When a seasoned auteur like Paul Thomas Anderson makes an overwhelming period epic like There Will Be Blood, it comes as little surprise, since he’d been painting on that size canvas for more than a decade. However, when a comparative upstart like actor-turned-director Brady Corbet makes that movie, having only ever directed Natalie Portman as a pop star in Vox Lux and one other feature, it’s a bit more startling. It invites us to ask whether it’s possible for apparently anyone to make such a movie, or whether Corbet is just significantly more than “apparently anyone.”

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The Brutalist is on the shortlist of films to take home this year’s best picture Oscar, having already been feted by the Golden Globes as best drama, and Corbet’s name is not the only thing that might have made that unlikely. If not for the advanced buzz, it’s hard to imagine many Academy members sitting down for a movie that runs 3 hours and 35 minutes, a duration that includes a 15-minute intermission. When Corbet decides he’s going to make a movie about a singular person involved in a singular industry during a tumultuous time of American history, as Anderson did, he’s not messing around. He wants us to live in, and breathe in, every moment. Thanks to some superlative filmmaking, Corbet does just that, constructing the cinematic equivalent of the sort of edifice that takes centre stage in this story of a Hungarian architect tasked with building a brutalist masterpiece for an industrialist madman.

Adrien Brody plays that architect, Laszlo Toth by name, and if you spend The Brutalist thinking this is the story of a real man, that’s yet another tribute to Corbet’s accomplishment. We meet him picking his way through the bowels of a ship arriving from Europe to post-war Ellis Island, and Corbet’s skewed perspective on this world is previewed through Toth’s first skewed vision as he achieves daylight: the Statue of Liberty pointing downward and to the right, effectively stabbing into him with its torch rather than lighting the way.

Softening his landing is his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), whose own immigration preceded Toth’s by several years, and who has now Americanised his name and opened up a moderately successful furniture store in greater Philadelphia. He also has news Toth has longed to hear: Toth’s wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) are alive back in Europe, having been separated from him, and may be able to follow him to America if he can get settled and pay their way. Attila initially seems to help in that regard, but then hangs him out to dry when a client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), is furious with Toth’s transformation of his library into a sort of minimalist space the likes of which no one had really seen.

Van Buren soon realises how wrong he got it. His library is featured in an architectural magazine, and the man seeks out Toth from where he is doing manual labour, a well as heroin, after being turned out by his cousin. Van Buren wants to belatedly pay Toth for his services, which his dickhead son (Joe Alwyn) had denied Toth despite being the one who contracted him. He also wants Toth to build a brutalist monument to his dearly departed mother, which will combine numerous community functions including a chapel, and will be the size of about three gymnasiums stacked on top of one another. With regards to the chapel, the fact that Toth is a Jew who survived the holocaust is perhaps lost on Van Buren, if he ever got that far in thinking about it.

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From this basic narrative structure, The Brutalist spins out into numerous threads, some related, some unrelated, not all of which resolve in satisfying fashion. That hardly matters. So grandiose is Corbet’s vision that the last thing you’re thinking about is the script and whether there are narrative callbacks or tied up loose ends. A person’s life does not always wrap up in bows, and even though Laszlo Toth is a product of the imagination of Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold, his experiences don’t need to play like those of a movie character. Remember, Corbet’s sense of verisimilitude for this period of the late 1940s and early 1950s is so acute, you’re half convinced you’re watching a biopic. It fools you in a way similar to the movie Tar did.

Unlike in Tar, our hero is not particularly problematic, though he does have that nasty heroin habit, and the ultimate arrival of his wife is not the storybook reunion we’d hoped. This reunion, in fact, does not come until the film’s second half, and it might be a spoiler that it happens at all if Felicity Jones were not a big part of the film’s promotional materials. If Brody and Pearce were carrying the first half along on magnificent performances, both likely to earn Oscar nominations, then Jones adds a jolt of different energy to the second, reconfiguring our understanding of this man, the world he’s come from, and whether any of this will end happily for any of them. Pearce is surely going to play a role in that outcome.

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The comparison to There Will Be Blood is only strengthened by the camera of DP Lol Crawley, who captures the depth and breadth of even narrow spaces in part due to Corbet’s decision to film in VistaVision, which has not been a regular tool of the trade since the 1960s. The film also benefits from Daniel Blumberg’s disorienting score, which does a little bit for this movie what Jonny Greenwood’s did for that one.

The Brutalist does not need to be constantly compared to one of the greatest films of the 21st century to earn its stripes, but the fact that it deserves these comparisons is telling. Simply put, directors who are not yet 40 don’t know how to make movies like this, yet Corbet does it anyway. He’s lashing out with so much creative energy in all directions that some of it can’t help missing the mark. People will also have their favourite half of this movie, though anyone who prefers the second half to the first is wrong.

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Maybe the second half is not as successful because it’s a task as tall as this building to wrap it all up in a way that’s as engaging and enthralling as the film started. Not everyone gets to end on Daniel Plainview’s “I’m finished.” Fortunately for us, Corbet may just be getting started.

 

The Brutalist opens today in cinemas.

9 / 10