes, and sexual violence. László was a flawed character because he loved his wife and tried to get his family over to America, but willing to sleep with other women. The first thing he did when he arrived in New York was hire a prostitute. László showed compassion for Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé) and his son who were also living in poverty, but László was also a heroin addict. László was prone to outbursts as he fought for his vision.

The runtime does sound daunting, especially due to the subject matter. However, if a film is paced right then a long film will whiz by while a badly paced short film will feel like it takes an age and day. The Brutalist did feel epic because of its scale. It told a story that took place over a long period of time, and there was a grand scale to the picture. There was historical detail throughout the film through its production design, costumes, and news reports about events like the Creation of Israel and the launch of the first ICBM. The second half of the film was about the construction of László’s magus opus, a behemoth of a building placed on top of a hill and it was a massive project that took time, money, manpower, and resources.

This sense of scale was extended to the direction, cinematography, and music. All of it felt grand and helped The Brutalist feel big. The Brutalist already has some iconic visuals like the Statue of Liberty being upside down, and László standing in front of some embers. The music has already become recognisable with a sound that was big and imposing, like when László arrived in America, construction starts on the building, and a train crashes. The Brutalist is the front-runner for the Best Director, Cinematography, and Score prizes at the Academy Awards.

The Brutalist’s production was even more impressive, with a budget estimated in the region of $9 to $10 million. It looked like it cost a lot more and shows that a mega-budget isn’t needed if a director has a vision. There has been some controversy because of the use of AI to enhance the use of the Hungarian language and some of the building designs. However, Dan Murrell pointed out in his video about the controversy that it amounted to at most eight minutes in the whole film and there was still a human element. It’s not a case of AI being used to replace humans.

The Brutalist was an ambitious film that deserved the praise it received. It was a bold new take on a classic style of film.