'The Brutalist' review: Towering achievement, despite its flaws

Adrien Brody as László Tóth in a scene from "The Brutalist." Credit: A24 Films
PLOT Following the horrors of World War II, a Jewish architect embarks on a troubled career in America.
CAST Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones
RATED R (nudity, language)
LENGTH 3:35, including intermission
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE A towering achievement despite its flaws.
If you build a masterpiece that eventually falls apart, was it still a masterpiece?
In the case of "The Brutalist," the answer is yes, though not everyone will agree. With a career-best performance from Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, a sweeping narrative that runs past the three-and-a-half-hour
mark and more ideas than can be reasonably squeezed into its VistaVision frame, Brady Corbet’s magnum opus thinks big, big, big. It also unravels so rapidly in its final minutes that some viewers may decide the whole edifice has crumbled to dust. (The movie, which has been in extremely limited release since late December, won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Drama earlier this month.)Brody plays László T
óth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust to emigrate to Pennsylvania — a character not too far removed from the one Brody played in "The Pianist" (2002). Tóth’s tearful embrace of his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) is a hugely moving moment given that we’ve just met them, and it’s a testament to the directorial powers of Corbet (who wrote the screenplay with his wife, Mona Fastvold). For a while it looks like Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect, will make his living churning out custom furniture for the middle class — an acceptable fate given what he’s lived through.Enter a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (an excellent Guy Pearce), who hires Tóth to build a massive church in his stark, Brutalist style. What follows is a complicated clash of ideas: art vs. commerce, purity vs. pragmatism, sophistication vs. provincialism. Van Buren can’t decide whether Tóth embodies European intellectualism or decay, just as Tóth can’t decide whether America is a land of rebirth or artistic death. "The landscape, the food we eat, everything is rotten," he mutters. When his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), finally joins him, even she brings both the warmth of home and the burdens of the past.
"The Brutalist" is filled with subtle yet arresting visuals, such as the library Tóth builds for Van Buren, a cavernous space with bookcases that fan inward like a creature’s gills. At the same time, Corbet ("Vox Lux") sometimes has trouble streamlining his thoughts. When Van Buren’s relationship with Tóth takes a shockingly abusive turn, we sense the symbolism but we don’t really buy it on an interpersonal level. That moment is where your patience will be tested (if it hasn’t already) and you’ll have to decide whether the movie’s flaws are fatal.
As Tóth’s story reaches its end, one character makes a proclamation: "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination — not the journey." That’s a terrifying and unforgiving philosophy, a recipe for either great art or complete disaster. In "The Brutalist," there is no in-between.
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