[COLUMN] The Brutalist is a Monument to Its Own Construction | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Brutalist, including a frank discussion of its closing sequence. That said, The Brutalist is worth seeing for anybody with an interest in contemporary or classic American cinema, so feel free to bookmark the piece and come back if you want to see it completely unspoiled.

There is a tendency, when talking about a film like The Brutalist, to assume that it demands a very high-minded level of engagement. The Brutalist is “the most monumental movie of the year”, “a Great American Movie of the old school” and “a new Great American Masterpiece™.” It is one of this year’s major awards contenders. The Brutalist carries itself with the self-importance this implies. Any discussion of The Brutalist threatens to devolve into an academic discussion of film formats.

The film’s subject matter seems to lend itself to such earnest and high-minded conversation. It is a three-and-a-half-hour epic (with intermission) following Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) on his journey to America. There, he finds himself under the patronage of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers that Tóth was an architect in Hungary, and commissions him to design a gigantic community center in the town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

More than that, it is exciting to talk about a movie – any movie – in those terms. If nothing else, The Brutalist has earned it. It was shot on a comparatively tiny budget of “under $10 million” in Hungary because, to quote production designer Julie Becker, “You get a lot more for your money in Eastern Europe.” The production moved in “fits and starts”, with a COVID shutdown so prolonged that it led to major recasting. The making of The Brutalist was an ordeal. It deserves to be considered seriously.

However, the best summary of The Brutalist might come from the cartoon character, Peter Griffin (Seth McFarlane): “It insists upon itself.” That is a line from the animated sitcom Family Guy, in which Peter outlines his objections to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, a film with which The Brutalist is very clearly in conversation. Peter’s wife Lois (Alex Borstein) points out that his criticism is so vague as to be meaningless, but it still resonates. It makes a certain amount of sense.

The Brutalist very firmly insists upon itself. Even more than the cast of Wicked, The Brutalist is quite literally “holding space.” The decision to project the movie on 70mm means that any copy of The Brutalist is a real physical object with definite mass. It takes up 26 reels and weighs 300 pounds. The movie’s intermission is not just an aesthetic affectation, but a structural necessity. At the Irish premiere, the intermission served the dual function of allowing the projectionist to change the reel.

Appropriately enough for a story of an architect trying to fulfil his creative vision, The Brutalist is a monument to its own construction. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” László asks Van Buren at their second meeting, as he attempts to articulate his creative philosophy. Jacques Rivette once argued that “every film is a documentary of its own making.” Any meaningful discussion of The Brutalist inevitably circles back to its construction.

Any review of The Brutalist is required by law to mention that it was shot on the long-defunct format VistaVision, shot on 35mm and then blown up to 70mm. At the premiere that was held at the Irish Film Institute, the introductory statement explained that this was one of only five cinemas in the United Kingdom or Ireland that could show it as intended. The Brutalist doesn’t just ask the audience to accept it as cinema, it demands that they consider it as a constructed object.

The Brutalist repeatedly calls attention to its own artifice. It opens with an overture. The intermission is scored. The two halves of the movie are introduced with title cards. An epilogue set in the 1980s transitions from film to video as the score reconfigures itself for synth, the language of the movie shifting with the time period. That epilogue brings László Tóth to Venice for the first Venice Architecture Biennale. Incidentally, The Brutalist premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

In The Brutalist, form does not follow function. Form is inseparable from function. Befitting its subject, The Brutalist is not a film that conceals its perspective behind an elegant façade. One of the central recurring motifs in The Brutalist is the idea that – for all the bluntness of their exteriors – László’s buildings survived both the literal devastation of war and the more abstract shifting of the cultural moment due to the simplicity of their construction. László’s buildings are concrete and grey, but they last.

This is one of the central metaphors of The Brutalist, the idea that these harsh and unappealing exteriors can conceal true beauty and art. László’s first completed commission in America is a library, where the books are hidden behind wooden paneling. László himself has perhaps constructed a rough outer shell to insulate himself from the racism of his benefactors who enthusiastically remind him that they “tolerate” him and to weather the indignities necessary to complete his vision.

This offers another mimetic prism through which The Brutalist might be understood, fictional author Garth Marenghi’s (Matthew Holness) assertion that he knows “writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Despite unfolding over three-and-a-half hours, The Brutalist is never a movie that is especially subtle in what it is doing and why it is doing it. The film’s bravura opening sequence culminates in an upside down shot of the Statue of Liberty, communicating a central theme while evoking The Godfather, Part II.

The Brutalist doesn’t so much hammer its themes as it constructs its themes in concrete with the certainty that they might weather any potential storm. Indeed, many of the film’s big shocking moments aren’t actually as shocking as they might otherwise have been, because either they are rendering one of the central themes of the movie as actual text in the most literal manner imaginable or they have been lifted directly from one of the movie’s major influences.

