The Brutalist
Composite Score: 99.6
Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Emma Laird, and Jonathan Hyde
Director: Brady Corbet
Writers: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold
Genres: Drama, History, Epic
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use, and some language
Box Office: $45.15 million worldwide
My take on Watching This Film:
The Brutalist is Brady Corbet’s epic film about a Jewish Hungarian architect who immigrates to the U.S. after surviving the Holocaust and his experiences with the upper echelons of American society as he seeks to make a name for himself in the “Land of Opportunity”. The film stars Adrien Brody in the lead as László Tóth, joined by Felicity Jones as his wife Erzsébet who starts the film still in Europe with their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Guy Pearce as Tóth’s benefactor Harrison Lee Van Buren, and Joe Alwyn as Van Buren’s headstrong and impulsive son Harry. The film follows Tóth from his arrival in America through his early years working for his cousin at a furniture store until he’s discovered by the Van Burens and hired to build a civic center on Harrison’s land in honor of his late mother, which sets in motion events that bring his wife and niece over from Europe but also put him in direct contact with the antisemitism, snobbery, and callousness of the American upper class of the 1950s. The film received wide acclaim, particularly for its performance and its visual style (Corbet revived VistaVision for this film), and it received ten Oscar nominations, winning for Best Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Actor (Brody).
Personally, I don’t believe that this film is the best film of 2024, and I don’t even personally have it in my top ten of the year, but I think that’s probably because of the emphasis I tend to place on story and theme in how I perceive films. There’s no denying that what Corbet accomplishes in The Brutalist is one of the most impressive feats of filmmaking in the 21st century, making a film that feels this big and broad and sweeping on a budget of around $10 million boggles the mind. The performances from everyone in the cast, but especially Brody, Jones, and Pearce, are some of the best of the year, and were it a less stacked year in the supporting categories, I’d probably have been happy to see wins for both Jones and Pearce. As it stands, I’d argue that the weakest performance in the film won, and that’s primarily because we’ve seen this performance from Brody before when he won his first Oscar for The Pianist, a film that’s superior in almost every aspect outside of its director, who is much worse (shoutout Roman Polanski). Nevertheless, Brody’s performance is not my real gripe with this film, and I did enjoy what he was doing even if we have seen it before.
My issue is with the story, the script, and its themes. People have been calling this film the next great American epic, comparing it to the likes of The Godfather and There Will Be Blood, two films that not only look and sound great, but also tell good stories that entertain and have memorable lines. As far as the script for The Brutalist goes, there’s no “Make him an offer he can’t refuse”, no “Look how they massacred my boy”, no “I have abandoned my child”, and certainly no “I drink your milkshake”. It’s lacking the iconic moments that make those other epics so memorable, which makes its three-and-a-half-hour runtime feel just a bit too excessive. Even cutting the film back by forty-five minutes probably would have made this film feel tighter and less insistent. Additionally, there’s the issue of the film’s subject matter. It’s a fictional story about the immigrant experience that makes commentary on American capitalism and the American dream, but it’s also explicitly (if you listened to either of Brady Corbet’s acceptance speeches at the Golden Globes) about the relationship between producers and directors, and it feels like that’s the point of the whole film, mainly because we’ve seen pretty much all of the aspects of the immigrant experience and the flaws of capitalism and the American dream plenty of times before. The aspect of this film that makes it stand out is its choice to allegorize that experience into a parallel for the experience of the director with certain producers. That’s what gives me pause (and also the film’s inability to take a firm stance either way on Zionism in a year when that subject is so charged) – that the director (a straight white man who has worked his whole life in Hollywood as both an actor and director) projected his own experiences onto a marginalized person. It smacks of a more artistic take on Sam Levinson’s highly decried Malcolm & Marie from 2021. And then there’s the symbolism (or lack thereof once the second act rolls around) of Tóth’s heroin addiction and the epilogue that I’ve heard so many different interpretations of that I’m not sure whether it’s the best part of the film or the worst ending of last year, so I can’t fully endorse the film as the outright best of the year.
Strong performances and fantastic visuals earned The Brutalist enough recognition from critics, audiences, and awards bodies to earn it the title of top film of 2024 according to this blog’s formula. Nevertheless, there are a plethora of issues, especially in the film’s writing that hold it back in my personal opinion from deserving said recognition or from deserving the runtime that the director insisted on. It’s certainly a cool cinematic experience and experiment, and I’d encourage you to see it at least once at some point in your life if you enjoy epic films, but don’t expect it to be the best of the best like some have asserted. Currently, you can’t stream this film without buying it, but I’d expect it to hit at least one of the services in the near future if you’d like to catch it outside of the theater.
