"The Brutalist"

   ☆☆☆☆ 

Few movies have ever felt as much like a novel as The Brutalist, a film that defies easy categorization; that saves the revelation of its most important themes for the last few pages—sorry, I mean minutes; and that doesn't shy away from the kinds of moments of introspection that are largely impossible to film. It's a big, sprawling movie that engages the mind more than the heart.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for most people who see The Brutalist—it certainly was a surprise for me—is that it's fictional. The central character of Laszlo Toth feels very much like someone we've known through history, whose story we've read.

Perhaps that's because Toth's story in The Brutalist is such a concise crystallization of the story of American immigrants, and in that regard The Brutalist comes at the most compelling and perhaps the most heartbreaking time in American history to consider all it has to say. After surviving the horrors of World War II and separation from his wife and niece, Hungarian Toth (Adrien Brody) makes the journey to the U.S. and, over time, again becomes what he already was: an architect of grand vision.

The Brutalist is the long, epic story of his life and work, though about halfway through it becomes focused on one project in particular, a project that is so specific it is part of the reason we're astonished to learn that the movie is a fiction. In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Toth crosses paths with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce), who provides both every financial and creative largesse necessary to create a massive, ambitious cultural center.

Divided both into five chapters (including prologue and epilogue) and into halves (thanks to a 15-minute intermission), The Brutalist becomes a tale of obsession and madness—not just Toth's, but the even stranger and darker millionaire Harrison Van Buren, who becomes an inextricable part of Toth's life.

When Van Buren helps Toth bring both his wife (Felicity Jones) and his niece (Raffey Cassidy) to the U.S., nothing goes as planned, and the massive, all-consuming construction project takes over every part of their lives.

The Brutalist surprises with a labyrinthine story that never goes quite as we expect, which helps the film hold our attention for more than three and a half hours. If its central characters, particularly Toth and Van Buren, never quite reveal themselves in satisfactory ways, they do become grandiose, overpowering icons—it is to the film's great credit that we spend the entire running time assuming we are watching fictionalized history. If these characters didn't really exist in the world, they should have, they must have; that's how convincing the movie is, even as it always feels a little hollow at its core. It's hard to know any of these characters, to empathize with their obsessions, or to be emotionally invested. Much as Toth's architecture, they are cold, impersonal, brooding, and huge.

But it's the film's epilogue that clobbers us with a secret the film has been keeping—and rightly so. 

(SPOILER ALERT) 

"No matter what the others try and sell you," a character (I won't say which) tells us as the film's final line, "it is the destination, not the journey." In its final moments, The Brutalist hits us hard with the truth of art and creation: We are left only with the end result, and the rest is for us to determine for ourselves. When we know the truth behind it, the creation takes on a different meaning. So it is with this big, confounding, absorbing film itself.

Viewed January 19, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

1600