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Rating: “I would have appreciated it more if it had been an hour shorter.”
No, if anything, it's the exact opposite. “The Brutalist” by Brady Corbet works precisely because of its cyclopean dimensions, that three-hour and 35-minute runtime (with a 15-minute intermission) that might intimidate and deter many. A counter-history of the American dream that manages to hold crucial aspects of the stars and stripes society together in a compact and even minimalist story, if you will.
Immigration, the acceptance or rejection of the foreigner, capital and its ossifications, the building of a civilization through its sites, buildings as eternal symbols, but also the obsession with creation, the suffering and total dedication required by art, the mutual deceptions between patrons and architects/artists. The unrestrained ego of a man who battles life to ultimately create an immortal work that redeems him from all his faults, that erases all the suffering.
The Jew from Budapest
The story of László Tóth is one of deportation and diaspora, of escape and (only imagined) rebirth in a new world that at first may seem better, brighter. The Jew is treated like all other immigrants, his merits in the field of architecture only hinted at here and there; in the new world he is a nobody. He ends up shoveling coal, living in a dormitory. But a capitalist notices him, Harrison Lee Van Buren, and from that moment all doors seem to open. But it's just an illusion. He remains a dog, a beggar who “speaks like a shoeshine boy” and will soon rebel against “the hand that fed him.”
The whims of capitalism
Monumental (in terms of script) is the character of Van Buren. A stern Guy Pearce embodies the contradictions of the tycoon who has everything but is poor in spirit, chasing that one genuine affection in his life (his mother) and believing he can buy immortality with money. He appreciates the artist's genius but somehow hates him, envies him. After seducing and contracting him, he subjects him to the unpredictable fluctuations of his mood and business, abandons and reclaims him, rapes his soul and body.
Stuff from another time
A colossal building (that’s the project) for a film that mimics its gigantism. Three hours and 35 minutes, because the audience must crave that building, it has to become somewhat of an obsession for them as well. In the theater, we must feel all the weight and effort of creation; no shortcuts are allowed. Corbet asks us to suffer with him and László Tóth in the almost trans-human process that is necessary to deliver an immortal work to posterity. Whether it’s the Van Buren building or the film itself. An obsession with ideas that clash with the hardships of real life, the need to reconcile ideals and contingency that brings the architect several times to the brink of the abyss.
A film that dares such gigantism for such a conceptual and uncompromising script is something now almost unique in the landscape of major studios. Stuff worthy of Herzog.
The artist's consumption
In the face of a vast Adrien Brody are gathered all the sufferings of the human race, in the highest sense of the term. Hunger, libido, the absence of his wife, indigence, physical pain, heroin addiction, subservience to power, the demiurgic necessity of creating what can give him immortality. But also the need to endure hordes of vermin and small men (Van Buren’s son and many others) who exercise over him a part of the capitalist power. An artist who becomes almost a monster because creation is beyond human.
The deceived power
A script that works beautifully on various levels of interpretation, without ever being unnatural. Every passage, every character, every dialogue carries with it a double meaning, a symbolic embodiment that embraces the entire sense and history of the nation. A counter-history, because in the end, a greatness seems to emerge that is not truly wanted and understood by those at the top, but is the child of inspiration coming from below, from outside, and that the advocates (financiers) of those works hadn’t even fully understood. The greatness of the United States is not generated so much by a precise will of the established power, but is the “illegitimate” offspring of those many immigrants who apparently had to obey the power, yet in truth used it to realize their vision. A very strong claim.
The persistence of the vision
Everything falls perfectly into place in Corbet's directorial style, granting us long, slow shots, because we must grasp the geometries of the soul as well as those of architecture. But as if in a counterpoint, after all the patience required by creation, the final work is almost taken away from us, never emphatically shown because maybe, in the end, all that torment only aimed to return to man the warmth of an embrace with the wife long distant.
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