An immigrant awakens on a boat packed to the brim with people– a refugee, having just left Europe following the evils that ravaged it. With another immigrant, he runs to the deck, hoping to see a particular sight. There, he is greeted by the image so many are eager to see on their journey to the “New World,” the Statue of Liberty. But to the audience, our sight of this monument is not caught directly; only shakily, distorted, and askew, set nearly upside-down.
It is an image that Blake Corbet’s period drama epic, The Brutalist, takes proudly, using it on its poster and marketing campaign. It serves to represent the film well, as a colossal, imposing work—And a rather blunt one.
The film follows Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), who immigrated to America, in search of a new life. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, Toth was constantly rocked by struggles to integrate and make a proper life for himself in the country. It is a life meant to be viewed on a scale as grand as the projects he works on, both visually and temporally: One would not expect things to be so cozy, after all, with a 3 hour and 35-minute runtime, including the rare intermission.
Each one of those minutes is crafted as spectacle on several levels. Toth’s postwar era and the projects he assembles are brought to stunning life through some impressive setwork, from the vehicles to the homes inhabited to the ominous construction that Toth assembles over the course of the picture. Cinematography colludes with soundtrack to provide a dizzying sense of enormity, as audiences are given sights like a vast Italian marble quarry to Toth’s study renovation while the sounds of booming synths and a banging percussion play over. All of it is designed to give a sense of weight and incomprehensible size.
The only aspect of the picture that does not meet this ideal, however, is the story itself, which is where the film’s lofty scale begins to falter. The story is a good drama, with a strong first half that delivers its tale of the titular “Brutalist’s” dealings in life and remains a strong character piece through to the end. But through its second half, and when viewed in its entirety, the film’s seemingly complex intertwining point to a rather blunt message: Another tale of the woeful failures of the “American Dream” and its hypocrisies. And while there are tinges of other ideas it implies, this is the one that looms over the whole film.
This is not to criticize the message or say it cannot be accomplished, and the film does meet the expectations of making a quality story from it. But there have been many movies before which also accomplished this message, and many have done it in ways more complex, more novel, or more time-efficient than The Brutalist. It would be one thing then for this to be a smaller picture, but it is clear from the outset that the film seeks to be a true “epic” in all scope. For all that this epic nature does around its story, the ultimate feeling coming out of the theater is not so much disappointment as a slight underwhelming feeling.
Nonetheless, The Brutalist is still an enjoyable evening. To be an epic that only meets partway is nothing to sneeze at, and one can get good mileage for the spectacle of the piece alone. A decent pick for a Best Picture nominee, but not a first choice.
James Daly is junior media and communications studies major and a writer for the Arts and Culture section for The Retriever. Contact James at jamesd4@umbc.edu.
