A New American Classic That’s Arrived Just In Time
Post-war society can be a war zone even without all the collateral damage. Havoc is further wracked if your very existence is a silent arrow pointing toward why the war in question started in the first place. Victim blaming is a casualty of warfare and I suppose in that sense, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist exemplifies that war is never over. Battles have been won, enemies slaughtered but the wars themselves have never been won. Victory isn’t bittersweet. It’s just really short-lived.
The first time we see Adrien Brody’s Laszlo Toth, we see him from behind in the darkness with others just like him eventually making their way towards the light. A Hungarian Holocaust survivor, his plan to rebuild his life in Pennsylvania marks the beginning of the end. A former architect who is now shoveling coal, he works hard and endures indigeneity and poverty whilst developing a dependent addiction to heroin. Wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce) finds his initial firing of Laszlo who was attempting to renovate his study and library at the request of Harrison’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) to be a mistake as Laszlo’s vision is lauded by the architectural community. He rehires Laszlo to construct a community center in honor of his late mother and thus begins a decades-long business relationship that is the slow-burning dehumanization from a master to his puppet.
Laszlo’s wife and niece Erzsebet and Zsofia (Felicity Jones & Raffey Cassidy) eventually are reunited with Laszlo through Harrison’s influential contacts. Erzsebet relies on a wheelchair due to osteoporosis and Zsofia has become fully mute. Laszlo attempts to rehabilitate all of their traumas by giving himself fully to the possibility of a better life by completing Harrison’s project but Erzsebet sees how Harrison and everyone around him uses and judges Laszlo. Years of antisemitic resentment finally come full circle at a party in Carrara Italy. Laszlo and Harrison both get very drunk and after wandering deep in a quarry, Harrison mocks Laszlo and shows his dominance over him with the most evil of actions that can be inflicted on another person. The way this scene is shot couldn’t be more morally admirable. It’s very still, very horrifying, very quiet, and uncomfortably lingering. It takes a minute for audiences to realize what is happening and is necessarily haunting.
“When dogs get sick, they often bite the hand of those who fed them until they mercifully put them down.” Harrison’s declaration of ownership towards a weakened Lazslo breaks him completely and he lashes out at his mostly disobedient team upon returning to work. Erzsebet sees the truth in plain sight and takes matters into her own hands just as she regains her limited ability to walk leading to a most heart-racing confrontation with Harrison as he hosts a business dinner.
I worried that I might have let my breath escape past my lips when I initially saw The Brutalist at the Venice Film Festival but all other audiences felt the same way. The Brutalist couldn’t have come out at a more important moment. The vast ocean between reckoning and reclamation has never been more apparent than as it is shown here. Brody delivers a career-best, even exceeding The Pianist in a performance that couldn’t be more different despite the character and film's supposed similarities. The gravity of Pierce’s work shouldn’t come as a surprise to me but I just can’t imagine casting anyone in a role with how Harrison is written. He’s so phantom like and a fraud at the same time and Pierce showcases Harrison’s many insecurities nested in an inner volt of pure evil. Jones is a grounding force of clarity against the backdrop of a society no one will eventually recognize and therefore see all too clearly. Isaach de Bankole is masterful as a longtime friend of Laszlo, whose friendship ends when Laszlo lashes out and fires him as a defense mechanism for being unable to verbalize Harrison’s dominance over him. Mayor Of Kingstown’s “Iris” Emma Laird is an unstoppable force of fear and fury as the wife of Laszlo’s cousin who initially takes him in. Laird is only on screen for 6, maybe 7 minutes but her presence shadows the rest of The Brutalist and the way she uses her body language to shadow her character’s agenda is spine-chilling.
The Brutalist is nearly 4 hours long. It had an intermission at Venice. I don’t know if A24 will provide one when it screens nationwide at the end of December. Having just been nominated for 7 Golden Globe nominations and declared one of the year's best, The Brutalist is a new American classic that’s arrived just in time for a frightening new era. We need more films like The Brutalist and the final words of Corbet’s vision couldn’t ring more true. It’s a reminder we need more than ever.
Hwang, J. [Jesse Hwang]. (2024, October). The Brutalist (2024). PosterSpy. https://posterspy.com/posters/the-brutalist-2024-2/
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