The Brutalist review: Ambitious film chases bold truths - with one glaring omission

Brady Corbet's Oscar-nominated drama is an admirable work of sweeping ambition but never reaches its true potential

Adrien Brody, left, and Guy Pearce star in The Brutalist. Photo: A24

It's hard not to root for The Brutalist. A monumental effort from director Brady Corbet, this is filmmaking at its most idealistic of the form – massive in ambition and pretension (necessary twin sides of the same coin) – a labour of love and a deliberate anachronism made for an era when three-hour epics made without green screens or CGI were a more everyday sort of miracle.

The film has been a rousing success since it was first screened to generational raves at the Venice Film Festival in September. It’s grossed more than $30 million on a $10 million budget, won a host of awards and is a favourite to win several at the coming Academy Awards – lead actor Adrian Brody is most likely to win after turning in the best work of his career and some of the best of the century.

But not everything is as it seems. Corbet, 36, revealed in an interview this week that he’s broke – scraping by off money cobbled together from odd jobs he took to stay afloat as he crafted his passion project. No one pays you to show up to award shows, he explains. Heck, you barely get paid to make your masterpiece. It’s a story that mirrors the one he tells in his own film – the tale of a struggling architect named Lazlo Toth (Brody) who fights for decades to build his own masterwork in an America that barely accepts him.

Corbet’s real-life villain is amorphous – a soulless, vacuous industry that rarely rewards integrity. Lazlo’s fictional villain embodies those same traits, but is more obvious and more charming – taking the form of a mid-20th century American millionaire industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).

At first, Harrison seems to be a kindly benefactor. His first proper interaction with Lazlo finds him with his tail between his legs – ashamed that he didn’t recognise the genius of a man he had once fired with fury until the work he’d done for him started to generate positive press. Harrison attempts to right that wrong, hiring Lazlo to build a massive community building near his home with a design like no other.

Lazlo is wary of basically everyone – even himself. A survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, he’s a Jewish Hungarian immigrant in search of an American dream he never fully believes in. He’s escaped fascism and is now beholden to the subtle evils of capitalism, which begins with promises of prosperity and freedom but exists to suck the soul out of him for the benefit of lesser men whom their system has deemed great.

Harrison is one of those lesser men, and he knows it. His self-worth is built on his vast wealth but he’s unsatisfied by it, instead attempting to co-opt the greatness of others. The poison within him comes out the more of Lazlo he attempts to possess – a thirst that grows more vampiric with time. His is an identity built on subjugation and spiritual colonisation, one Lazlo never fully submits to.

Lazlo’s Jewishness is central to his character. He’s keenly aware that, because of his ethno-religious identity, those around him view him as unwanted other. He’s a man of faith but he struggles at times to maintain his connection to God in the face of his great suffering. And at regular points in the film, we’re overtly reminded of the founding of a Jewish state called Israel, which his family members believe is their true home and the only place they’ll be accepted – something Lazlo personally rejects for much of the film.

While Lazlo’s story is a work of fiction, it takes heavy inspiration from the real brutalist architects of the 20th century, many of whom trained in the Bauhaus in Germany before the Nazis shut it down in 1933. They created works that were both harsh but hopeful, and utilitarian but stylish in their deceptive simplicity. In real life, many of them came to America and many ended up in Israel, with Brutalist architecture having since become a draw card (of those allowed to return there, anyway) of cities such as Tel Aviv.

The Brutalist is a long film – a feature, not a flaw. In cinemas, it runs nearly four hours long (three hours and twenty minutes at home) thanks to its mandatory intermission. The first half is still starry-eyed, ending as Lazlo’s dream building seems all but inevitable, and he and his long-lost wife are set to be reunited. The second half confronts the darkness the first lets you ignore. Some critics have said that the film would only be a masterpiece if it just stopped before the intermission, an opinion akin to saying Romeo & Juliet should have ended after the balcony scene.

It's long, but it’s never boring. The cinematography – filmed on the '60s technology Vistavision – is sumptuous and considered, making the most of the film’s copious long cuts and wide scenery shots. The performances, particularly those of Brody, Pearce, and Felicity Jones (who plays Lazlo’s wife), are layered and engrossing. It’s a world you won’t want to leave, though one you may not entirely be satisfied by.

This is a film adorned in truth – truth about art, humanity and society. In it, power is the only true currency that matters, and evil is infectious and pervasive. Corbet has stated that he made the film as a rejection of the American dream. He wanted to show the dark side of that promise – telling a story of those who failed to find it and were forced to leave, reinforcing the latent greatness of its hero to hammer home the value he could have brought had society been as accommodating as it advertises.

From start to finish, the film offers his alternative plainly – Israel, a place where Jews can supposedly live in peace and prosperity, the home that was promised to them. It can be argued that the film presents things objectively, never endorsing Zionism but merely presenting it as a fact of history, and one open to interpretation. But more important than its objectivity is its deliberate omission – never once mentioning the word Palestine, nor the plight of the Palestinian people.

At the end of the film, Lazlo’s niece gives a speech at the Israeli Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale honouring her uncle, in which she says that we’ve had it all wrong – it’s the destination that matters, not the journey. That can be read as an echo of Lazlo’s own hopes – that his life’s work was worth all that struggle. But it can also be read as subtly Machiavellian – the ends justify the means, and the dream of Israel was worth the hundreds of thousands of people killed or displaced to build it.

It's a deeply unsatisfying ending. Let me propose another: in it, we see Lazlo has built his greatest Brutalist masterpiece in Tel Aviv and, as he stares at it, the shot begins to reverse. We then see a time-lapse video that goes back to the building’s construction and then back further to the Palestinians who had been living there before. Maybe we watch them be killed and ethnically cleansed from the homes their families held for millennia, as their orange trees burn. Or perhaps they fast-forward to today, where the bodies of children are still being pulled from the rubble in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war, 70km away.

In this version, we’d see the darker truth the film is unable to engage with – as Ta Nahesi Coates writes in The Message: "Your oppression will not save you; being a victim will not enlighten you."

Even those who went through the Holocaust can enact comparable evils on others. Now that would make this the truly bold work full of grand statements it strives to be.