Epic Drama with Adrien Brody as a Visionary Architect

If you see only one madly ambitious, wildly allegorical movie this year about a fabled architect whose dream is to design buildings that define the future, make that movie “The Brutalist.” I’m saying, in other words, that you should choose “The Brutalist,” the third feature directed by Brady Corbet, over Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” an architect saga that’s diverting for about an hour, until it descends into a folly that’s anything but grand. Why did Coppola, the great retro classicist of the New Hollywood, ever convince himself that he was an avant-garde visionary? “Megalopolis” is a movie that crashes into glittering fragments.

But with “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet goes in the opposite direction. His first two films, the fascist parable “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015) and the pop-star parable “Vox Lux” (2018), had flashes of brilliance amid a sea of indulgence. But “The Brutalist” comes close to being a work of retro classicism. It’s three hours and 15 minutes long, it’s paced with a pleasing stateliness and overflows with incident and emotion — and it spins out the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who journeys from Budapest to America after World War II, as if Corbet were making a biopic about a real person.

If the protagonist’s name sounds familiar, that’s because Laszlo Toth was the Hungarian-born Australian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972. That Corbet would name his hero after this nutcase sounds like an inside joke, but to the extent that the reference has resonance, it’s meant more seriously. It’s the film’s way of suggesting that a powerful creator is always, in certain ways, a destroyer.

I may be alone in not having been crazy about Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning performance in “The Pianist.” To me, he gawked through that role, and the movie itself mostly sat there. But in “The Brutalist,” Brody plays another wayward Holocaust survivor — László arrives on a boat, passing through Ellis Island — and his performance, even at its quietest, is suffused with tumultuous feeling.

Speaking in a thick accent, Brody, at first, makes László dour and tentative and seemingly rather harmless: a desperate refugee just keeping his head down and trying to carry on. From the start, though, there’s nothing quaint about the filmmaking. Corbet gives us a riveting side-angle shot of the Statue of Liberty as László emerges from the ship’s dank and teeming interior. This is followed by a sex scene that’s jarring (not because László hires a prostitute, but because Corbet films their encounter with a touch of hardcore explicitness). “Your face is ugly,” she says. “I know it is,” says László. Their encounter hints at the life force that’s buried in him, and so does something else, in a perverse way. László suffered a broken nose, and during the passage to America took heroin to quell the pain. He still shoots it up and, as it turns out, he’ll be a secret (functional) junkie for the rest of the movie. This speaks to something in him that’s both self-centered and self-destructive.     

He has come to Pennsylvania to find his footing by staying with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a snake-oil smoothie who has his own custom furniture shop. He puts László up in a spare room in the back of the store, and for a while László forms a homespun unit with Attila and his WASPy wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), who turns out to be the film’s first signifier of treachery.

Before long, they get a furniture commission: Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), the rich-kid son of a local tycoon, wants to take the dowdy old reading room used by his father and renovate it into a state-of-the-art library. (It will be a surprise gift.) László is just the man to do it. At this point, we’re still vague on his background (filling in details gradually is a Corbet touch), but the library László designs, with shelves hidden by diagonally unfolding slats, a gleaming skylight, and a lounging chair in the middle that looks modern enough to have been designed by Mies van der Rohe, adds up to a stunning vision of architectural beauty.

When Harry’s father, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), arrives at the estate and sees what’s been done to his beloved reading room, he erupts in fury. László and Attila are thrown out of the house and don’t even get their full payment. But it turns out that Van Buren just likes to control everything (and was in a state because his mother was dying). The new library is a landmark of design (it gets a spread in Look magazine), and Van Buren soon requests a meeting with László. He wants to pay him, and more than that he wants to partner with him. To build a building. To design the future.

Pearce is often a riveting character actor, but it’s been a long time since he popped in a role the way he does here. In thick wavy hair and a mustache, speaking with a booming stentorian bluster that’s plummy and irresistible, he’s like Clark Gable playing Charles Foster Kane. The relationship between László and Van Buren is many contrasting things at once: artist/patron, immigrant Jew/American blue blood, vassal/exploiter, and, ultimately, something much darker. “I find you intellectually stimulating,” says Van Buren, fixing his fascinated gaze on László. Rarely has a compliment carried such unsettling overtones.  

For all of “The Brutalist’s” meaty sprawl, Corbet lets us know, in ways big and small, that he’s making a bold-statement art film. The opening credits are the most flamboyantly austere since “Tár.” The film is divided into chapters with titles like “The Enigma of Arrival,” and there’s an intermission, programmed for 15 minutes, accompanied by a modernist solo piano performance. For the first half, though, it’s mostly a tale of success, as we learn that László was a noted figure in Hungary — a brutalist designer out of the Bauhaus school. His blocky concrete buildings were audaciously new and built to last, and that’s just what Van Buren wants him to build here: a combination auditorium, gymnasium, library and chapel, made of concrete and Italian marble, that will be a luxe monument in the Bucks County borough of Doylestown. It will cost $850,000 (a sum beyond a king’s ransom in the ’50s).

The film’s second half opens with the arrival of László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who is in a wheelchair, the result of osteoporosis caused by the famine she suffered in a concentration camp. László has been pining for her, but Jones plays her with a forceful blast of Old World ego that hits the film like a slap of reality. The marriage is no oasis, and from this point on life for László will be complicated.

The drama of the building’s construction feels inspired, in equal measure, by “The Fountainhead” and “There Will Be Blood.” It’s not just a building. It’s an American crusade, fraught with beauty and peril. The funds keep running out; László’s willingness to sacrifice his own salary is the first sign that he’s getting in too deep. His niece, Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), has come over with Erzsébet, and when Van Buren’s son Harry takes a forceful shine to her, that’s a sign of trouble. As for the relationship between László and Van Buren, it becomes an increasingly confrontational symbiosis, culminating in their visually spectacular visit to the marble mines of Italy, where Van Buren commits a crime that’s both horrific and intensely metaphorical.

Maybe a bit too metaphorical. What is “The Brutalist” ultimately about? It’s an echt-American tale of immigration and ambition, and of what it means to be an artist. But it’s also a tale of what it means to be Jewish in a world that approaches Jews with supreme ambivalence. This aspect of the film feels overstated, if only because the era it’s set in was such a powerful age of assimilation. It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, “The Brutalist” lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough.