‘The Brutalist’ movie review: a hollow metaphor that hides beneath grandeur
The triumphant sound of the brass band that soars over the musical motif in The Brutalist is enough to make anyone feel patriotic and proud to be living in America, even if, like myself, you have no personal affiliation with the country in the slightest. As we see Làszló Tóth emerge from the frenzied crowd on the ship and the Statue of Liberty seeps into the frame, there is a moment of hope and anxious euphoria as the land of promise grows into view – the possibilities of a different world await him on the other side, with the audience being swept up in a breath-taking view that is both electrifying and riddled with nervous energy.
But while the journey ahead seems overbearing and ripe with uncertainty, Brady Corbett instead draws our attention to the final destination, with a deeply unsettling conclusion that has lingered in my mind since watching it and left me with one all-consuming question – what is the point?
The Brutalist starts off unbelievably strong – it’s a dazzling visual feat that captures the sheer wonder and magnitude of this daunting new world, heightening Tóth’s alienation and desperate yearning to begin his own chapter of the American dream, with a devastating performance from Adrien Brody as a proud yet deeply angry architect, forced to maintain a dehumanising level of gratitude despite being disrespected by everyone around him. While his new life is not without challenges, encountering hostility from Americans who have been brainwashed by racist rhetoric around immigration, he quickly lands on both feet, leading to one fateful interaction that will soon define his life’s work and entire identity as an artist.
Corbett attempts to explore the struggle to maintain creative integrity and authenticity through the lens of immigration, with Tóth slowly resigning himself to an image that doesn’t reflect him as he scrambles to survive the journey, sacrificing his values for the sake of contorting himself into the limiting American mould. However, while the first half of the story depicts the peaks of the American dream, with Tóth being swept up in the upper circles of high society who use kindness as a manipulation tactic to control and exploit him, the second half of the film then becomes a caricature of intellectualist ideas that ends as a hollow and troubling mess.
While the first half succeeds in painting the deceiving highs of the American dream, the second clumsily escalates towards the lows of achieving this ideal, with Corbett making completely unjustifiable narrative choices that descend into misery porn and pointless drama. The meaning of these choices is painfully obvious, with the director highlighting how Tóth has to sacrifice his personal and cultural identity in order to conform, but in doing so, he opts for clumsy plot points and harmful metaphors that are presumably there to add depth, but only strip the story of nuance and emotion. The exploration of the immigrant experience becomes one-sided and relentlessly bleak, with Corbett not really saying anything about the multi-layered journey and, instead, reduces it to poorly written tragedies.
The story ends with a painfully on-the-nose statement about how “it’s not about the journey, it’s about the destination”, with a disastrous conclusion that includes a staggeringly useless time-jump and subjecting the character to a comical number of traumatic experiences, almost as if the writers ran out of ideas about how to criticize the American dream and added in a rape scene last minute to hammer in their point.
The Brutalist attempts to sweep up its audience with an excessive run-time that mimics the framework of a ‘historical epic’, but left me feeling profoundly unsatisfied and frustrated about the meaningless way it explored this subject matter. I left thinking whether this was more simply an imitation of what the director thinks is a ‘smart’ film by using politically charged subject matter but with little substance to flesh it out, and, in turn, feeling distant and slightly emotionless as he subjects his character to cruel experiences to create what is ultimately a glorified metaphor.
I left with no idea what Corbett wanted his audience to take away from the film, it felt as though he himself was clutching at straws as he tried to find meaning beneath the grandeur of the facade. If Corbett can use problematic metaphors in his Oscar-nominated film, then I will too, but The Brutalist is all mouth and no trousers — which is, perhaps, why it has been received so well. Nothing needs to have true meaning anymore because if it imitates greatness on the outside and vaguely alludes to something deeper, then that is more than enough.
