Brady Corbet’s story of an émigré architect and his American patron has a first half as sure of itself as anything we have seen in years, an Adrien Brody performance that carries it, and a second half that loses its way. Worth the evening.
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold have written a film about a man who builds in concrete for a man who pays in cash, and the first hundred minutes of it are as good as most critics say. László Tóth (Adrien Brody) comes up out of the hold of a ship into daylight and the camera swings so the Statue of Liberty hangs upside down over him. We knew what the shot meant before we had time to think about it, and it still got us. That is the whole film in one image, and Corbet then spends three and a half hours making sure we have understood.
Brody plays László as a man who has been humiliated so often that he has stopped registering it, and then one day registers it. He is gaunt, he limps, he has a habit of looking slightly past the person talking to him. When Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce) finds out who the tradesman in his library actually is and starts calling him a genius at dinner parties, Brody lets a small dreadful hope into the face, and we did not enjoy watching it, because we could see where it was going and he could not. Pearce is the other half of the film: loud, generous, quick to cry, and the more he gives the more frightened we were for everyone at his table.
Lol Crawley shoots it grainy and wide and heavy with shadow, so it looks like a film from the era it is set in. He shoots the Pennsylvania estate in flat winter light so the Van Buren house looks like a bank. Judy Becker’s production design does the rest: the library László remakes is the moment we understood, without a line of dialogue, why anyone would hire this man. Kate Forbes’s costumes make the money visible from the back row.
Daniel Blumberg’s score is the best thing about the film that nobody at home will notice they are noticing. Brass comes in low and unresolved under the arrival, then a piano figure that sounds like somebody working something out, then a long stretch where the music gives way to the sound of drills and poured concrete. Dávid Jancsó cuts the first half briskly, with title cards for the years and a newsreel about Pennsylvania steel that we would happily have watched more of. Nothing in the first half is longer than it needs to be.
Then there is an intermission, and Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) arrives, and the film changes. Jones is good, sharp-tongued and unfooled, and her scenes with Brody at the kitchen table are the only ones where László seems to have an equal. But the story that follows is one we will not describe, except to say that it takes a turn we found ugly rather than shocking, and that Corbet stages it as if the ugliness were self-evidently an argument. It is not. We sat through the last hour angry, and not in the way the film intended: the turn is shot at a distance in near darkness, so we are asked to feel its weight without being allowed to see it, and Jancsó then cuts on as if the question were settled. The point about money and art and what patrons do to the people they buy had been made, clearly and well, before the interval. The second half makes it again in capital letters.
There is an epilogue, and we will not describe it either, except to say that it is a strange decision from a director who had, up to then, trusted his images to do the work. Ariane Labed is good in it. We still wished it had not been written.
Most critics have rated the film higher than we do, and we understand why: the first half is a real achievement, the two leads are working at full stretch, and nobody else is shooting on this scale with this much patience. Corbet made Vox Lux before this and it was a mess with a good idea in it. The Brutalist is the reverse, a beautifully made thing with an idea that runs out.
It is a film built for a big screen and an intermission, and the interval is there so you can argue. If you watch at home, do not pause. It is already long enough.
