Produced with a small budget of less than $10 million, shot on VistaVision, which has been incredibly rare since the 1960s, and with a runtime of 215 minutes, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is an ambitious cinematic epic that’s masterful and inspirational. Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn, not a minute is wasted in the robust story about a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and travels to the U.S. to start a new life.
Brody plays László Tóth, who leaves his wife Erzsébet Tóth (Jones) in the aftermath of World War II, she’s stuck at the Austrian border with their niece. László time in the U.S. begins with him living with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who is a furniture maker in Pennsylvania. The cousins are hired by Harry Lee (Alwyn), the son of wealthy businessman Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce), to design and build an exquisitely unique library in the Van Buren home.
While Van Buren was initially angry about the change, he ends up having an appreciation of László’s work, and that changes the course of László’s life.
Spanning 30 years, The Brutalist explores years of trauma in the Holocaust, assimilation, anti-semitism, and uses brutalist architecture to examine parallels between artistic expression and the immigrant experience.
“I think it’s fascinating that 75 years later it still is such a controversial style of architecture,” Corbet told Yahoo Canada in Toronto, speaking about the brutalist style.
As Corbet explained, the film was written during Donald Trump’s first term as U.S. President, a time when there was an executive order to “make federal buildings beautiful again,” meaning the destruction of federal buildings designed outside of the classical style, including brutalist architecture.
“When a new building is erected, everyone’s first instinct is to hate it and there seems to be a similar response in communities with their new neighbours,” Corbet said. “They have different traditions, they have different heritage and the community wants them thrown out.”
“The immigrant experience and the artistic one are linked. I mean, the film is about an artist fighting for his right for the project to exist, and also him fighting for his right to exist in this community.”
Combination of minimalism and maximalism
Following the death of Scott Walker, a frequent collaborator with Corbet who the writer/director dedicates the film to, musician and composer Daniel Blumberg was responsible for the intoxicating score of The Brutalist. Using rich sounds, Blumberg’s work really enhances the psychological impact of the film, even working with what Corbet described as a “pathetically small budget.”
“I didn’t have to think twice about who would be best to step into Scott’s shoes,” Corbet said. “Daniel has a very different approach than Scott did, but he also works with Scott’s co-producer, Pete Walsh, and so it was a very soft landing for me to finish the film with a lot of the same people that I’ve always finished these movies with.”
“Daniel is an improviser and wrote many, many themes and then worked with horns and open piano and prepared piano to achieve this sort of gargantuan sound. … And tubas as well, which we were using a lot of. What’s funny is that there’s kind of no difference between two tubas and 10 tubas, it’s just a big sound, and if it’s recorded properly, it takes up a lot of space. … [The score] represents what the whole movie represents, which is this combination of minimalism and maximalism, when it was actually made with very modest means.”
‘Subverting expectations’ of celebrities in films
While Brody’s performance in The Brutalist is incredibly moving, piercing in his portrayal of László Tóth, one of the most interesting elements of the film is how Corbet introduces Jones’ character Erzsébet. Coming onto the screen well into the film, Erzsébet doesn’t fall into any of the tropes of the woman left behind while the man tries to start a better life.
“I really love subverting expectations in terms of how the films deal with celebrity,” Corbet said. “I love how Hitchcock handled Janet Leigh in Psycho, … no one saw it coming that she was only in the first 20 minutes of the film. … When I made Vox Lux, it’s about an hour into the movie before Natalie [Portman] shows up, even though she is the lead of the picture.”
“A movie is a roller-coaster and some of them just feel too safe. I want films to constantly be developing. … We build these films to really engage and surprise audiences, but also it was just the most effective way of feeling his yearning for her. That she’s sort of this spectre in the first half of the film and then finally when she arrives she’s also not at all what you expect, and she’s not in the situation that you’re anticipating.”
Difference between art and content
That desire to subvert expectations also comes through in the way Corbet treats The Brutalist audience. Yes, the runtime is longer than most films, and the technology used to shoot The Brutalist was incredibly specific. But more importantly Corbet certainly doesn’t spoon-feed the audience with information, telling them how to interpret his film. It’s something that’s becoming more rare in movies.
“I just think that audiences have never been savvier,” Corbet said. “I feel like viewers, they pick up on absolutely everything and I try to make films that operate according to a sort of poetic logic, for me they’re more like music than a traditional historical biopic, for example.”
“I want to feel that a film lives on in the imagination long after it’s over, and there are too many films that I see that, when they’re over, they’re truly over. You never think about them ever again. I think that’s the difference between a work of art and content.”
The Brutalist will be released in Toronto Dec. 25, moving to theatres in other markets in January