26 rolls of 70mm film, weighing around 150 kilograms, were shipped to Venice for the world premiere of The Brutalist. The film runs for 215 minutes, minus a quarter-hour intermission that splits it into two chapters. The Brutalist is a powerful American novel in film form, an epic that seeks to explore an entire era.
At this year’s Venice Film Festival, the new film by Brady Corbet (Vox Lux) marks the first milestone in the competition. It invites you to rub up against it, to work on it and to take a stand. “What do you think of The Brutalist?” may not become a standard for flirting over espresso and Aperol, but it should be. A film like this – with all its strengths and weaknesses – is not released every day.
The Brutalist begins with a rebirth after World War II
After Oppenheimer, this time we have a fictional biography with a monumental image format and an equal length before us. Corbet uses his texture (the VistaVision format from the 1950s) and his material (film) like the architect of a brutalist building uses his bare concrete walls and clear lines.
The Brutalist opens with a flickering in the dark, it feels like a birth – or a resurrection from the dead. László Tóth (Adrien Brody) digs his way through the belly of a ship into the blinding daylight. A golden torch slides through the frame. The Statue of Liberty welcomes the Hungarian Jew to the United States of America in 1947. László escaped the Holocaust in Europe. Now he wants to start a new life in Philadelphia.
While he waits to be reunited with his long-lost wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), he makes a living in the city of brotherly love in the furniture store of his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola). Attila is commissioned to remodel the library of the businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). It is supposed to be a birthday surprise for the spoiled son (Joe Alwyn) for his father. A welcome challenge for László, because In his homeland he was a celebrated architect. The bond between artist and patron is establishedor should we say: the chains.
The comparisons to The Godfather and There Will Be Blood are not entirely accurate
In the first reactions from Venice, this story has drawn comparisons to There Will Be Blood and The Godfather, which I can certainly understand. The script by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold is set in the same era as the Godfather films, while the duo of characters conjures up memories of Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday. Van Buren is portrayed as a self-made man. He erects his monument on a huge green hill behind his villa. He builds his own “City upon a Hill”, to use the biblical image that has been used for decades to describe the USA’s sense of mission.
Adrien Brody’s László Tóth, on the other hand, has been robbed of his foundations and injects himself with drugs to relieve himself. He is one of those people mentioned on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Send them to me, the homeless, driven by the storm …” And like in The Godfather or There Will Be Blood, he will experience the goodness of American capitalism.
The Brutalist, however, feels different from the pastoral epics of Coppola and Anderson. Especially in the first half, the film buzzes with a spirit and improvisational spirit that I would rather place in independent cinema or European arthouse. When László climbs on a dockside crane high above the coal-dust-smeared ground on one of his jobs, you can literally smell freedom. This is more Martin Eden than Michael Corleone. This makes the film seem sometimes disjointed, but always fresh. In fact, the 200 non-stop minutes trickle through the projector faster than you would expect given this subject or this director.
Guy Pearce provides the biggest laughs and moments of shock
Former actor and current director Brady Corbet narrated his first two films, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, with an exaggeratedly serious auteur style. As if his time with Haneke on the set of Funny Games US had rubbed off on him. The Brutalist is more permeable.
Adrien Brody’s natural acting loosens up the whole film, he takes you by the hand and drags you across the Atlantic to Philadelphia in one go. But the biggest laughs and moments of shock belong to the fantastic Guy Pearce as Van Buren. He adorns himself with culture and beauty, but moves so stiffly through the scenery that as if he had to put on a human suit in the morningso that no one sees his true face.
It is only in the second chapter that The Brutalist falters slightly, as Felicity Jones’ casting is either a joke that someone has to explain to me, or a sad miscast. She plays Erzsébet, scarred by persecution and the post-war odyssey, about as naturally as Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury. But you can overlook that. The Brutalist approaches the bulk of its enormous demands without breaking under the weight.
The Brutalist is not a film for the super-rich
Despite all comparisons, The Brutalist a unique position in the current film landscape. You could probably write a screenplay about how Corbet and Fastvold pulled off their major project over seven years, several fickle financiers and a pandemic. But essentially, The Brutalist is already that film.
The obvious model for this is not The Godfather or There Will be Blood, but The Fountainhead. In the novel, Ayn Rand paints a portrait of her ideal American: an innovative architect, a man who can work with his hands and his brain, and who does not back down an inch from his artistic vision. Thanks to a financier, he builds a skyscraper that leaves all doubters and conformists in the dust. It is a story that would please Harrison Van Buren, just as it pleases Elon Musk and other super-rich people. The Brutalist tells its own story, but not for Musk, but for the rest of the world.
The Brutalist does not yet have a German distributor or cinema release and that should change as soon as possible.