There is a moment in the second half of the film where Tóth repeatedly yells one of the films core themes at his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), “They do not want us here!” He does this as the movie indulges in one of its thematically resonant visual motifs, a road or railway track or canal unfolding ahead as an expression of the inexorable march of progress. In case the scene is still too subtle, the car radio plays a speech from John F. Kennedy articulating the idea of American exceptionalism.

It is easy to be cynical about all of this. Peter did frame The Godfather’s self-insistence as a vice. Marenghi is very obviously a parody of a bad writer who is completely lacking in self-awareness. Indeed, there are moments when The Brutalist tips a little bit too far into the sensationalist miserabilism that also marked director Brady Corbet’s work on Vox Lux. There are also moments where it feels like The Brutalist has been preemptively unpacked for its audience, not just insisting upon itself, but insisting upon explaining itself. The Brutalist does the critic’s job for them.

However, for the most part, there is something endearing in all of this. The Brutalist largely gets away with both its insistence upon itself and its complete rejection of even the concept of subtext because it is an achingly and earnestly sincere movie and those facets are an expression of that sincerity. For all the film’s ruthless cynicism about the American Dream, the myth of the melting pot, and the relationship between commerce and creation, it is a love letter to the artistic process.

While it was directed and produced by Brady Corbet, The Brutalist is introduced as a film “by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold.” Corbet’s long-term personal and professional partner, Fastvold is credited on the screenplay for both of Corbet’s previous films, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux. It’s hard not to see some of that dynamic in the relationship between László and Erzsébet, the husband and wife collaborating to navigate a complicated and hostile environment.

Corbet has been quite open that this story of an architect trying to complete his grand design is colored by his own experiences making his own art. “This film is very personal in the sense that it’s about how many obstacles are put in my path and my wife’s path just to bring our projects to life,” he admitted. “This movie should not have taken seven years to get made. But it did — and my cortisol levels are still through the roof.”

This was on Corbet and Fastvold’s minds from the beginning, with Corbet conceding, “when we wrote the screenplay, it was as much from a place of rage as it was from passion. I mean, Mona has described the process as something close to an exorcism. We’ve had experiences where we’ve been exploited, and there’s a real anger to it that’s being channeled into this.” Indeed, the most controversial scene in The Brutalist is an aggressive literalization of that sentiment.

Indeed The Brutalist is expressly about that idea, that the artist is inevitably present in their own work. Reviewing László’s blueprints, Erzsébet remarks, “I’m just looking at you.” The film’s final revelation is that the monument that Van Buren commissioned to himself was actually a stealth expression of László’s love for Erzsébet, the spaces modelled on the two separate concentration camps where they were interned, but this time connected by invisible tunnels.

Again, The Brutalist is not subtle. More than two hours earlier, László stopped just short of stating this outright to Van Buren during that conversation in which he outlined his creative philosophy. To László, his architecture is a way of confronting and reminding the world of what it might otherwise forget. As sentiment fades into memory, only the harsh concrete of his buildings endures as a profound statement of intent. The Brutalist might have been designed by László himself.

Setting aside the personal resonance of the project to its creators, there is something reassuring about the idea of art “insisting upon itself” in the current moment, when so much creative work is reduced to mere “content soup”, drowned in AI slop, or written off for tax purposes. Creatives have always been undervalued in the entertainment industry, but the past few years have been tough for artists, culminating in a series of brutal strikes in late 2023 to assert the value of creative work.

At a time when streaming services will direct writers to “have [a] character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along” and when one of the directors of one of the most successful movies ever made promises a world where viewers can ask AI to generate “a movie starring [their] photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar”, there isn’t really any space for subtlety in expressing the importance of creative vision.

Indeed, it’s noteworthy that throughout The Brutalist, László’s work has a communal aspect to it. His first commission on arriving in Philadelphia is a bowling alley that he most likely doesn’t finish, another example of the film’s somewhat heavy handed symbolism. Van Buren commissions him to build a community center with a library, a gymnasium and a church. (No swimming pool, pointedly.) His career retrospective includes other community-oriented projects. What is cinema but, as Roger Ebert noted, a “communal” artform?

In contrast, the most prominent work by his chief rival, Jim Simpson (Michael Epp), is “a shopping mall”, a monument to consumerism. The construction suffers a setback when Van Buren opts to use his private trains instead of public services. There is a sense in The Brutalist of a crass consumerist entropy that eats away at everything. Indeed, the film’s timely commentary on American culture has only grown more relevant since Corbet and Fastvold started writing the film in 2018.

“My buildings were designed to endure such erosion,” László boasts. This is clearly the intent of The Brutalist, a film designed to weather the “contentification” of media. It is indulgent and perhaps self-important. However, it is undeniably commendable. It insists not only upon itself, but on the very idea of the creative communal cinematic artform.