The Brutalist Review: Adrien Brody dazzles in soaring, incongruous post-war parable

♏But this surprise by Van Buren’s children, Harry (a scene-stealing, viper-like Joe Alwyn) and Maggie (Stacy Martin), doesn’t initially fare well with him. He throws Tóth out of the house. It’s only when a laudatory notice about the library’s swanky design at a journal pops up, furthermore complimenting him, Van Buren calls back the architect. He tasks him with building a massive community center where townsfolk could congregate. As an initially sceptical Tóth buries himself in the work of several years, the film punctuates with letters from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he got forcibly separated at the borders. Scattered throughout are also archival footage from the era.

In its first part, The Brutalist♎ is richly absorbing, as enrapturing as submission to an artwork can be, wholly enveloping. Corbet sucks you into the world with lush, expansive scale and skill. Tóth builds himself as one with a steely shell. Electrifying scenes, a standout one when the architect is first called back to the Buren estate and meets close-knit elite circles, point out the exclusionary, deeply anti-Semitic atmosphere. Van Buren and his coterie may lob several humiliations at the architect but he doesn’t let them intrude. He remains aloof, fearless in his sprawling vision. No one is allowed to challenge him at his work, limit or mess with his designed parameters. To manipulate them is a corrosion of his rigorous dream. Tóth had been expelled from his homeland for his art was called by the Reich ‘un-Germanic in character’.

This is filmmaking that subscribes to no concessions. It goes all in with ambition so breathtakingly daring it demands reverence. However, the screenplay by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, loses steam eventually, the sheer pulsing energy the first chapter brims with goes amiss. The Brutalist slowly crumples. Too many gaping holes accrue. On the question of representation itself, The Brutalist wavers critically. As it trails the focal Jewish experience in America, xenophobia banded onto foreigners, other marginalities are ditched. Corbet keeps underlining how much Tóth helps, takes under his wing Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), a poor black man. He sticks staunchly by Tóth out of gratitude. But the film denies him any personhood. He just hangs around as someone entirely peripheral, mostly mute, inconsequential, hurled aside at Tóth’s flighty whims. When the latter can’t fight off those above him on the power-rung, he takes out his rage and wretchedness on those below. Gordon is easily disposable, handed the sorry fate of the black guy in American cinema, despite The Brutalist♋ projecting with a feint their friendship spanning years.

Neither is the film comfortable in how it intersperses its women among male-dominated systems, ontologies. After Tóth is reunited with his wife and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Corbet cares little to etch them out beyond relationality for the former, lingering, numbing, mutening trauma for the latter. You’re struck by heightening realization The Brutalist🐓 isn’t quite sure in how to proceed, elevate its exquisite symphony to greater levels. The bravado hitherto abundant in the filmmaking vanishes. Instead, it opts for a slew of bizarre, frustrating scene-turns in its unwieldy third act. The parasitic relationship between the artist and patron, the former being forever beholden, bound to the other takes on grotesque, overly literal dimension. A defining trauma spreads to make way for a confrontational scene between Erzsébet and Van Buren Sr. This, which should have been stinging and powerful, feels like it springs out of nowhere, a cohesive, connective thread missing. You’ll also have to try hard to ignore both Brody and Jones’ stiff Hungarian accents.

The Brutalistꦑ, so concentrated in its ascent, ultimately becomes adrift. It crashes into a coda set at Venice Biennale, whose major temporal leap tries to explicate on legacy, firmly establish exact contours of Tóth’s modernist architecture. How well does Zsófia really know her uncle? For most of his life, Tóth is wary of expounding his own philosophy.  An earlier remark says it all: “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” Corbet lends a particular reserve to Tóth. Much of his interiority is left behind blinds, as we watch him consumed by his rippling, magnificent art. His devotion in the pursuit is singular, the kind that barrels forth without pausing to reflect on the stack of scars. He loses himself in the process, perhaps believing it to erase or, at least, mollify the pain, grief in assimilation.

The Brutalist 𝓀exceeds its grasp. The air of hostility to Jewishness, immigrants, enquiries into roots and belonging-these already thicken the early and mid-sections. As the narrative winds up, the screenplay seems to insecurely bolster its thematic anxieties with too much hand-wringing. The careful, composed ease in storytelling gets abruptly interrupted by a string of dramatic developments, most of which don’t cohere. Yet, Corbet’s vision is indubitably imposing, majestic in sweep and never shy of formal invention. Even when many scenes are just bangled by misguided narrative choices, there’s something or the other to marvel at, be it Lol Crawley’s camerawork, Judy Becker’s jaw-dropping production design or Daniel Blumberg’s triumphal music. Each of these elements smoothly weaves together, giving the film towering scope held together by Brody’s compulsive, stubborn and aching portrait. As the film threatens to derail in its clumsy, jarringly contrived backside, an astonishingly pictured scene, with the artist and patron walking through shimmery, mighty marble quarries, will yoke you back into a hypnotic grip.