Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

I’ve been thinking about the plot structure of The Brutalist. It might just be a cornerstone of modern American cinema. It takes some time to digest it . . . architecturally. Okay, I’ll stop.

So here’s the great question: is The Brutalist a modern American masterpiece? I hesitate to use the word '“masterpiece” in reference to a film the very same day I saw it. Time will be the judge of that. The marketers of this film sure have been eager to share the many reviews that have referred to it as “monumental.” This was not how I responded to it, though. The Brutalist did not blow me away. Instead, it seeped into me, like some kind of narrative IV drip. There are certain narrative threads that remain unresolved and which I keep thinking about, but there is also a strong sense that that is by design.

I’m always impressed with a film that takes a fairly small cast of characters and successfully makes it an allegory for America. That is certainly what’s happening here, along with its examination of capitalism, massive income inequality, insidious antisemitism, and broad xenophobia. All of this is woven into the subtext—and often the text—of a story involving three principal characters: László Tóth (Adrien Brody), the title character having immigrated to the U.S. from war-torn Budapest; László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who isn’t even seen onscreen until the second half and yet she still looms large; and the Pennsylvanian millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers László to have been a renowned European architect and hires him to design a massive community center in his town outside of Philadelphia.

There are other key characters, of course. Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), László’s mute and orphaned teenage niece brought to America with Erzsébet, is in many scenes in which she never says a word yet conveys a great deal with her eyes alone. Later, as a young adult, she gets one scene in which she has any dialogue, when she and her young husband declare to László and Erzsébet that they have decided to move to the then-very-young state of Israel—a scene with many implications, both in their time and in ours. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), Harrison’s entitled son, is the first to hire László for a design job, rebuilding his father’s library as a surprise that does not quite go as planned but kicks off Harrison’s and László’s complicated and ultimately tragic relationship. Attila (Alessandro Nivola), László’s cousin, takes him in when he first arrives in America, and hires him to work at his furniture store in Philadelphia. Audrey (Emma Laird), Attila’s Catholic wife, has convinced Attila to convert to her religion and clearly resents László’s Jewishness. Minutes after meeting him, she says, “We know someone who can take a look at that nose,” and although the conversation is about an injury, the double meaning is far from lost on us.

There is a great deal to unpack in The Brutalist, but perhaps the most with László’s Ivorian single father friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), and Gordon’s young son William (Charlie Esoko as a little boy; Zephan Hanson Amissah as a teenager). William is also orphaned; Gordon is also an immigrant; both of them are Black; and it feels somewhat like a missed opportunity that The Brutalist has nothing to say about them as it pertains to these facts, least of which how their experiences might differ from László’s. They are just László’s friend—met in a bread line; Gordon later hired by László to work on his projects—and his son. There is a moment when Harrison returns from a trip sooner than expected, discovering the library “surprise” mid-construction, and refers to Gordon as a “strange Negro” in his front yard, and this is the only overt reference to their race. There is no doubt that director and writer Brady Corbet is unusually intentional with every choice in this film, from casting to editing, and still some of it remains a mystery. We get a brief glimpse into Gordon and William’s relationship when Gordon insists William does not remember his late mother, and William replies that he just wanted to make it easier on him—and then it cuts to the next scene.

That said, one of the notable achievements in The Brutalist is how quickly it seems to go by in spite of its length. This is a three-hour and 35-minute movie, including a 15-minute intermission (which helpfully features a countdown clock), and when the intermission happened roughly ninety minutes in, I was surprised we were halfway through already. And this is with a narrative that is not especially fast-paced—but, you still can’t take your eyes off of it: not the excellent performers, not the beautiful cinematography, not the tragically typical American immigrant story unfolding onscreen. During the opening titles, the camera follows László through a tightly crowded, dark space that I first suspected to be some chaotic place he was escaping from in Europe, but turns out to be the depths of the ship he’s taken to Ellis Island. This is where we see, within minutes of the film’s beginning, the iconic shot of the Statue of Liberty viewed upside-down. László is elated, but we already know what American experience awaits him. Much later, he utters one of the most memorable lines in the film: “We came here because we had no other option.”

Felicity Jones deserves special mention, as László’s wife, Erzsébet. We hear her, narrating letters from Hungary during László’s first five years in America without her, in the first half of the film, before the intermission. We see her onscreen for the first time in the opening scene of Part Two, when she finally arrives. Others have already commented how Erzsébet is “the wife” character but also more than that, and this is true. Brady Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, have written her with much more autonomy than most characters of this sort get, and she is much more integral to the story in the second half. I actually found her to be one of the most interesting and dynamic characters in the film.

Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, on the other hand, is by turns the most enigmatic and the most predictable character. His son, Harry, is much more readily pompous, but Harrison is subtly every bit the entitled figure one would expect from someone with far more money than he needs. Money changes how people view the world, and how they view everyone else in it, especially those without wealth, and Harrison embodies this to his very essence. Pearce plays him as a deeply repressed man, with occasional bursts of shocking violence. In one such scene, between him and László, I was so taken aback my jaw dropped, and I’m still not entirely sure how I even feel about it. In the end, though, it all comes down to power and privilege, and how casually they can be leveraged when people simply move from one system of oppression to another. They may have different structures, but the same people are granted access to separate spaces designed only for them.

*Opening doors to the intersection between aesthetics and knowledge, but without equal access to either.*

Overall: A-