'The Brutalist': Yes, it's that good

Now streaming on (HBO) Max, so this delayed review is actually timely again!

I told you it would take me seven months but I got here in four-and-a-half. (You’re welcome.) The next post will have nothing to do with movies, I promise.

Close your eyes, pretend you don’t already know this post is about ‘The Brutalist’, and tell me what comes to mind when I tell you the following story:

A plucky immigrant disembarks in America, Land of the Free, greeted on arrival by his cousin, a portrait of assimilative success. The cousin gives him a… let’s say “modest” place to stay as he tries to find work, any shitty job that will have him. He makes friends. He makes enemies. He falls prey to various temptations as he slowly but surely works his way up a ladder that may in fact be leading nowhere except his own damnation. In the end, was it even worth it to get off the boat in the first place?

Of course we’re talking about GRAND THEFT AUTO IV, the PS3 era open world masterpiece that sure, has a lot more gunplay than ‘The Brutalist’ (albeit an equivalent number of handjobs) but — and this is important to where I’m going today — the same rare ability to balance Importance with accessibility. This ain’t your grandma’s Holocaust survivor drama!

“László! It’s Attila, let’s go bowling”

You’d be forgiven for, hearing about ‘The Brutalist’ for the first time, assuming it would be exactly that. Hell, the trailer gave me immediate flashbacks to the same headspace I’d found myself in two years earlier, preparing for ‘Tár’ (plug in “Brady Corbet,” “Adrien Brody,” and “2025” below and it’s nearly a one to one):

I wrote 'Tár' off the moment I heard the title. And the poster wasn’t helping, suffused with Oscar Movie™️ self-importance that might as well be written in neon. Todd Field, a venerated filmmaker emerging from sixteen years of cinematic hibernation! Cate Blanchett, a great actor whose assured greatness is frankly boring to talk about at this point! I was fully prepared to watch this a week before the 2023 Academy Awards, post a 3.5 star review on Letterboxd, and move on with my movie-loving life.

‘Tar’ may actually be ‘The Brutalist’’s closest cinematic analogue, and not just because they’re both harder to categorize than their marketing would have implied¹. These are films that suggest utter self-seriousness, while delivering characters and stories far more messily alive than that. I told you about the handjobs. But this movie has [Stefon voice] EVERYTHING:

• architecture porn

• heroin addiction

• Joe Alwyn’s punch-worthy mid-Atlantic diction

• four perfect notes in a score that makes me want to dox the nearest ICE officer

• a star turn for frequently overlooked Doylestown, PA

• discourse-generating scenes in Italian marble quarries

Over the course of three hours that don’t actually feel that long (more on that later), Corbet and Brody chisel what feels like an entire history of László Toth, to the point you wind up convinced — Lydia Tár-style — that the character you just followed is real, and the movie about them a biopic.

And why not! “Biopic” as a movie genre has, over the past ten years, buckled under the weight of brand management. You know exactly what I’m talking about: ‘Straight Outta Compton’, ‘Rocketman’, ‘King Richard’, ‘A Complete Unknown’. Subject-friendly — often subject-worshipping — movies that, in order to secure their subjects’ permission (and frequently music rights!) wind up telling a sanded-down version of their story. Why depict the true messiness of human life when instead you can depict yourself, played by your son, laughing at your own script for the movie ‘Friday’?²

Unmoored from any legal obligations to their subjects, ‘Tár’ and ‘The Brutalist’ are free to do and say whatever they want — something that’s frankly liberating, ironic enough for a movie about an artist who because of his specific patronage (and heritage) is not free to do and say whatever he wants, at least not with his voice.

If anything, I could’ve watched another two hours of this already 3+ hour movie³, filling in the gaps of László’s real-feeling fictional history. Even projected in epic VistaVision, what’s depicted here feels like just a sliver of life Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, have elected to carve out for us to look at. I won’t get into spoilers here, but there’s SO MUCH more I want to know about László. Hardly a ding on the movie! If anything another testament to its richness, how one angle suggests a hundred more just offscreen.

If I haven’t mentioned Adrien Brody much, it’s because he’s that fucking good in this role as to almost disappear entirely. That’s just László! I don’t know who rapper, pop artist, and motivational walker Adrien Brody even IS. You watch László bend metal, dance, bathe, shoot heroin, and you retroactively lose your mind at the idea that Timothée Chalamet was ever a serious contender for Best Actor this winter. “Vat, are you fucking DENSE?” László screams, strung out, bleeding into a cement mixer. From minute one, you are watching a very real Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect, a man who’s already lived six lives by the time you meet him wearily making his way through the passage hold of a ship and into the blinding sunlight of AMERICA, silhouetted by an upside-down Statue of Liberty.

That’s László

There are a million more things to unpack about ‘The Brutalist’, from its across-the-board staggering performances (Alessandro Nicola kills it, especially in the realm of “medium-assimilated” accents) to its impressive budget (how do you shoot what looks like a $100 million movie for ten?) to its timely discussion of Zionism/making Aliyah to its second half narrative swings to its concluding statement I’m not sure I totally agree with (and I’m not sure the movie does either!). I could talk about ‘The Brutalist’ forever⁴, an instant classic that you owe it to yourself to see, however long the journey.

1. Their characters also both share the same initials! Lydia Tár, László Toth… makes u think

2. Okay not totally fair, ‘Straight Outta Compton’’s largely great (especially when it focuses on Eazy-E, who in support of my thesis was the only member of NWA to have died)

3. Probably the first time I’ve felt this way about a 3+ hour movie that isn’t ‘Lord of the Rings’

4. At this point I consider myself something of a Bro-talist