The Brutalist — Surrender, Then Reckoning

Some films you watch. This one admits you, on one condition: surrender first, reckoning after.

A six-story building assembled itself in front of me in a large dark room, in a frame wide enough and tall enough to hold the whole of it, and somewhere in there I stopped composing opinions and just sat. That is the first true thing I can tell you about The Brutalist. Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour immigrant epic arrives in wide release this month trailing a festival run that has already hardened into discourse: the runtime, the intermission, the format, the flap over a few seconds of post-production. The noise is loud enough to do the one thing this movie cannot survive, which is to be met as a position before it is met as an experience. So here is the unfashionable confession. I went in having read nothing and heard nothing. I kept myself clear of all of it on purpose, and I have not stopped thinking about the occasion since. The analysis can come, and it will. But the film insists on an order of operations, and the order is surrender, then reckoning.

Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian-Jewish architect, a survivor of the camps, who lands in postwar America with a cousin’s promise and a reputation worth nothing on this side of the water. He is Bauhaus-trained, a visionary, and he is shoveling coal and sleeping in a shelter. The first movement is the specific humiliation of a man whose genius is a language nobody around him speaks. Then he is discovered, the way the poor are always discovered, which is to say used. Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist, commissions a monument from him and spends the next two hours teaching him the exact exchange rate between a rich man’s patronage and a poor man’s soul. “We tolerate you,” Van Buren tells him, and the whole American transaction lives in those three words. The favor that is also a leash. The welcome that is also a warning.

Brody already has an Oscar for playing a different survivor of the same catastrophe, and the distance between the two performances is the measure of what he has learned since. There is no pleading in this one. Toth does not perform his suffering, not for Van Buren, not for us. Brody plays a man whose interior life has been driven so far underground by what he lived through that it surfaces only in the work: the obsessive correctness of a ceiling height, the refusal to cheapen a material, the fury that comes not when he is insulted but when his building is. Watch what his face does when a patron suggests a cheaper stone. It is the only time the war shows. Toth can absorb any humiliation aimed at his body. The one aimed at the design cannot be borne, and Brody builds the entire character out of that asymmetry: a person who has moved his capacity to be wounded out of his flesh and into his work, because the flesh learned, in a specific place, that being wounded there could kill you.

Pearce is the counterweight, and what he is playing is the grammar of American power, the way it flatters before it owns, the way its cruelty dresses up as generosity. Van Buren is not a villain in the register the genre would hand him. He genuinely admires Toth. He genuinely wants the building. He also cannot imagine the artist as anything but an instrument he has purchased, and Pearce holds those facts in collision without ever letting the man flatten into a cartoon of capital. Felicity Jones, as Toth’s wife Erzsebet, arrives in the second half carrying the film’s conscience and its damage in equal measure, and she does something quietly radical with a part a lesser film would have sainted: she lets Erzsebet see the transaction clearly, name it out loud, and stay anyway, because staying is also survival. The marriage is where the movie keeps its heart. Jones guards it.

Then there is the frame itself, which carries half the case. Lol Crawley shot the picture in VistaVision, a format wide and tall enough to hold the corner of a six-story structure top to bottom in a single shot, and Corbet has been plain that this is necessity, not nostalgia. You cannot photograph architecture, he has said, you can only represent it, and the representation needs a frame built to the scale of the thing. Where you are lucky enough to find it, the film projects in 70mm, and it carries a fifteen-minute intermission written into the script itself: a countdown clock, a family photograph, a held breath. I will say it flat. The format is not separable from the experience. Meet this film on a laptop and you have met a photograph of a cathedral. The cathedral is the point. Daniel Blumberg’s score does the other half of the lifting, brass and dissonance building not an illustration of Toth’s rise and ruin but the weather they happen inside. And the intermission is no indulgence. It is the film insisting you feel its duration as duration, that you sit inside the length of a life the way Toth sits inside the length of his.

Now the reckoning, the part the surrender eventually permits. The second half is harder, colder, and more punishing than the first, by design and at a cost. The early movement has the pull of arrival, a man clawing toward the thing he was made to do. The later movement is the slow education in what the doing will cost him, and Corbet does not flinch from the despair of it, which means there are stretches in the back half where the film becomes a record of attrition rather than ascent. Some viewers will feel the grip loosen there. I felt it loosen. And then comes a closing movement, years later, in a setting I will not describe, that reframes everything the previous three hours have built: a final claim about what a building means, and who gets to say what it meant, delivered with a deliberate interpretive coldness that has split every room it has played in. I will protect it. What I can say is that the coldness is the film declining to console you, and that ending on interpretation rather than emotion is the riskiest thing Corbet does, and the thing people will still be arguing about long after the runtime stops being a story.

About the controversy, since the lazy version is everywhere, the precise version deserves one plain paragraph. A piece of software was used to refine the Hungarian-vowel pronunciation in dialogue the actors had already performed, after conventional re-recording failed to match the energy of the original takes. No English was altered. No emotional performance was generated. Nothing Brody does in the frame was made by a machine. The real question the episode raised was disclosure, not authorship, and a film this committed to the dignity of human craft has earned the distinction rather than the smear. The building was built by hand. So was the performance.

It helps to know who built this, because in some sense the people who built it are inside it. Corbet spent a first career as an actor, and not in comfortable rooms. He was one of the two smiling torturers in Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games, learning from the inside a cold, unblinking way of seeing that treats an audience as a moral participant rather than a customer, and he directs that way now, come by honestly from the other side of the lens. He wrote the film, as he has written all of them, with his wife and constant collaborator Mona Fastvold, a filmmaker herself, with her own forthcoming drama about the eighteenth-century Shaker visionary Ann Lee. Once you know that, the outline of an artist couple inside Laszlo and Erzsebet is not hard to see: two people whose marriage is a shared defense of a vision the world keeps trying to buy cheap. The lightning rod, by Corbet’s own telling, was Vox Lux, the film before this one, whose financing collapsed the night before the cameras were meant to roll, whose backers informed him that a structure he believed in was simply not allowed, and from which he walked away having made, by his own account, nothing at all. The Brutalist is what a person makes after that. It is the wound rebuilt as a cathedral. Laszlo’s humiliations are not invented. They are remembered, one career removed.

This is the work of a thirty-six-year-old director making a beeline for the canon with, almost unfairly, the command to reach it. And it is great in the specific way that lasts: it will not resolve into a single reading. Take it as an immigrant epic, a Jewish reckoning, a parable of American capital, a portrait of a marriage, a claim about art itself, and it holds every one of those at once without ever letting you finish it. There is a room in this film you have not entered, no matter how many times you walk through. That is not vagueness. It is the oldest mark of art built to be returned to. If it reduces to one idea, the idea is that the artist’s fight and the immigrant’s fight are the same fight, a fight for the right to exist, to take up space, to insist that the vision in your head deserves to stand in the world even after the world has told you that you are tolerated, not wanted. Corbet lived that fight while filming this one, and the doubling is in every frame.

I have seen it once. I went in clean and came out altered, and I knew before the lights came up that I would be telling people, years from now, that I saw this one in a theater, the way it was built to be seen. That is not a small thing for a movie to do anymore. It may be the largest. The monument stands. Go stand inside it.