At last, Vermonters have a chance to see the winner of the Venice International Film Festival’s Silver Lion and the Golden Globe Award for Best Drama. With 10 Academy Award nominations, director Brady Corbet’s immigrant story is a safe bet for your Oscar pool.
But will locals hasten to the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, the Majestic 10 in Williston or Essex Cinemas to catch The Brutalist before the Oscars? If the film’s three-and-a-half-hour run time puts you off, bear in mind that it includes a 15-minute intermission.
The deal
1947. Hungarian Jewish couple László (Adrien Brody) and Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) Tóth have been forcibly separated by the war. While Erzsébet shelters in Europe with their young niece (Raffey Cassidy), László manages to get passage to the U.S. In Pennsylvania, he takes a job making furniture for his cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who has married an American and assimilated.
Deeply isolated, László corresponds with Erzsébet and struggles to fund the heroin addiction he acquired after an injury. He’s a Bauhaus-trained architect who designed public buildings in Budapest, but those skills are of little use now — until the son (Joe Alwyn) of a wealthy industrialist hires László to renovate his father’s library as a surprise gift.
Self-made patriarch Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) doesn’t like surprises. He chases László away. Then, fancying himself a connoisseur of the arts, Van Buren realizes what he has on his hands and offers his patronage to the now-unhoused architect.
Living in Van Buren’s guest house, commissioned by him to build a monumental community center, László finally has the powerful connections he needs to reunite his family. But at what price?
Will you like it?
I went into The Brutalist with memories of being disappointed by Corbet’s 2018 breakout feature, Vox Lux. Like this one, that film was cowritten with Mona Fastvold, supplemented fiction with found material such as news footage and made big statements about America. But the voice-over narration of Vox Lux rendered its messaging hopelessly heavy-handed. The movie was an ambitious attempt to unite documentary relevance with dramatic immediacy, but — for me, anyway — nothing about it worked.
The Brutalist is the opposite — everything works. There’s no narration, and the dialogue is naturalistic and sometimes downright brilliant. The performances are big, mostly in a good way. Most importantly, Corbet immerses us in the Tóths’ plight from the very first scene and uses bold visual and stylistic choices to keep us riveted all the way through.
The movie was shot in VistaVision, a higher-resolution widescreen format invented in the 1950s. While we can’t see The Brutalist in IMAX locally, its vivid, vintage look still justifies a theatrical outing.
In the early scenes, Corbet conveys the chaos of postwar Europe by keeping the action very close up, avoiding establishing shots. We don’t know László is shipboard until he gets his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty — and even then, he sees it at an angle that is as jarring and disorienting as Daniel Blumberg’s score. Up to that moment, the architect hasn’t been sure he’s safe. But is he, really? Even when Corbet eventually unfurls wide, magnificent vistas — such as an Italian marble quarry — he keeps us watchful and on edge, much like his protagonist.
Like There Will Be Blood, The Brutalist revolves around a series of confrontations between two archetypal American characters, here an artist and a capitalist. Both have nuances that make them compelling: László is sensitive and talented but also sometimes irascible and feckless, while Van Buren is brutish and entitled but also sentimental and insecure.
Brody and Pearce do full justice to these roles, their anti-chemistry lighting up the screen. Jones also more than holds her own, giving Erzsébet a fierce, articulate determination that complements her husband’s quieter stubbornness. When the protagonists of A Real Pain (see sidebar) speak with reverence of their Polish refugee grandmother, one imagines she might have been a little like this.
Sure, when you strip The Brutalist down to its essence, the message isn’t subtle. One might even call it a creative’s John Wick: a fantasy of vengeance on every moneyman who ever tried to water down your vision. The use of the La Bionda song “One for You, One for Me” in the end credits drives that point home, echoing the old movie industry saw “One for them [the studio], one for me [the artist].”
At this point in history, however, it’s hard to dispute the relevance and power of a film about how capitalism tramples on art and America doesn’t welcome outsiders. Like László’s designs, The Brutalist combines brute force and elegance into a structure built to stand the test of time.
If you like this, try…
Vox Lux (2018; Tubi, rentable): Corbet’s previous effort, about a teen singer who rockets to stardom after witnessing a school shooting, does feature a standout Natalie Portman performance.
A Real Pain (2024; Playhouse Movie Theatre, Hulu, rentable): Jesse Eisenberg’s road movie about American cousins on a Jewish heritage tour is a natural companion to The Brutalist, exploring how the trauma of the Holocaust filters down to younger generations of the diaspora.
To a Land Unknown (2024): Speaking of the refugee experience: This acclaimed thriller about two Palestinians in Athens isn’t streaming yet, but you can see it on Sunday, February 16, 8 p.m., at the White River Indie Film Festival in White River Junction.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
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