Review: The Brutalist (2024)

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist (2024) is one hell of a ride: Sweeping but clunky, overflowing with injustice but inspiring, stupendously long but always attention-seizing. The cinematography, acting, music, production design, and direction are all triumphs but there's more going on here there it might seem.

First, let’s be clear about the word “brutalist.” That adjective is almost exclusively used to describe an architect or a building that is associated with a mid-20^th century art movement known as Brutalism. That word does not refer to “brute” or “brutal” or as commonly used in English, but instead refers to a French term for “raw concrete.”  Concrete is cheap, plentiful, quick to use, and long-lasting and that’s why it is one of the most important building materials of all time. It is commonplace to try to hide that buildings are made of concrete by cladding them in something that’s pretty such as glass or stucco or stone or by detailing them with flourishes made of wood, metal, or foam.

In Brutalism, however, the workaday value of concrete is instead celebrated and made as obvious as possible. Brutalist buildings are not adorned with doodads or decorations of any kind. In fact, they’re usually not even painted so that the raw concrete can be seen for what it is. To Brutalists, this kind of honesty symbolizes the power of telling the truth, with the idea that this truthfulness what makes a building truly beautiful.

This move titled The Brutalist does indeed record the career of an architect who is an advocate for Brutalism who makes a big concrete building that a lot of people think is ugly or weird but then many years later is understood to be a masterpiece. On its surface — and, I think, only on its surface — the movie can be taken on its face to be a lot like Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in which a visionary architect is set upon by a society that doesn’t get what a genius he is.

Supporting that idea is that the film looks like a modernist movie from America’s postwar heyday. It’s formally set up with title cards as having two numbered acts. There is a formal overture, an intermission, and an epilogue. The performances and screenplay feel very much like the late 1940s, with rapid-fire line delivery and swaggering self-confidence. There is a gloriously majestic score emphasizing how important the architect’s ideas must be. It’s even filmed in VistaVision, a throwback technology intended to make movies feel as big and important as possible.

I think some good portion of that, however, is intended ironically. Moreover, some details seem to undercut that interpretation.

A telling detail is how persistently the film broadly exaggerates or even distorts how architects work and how buildings are constructed. There are odd statements and decisions that keep suggesting that this might not be a movie about architecture at all. It’s normal for architects to build a physical model of the building design for their client, but this is usually something that is sized small enough to be able to carry around in taxicab. In this picture, the model is absurdly huge, and is carried around like a coffin by a group of workers who comport themselves precisely like pallbearers. In a key scene, the visionary architect’s design is changed in secret by the contractor, leading to a roaring fight until the problem is resolved by a few pencil strokes and a dubious construction fix. In another scene, the client isn’t convinced that a certain kind of marble is right for the building. Instead of just showing the client a sample of the marble, the architect and client travel all the way to Italy so that the client can press his face to the raw unpolished rock and be instantly converted. By the time this happens, any sense that this movie is supposed to be taken literally is hard to maintain. This movie is about something else, and architecture is just a metaphor.

This is emphasized in that the architect in the film is named László Toth, who is indeed a historical person most famous for an incident involving marble. However, the real-life László Toth is not an architect but a geologist who vandalised Michelangelo's Pietà with a hammer in 1972 in an attempt to be recognized as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.  It is unlikely to be coincidental that the marble used for the Pietà came from the same quarry shown in the film. All this weirdness creates a sense of ambiguity, and occasionally the narrative becomes nearly dreamlike.

This isn’t a movie about a misunderstood architect, or at least it’s not only that. Instead, the movie seems to look closer at some related themes.

One such theme is the exploitation of artists, which is shown in multiple ways. The overt exploitation of the architect by his ultra-rich client/patron is shown in details both large and small — and, ultimately, in horrific physical abuse — but there is also the side story of how the architect is used and then discarded by a family member.

The exploitation of “the other” is just as pronounced. All of the characters are in cultural free-fall following World War II, and the architect and his wife suffer the traumas of concentration camp survivors: Emotional distress, anxiety, drug abuse, alienation. Moreover, there is a prominent focus  — including an actual perspective flip of the Statue of Liberty — on how America grandly claims to be a nation of immigrants while seizing their labor and ingenuity, then keepiug them isolated and impotent. “They don’t want us here” is an ongoing conversation. There are several rapes both seen and implied, and there are other kinds of shocking assaults on body integrity, and both the motives and the reactions of these acts are complex and difficult to articulate.

Finally, the picture emphasizes the paradoxical incompleteness of art as a form of communication. Part of this is that art is so often one directional, in that once the art exists and is displayed, there is often little or no back-and-forth communication the artist and the viewer. Several characters in the picture lose their ability to speak in various ways: Through trauma, through disease, and through physical force. Those characters who can speak often do so with ill intent, or struggle with language barriers, or are threatened for speaking truthfully.

All of these themes are wound up quite tightly in a surprising two-part epilogue. The first part is formally presented as an epilogue, and includes a speech by a new character who claims to be speaking for a mute character. Although she seems completely earnest, the message she gives may or may not be accurate, or may be woefully incomplete. We are not allowed time to resolved this before there is a second epilogue that lasts only for a second or two, and those few seconds are haunting.

We are left there in the dark, greatly moved, and now suddenly reminded of the difficulties of language and meaning and art and of humanity itself.