The Brutalist: Movie Review

Cast: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn
Director: Brady Corbet

Director Brady Corbet's take on the American dream follows Adrien Brody's László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, who finds his way to Philadelphia in 1947.

Taking a job with his cousin's furniture business, Tóth finds favour with Guy Pearce's wealthy millionaire Harrison van Buren after an initially angry meeting. Commissioned to build a monument to van Buren's dead mother, Tóth finds his time taken by the project and also by his desire to reunite with his wife, separated after the war ends.

But as both work and life projects get underway, they are caught up in uncertainty and in life's ebbs and flows - will Tóth be able to survive his design and desire?

The Brutalist, along with its epic run time of over 3hours 15 minutes, is almost an endurance that's not worth undertaking - and is definitely a film of two halves.

The first half, with its familiar immigrant themes, anti-Semitism and uneasy relationship between van Buren and Tóth, is a strongly compelling piece that, while offering little new in terms of story beats, provides the viewer with a degree of meat that's worth chewing into. 

Blessed with a naturalistic performance from Brody and a hoity-toity antagonist in the shape of Pearce's wealthy industrialist who seems unnaturally concerned with Tóth's welfare and that of his family makes the drama feel uneasy and unsettling.

But a second half (after a baked-in intermission) feels more of a symbolic mess than a well-crafted resolution to what has befallen Tóth and his family. Despite being crafted so by design, the film feels like it's falling apart at the seams as subtle symbolism of the relationship between an artist and their patron is overtaken by something akin to a sledgehammer and a nut situation.

It's a disappointment to note as the film's look and industrial-heavy soundtrack both make the movie a standout - it's just the initial absorption fades away in the final furlong, morphing into something that's sort of watchable, but feels more Brutalist on the viewer than perhaps it has any right to be.