THE BRUTALIST

How do you define the function of art? For every person who creates art and every person who consumes it, there is likely a different answer. At its most basic level, its function could be said to affect the beholder, but again, there is no universal principle on what that affect should be. To entertain? To inspire? To provoke? To outrage? And what factors must be considered when either choosing or interpreting that intended affect? The purpose of the artist? The context in which the work is made and subsequently viewed? Is art for the good of the public, the good of a select few, the good of the artist themselves? Or is it for the good of the past, the present, maybe the future? It's these questions that make the consumption of art such as joy, that the response to any artwork is fundamentally subjective. The difficulty comes often with the creation of that artwork, especially when a number of stakeholders look over the shoulder of the artist, demanding that their needs and concerns are added into the mix. It can be a healthy, collaborative process or it can be like a restaurant owner throwing unwanted ingredients into a dish as a master chef is preparing it.

This seems to be the key struggle at the heart of 'The Brutalist', the monolithic third feature from writer-director Brady Corbet ('Vox Lux', 'The Childhood of a Leader'). I use the word "seems" because the ultimate intentions of the film feel too opaque to pin down to one single thesis, despite Corbet's confident and commanding direction. At three and a half hours, 'The Brutalist' is an enormous artistic object, impressive in its scale and an exhausting experience in a way that's likely intentional. You could also call the kind of brutalist style its artist-protagonist engages in "exhausting", so perhaps the film itself is attempting a cinematic equivalent of this style, born in the wake of the Weimar-era Bauhaus art movement of function over style as a form of artistic expression. Brutalism feels like the ultimate manifestation of this question of the purpose of art, a provocation from artist to spectator - you either love its harshness and see in it an intense and potent passion, or hate its apparent coldness and sharp textures. Brutalism is as much a political or social statement as it is an artistic one. It seems the perfect canvas on which a film can interrogate how the debate over the purpose of art can ultimately hinder or harm the process of art, and yet we come back to that word "seems". For a film that is made with such surety and intention, the lack of clarity in regards to the intentions of 'The Brutalist' makes for a viewing experience that is at once thrilling, frustrating and ultimately baffling.

The film, co-written with Corbet's creative partner Mona Fastvold, centres around fictional Bauhaus-trained Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody, 'Asteroid City'), charting nearly 40 years of his life in the United States. We begin with his arrival in New York after escaping the catastrophe of Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s, having left behind his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, 'The Theory of Everything') and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy, 'Tomorrowland'). He initially struggles to find his footing until a chance encounter with industrialist and modern art connoisseur Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, 'Prometheus'). He offers to help bring Erzsébet and Zsófia to the United States and gives László an incredible opportunity - to design a new community centre for a nearby Pennsylvanian town in his brutalist style. Even with Van Buren's support though, László struggles to complete his grand and imposing monolith, hindered by a wider community who trust neither his design nor his outsider status as an immigrant.

'THE BRUTALIST' TRAILER

Corbet approaches this film as a variation on major cinematic epics of the 50s and 60s such as George Stevens' 'Giant' - a grand story of the rise and fall of a complex protagonist covering many decades, shot in VistaVision and complete with built-in overture and intermission. What is most surprising though about 'The Brutalist', certainly compared to the free-wheeling chaos of 'Vox Lux', is how traditional its storytelling is. The narrative is complex but straightforward and chronological, and despite the scale of the film, there aren't many moments of bravura or spectacle. Perhaps this is Corbet assuming that the sheer weight of the film is boldness enough, and certainly in the first act, the sweep of 'The Brutalist' is enough to keep you enthralled and engaged. The film is meticulous and takes its time, but you get the sense that it is building to something, in particular the arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia, the former only present through voiceover recitations of letters to her husband. There's an advantage to her absence, though it does mean a decided lack of complex female characters in the first act - we focus in on László and his struggle to find his place in the New World.

Like countless immigrants, he believes in the idea of the American Dream, that in this land of opportunity he will create a better life for himself and his family than the one he left behind. What he finds though is that his past achievements do not matter, that whatever success he had in Europe doesn't mean as much in the affluent capitalism of the United States. In one of the most moving scenes in the film, Van Buren presents László with a dossier he has compiled of László's achievements before the war. This intelligent, brilliant man, now shovelling coal and living in charity housing, carefully holds these pictures in his hands, each building they depict like a lost child to him. It's a reminder of what he was and how far away from home he is, physically, emotionally and artistically. Van Buren's offer, to patronise him in his return to the work he was trained for, finally offers him the chance to make the life he dreams of.

The question of the purpose of art in 'The Brutalist' is inexplicably tied to that of the American Dream, well-trod ground for countless filmmakers before Corbet. László feels cut from a similar cloth to Willy Loman or George Bailey, men whose commitment to the ideals of American exceptionalism placing them on the knife's edge between success and catastrophe. Unlike those characters though, László almost immediately begins to slide towards disaster. What he discovers quickly and fights against is that the American Dream is conditional, as the creation of public art is. One may believe the system serves their needs, but in truth, it's just another oppressive system built to benefit from the cheap labour of the unfortunate. It begins the moment László steps onto U.S. soil and continues right until the silhouette of his concrete cathedral begins to dominate the landscape. He is of use to Van Buren, to the community and to the United States until they decide he isn't. Rather than having the security he craved, he finds a new kind of racially and economically-charged instability.

One could spin this into Corbet using this fictional story as a metaphor for working within the Hollywood system, but while there is swagger to 'The Brutalist', there isn't that kind of cynicism or arrogance. The film seems to be genuinely asking the question of whether great art can exist within a racist, capitalist system, where the most fiscally advantageous outcome is more important than the integrity of the art or the artist. The first act of the film cleverly lays this groundwork, with some pretty spectacular sequences of men talking in rooms, discussing the importance of art and extolling praise on László for his vision. Again, this borrows from the totemic Hollywood epics of the 50s and 60s, a first-act rise in preparation for a second-act fall. Arriving at the film's intermission (bombastically baked right into the film itself), I was energised by the ideas floating through the film, as well as by its tremendous craft. The writing is sharp and surprisingly funny, Lol Crawley's cinematography is magisterial, Judy Becker's production design perfectly evokes the many time periods it moves through and Daniel Blumberg's score, while a little derivative of composers such as Mica Levi, does offer some great inspired blasts of musical creativity. The film, at this point, feels holistic, and considering its size, that's quite an achievement.

Some responses to 'The Brutalist' have described it as feeling almost like two stylistically different films separated by the intermission, but this wasn't my experience. It's less that there's a conscious shift occurring and more that, unfortunately, it starts to lose its clarity in the second half. The narrative begins to go around in circles - László rubs everyone up the wrong way, his co-workers complain, Van Buren backs László then changes his mind - so much so that the forward motion so present in the first half begins to lose its momentum. The arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia is also a problem. This is what the film feels like it has been building to, but when they arrive, it doesn't seem to know what to do with them. Erzsébet is a frustrating character, where her abrasiveness seems to sit in place of complexity. Both women quickly begin to feel like narrative or thematic functions, especially when Corbet begins to take the notion of artists as unwilling slaves to capitalism from subtext to obvious, cruel text. The film is trying to make its point, but it's doing so with an unnecessary bluntness, over and over again, to the point where there's little actual impact. Focusing on László gave the film a sense of clarity, but that clarity is lost in the second act, culminating in an epilogue that's almost baffling in how convoluted and narratively packed it is.

As a result, it's very hard to know what to take away from 'The Brutalist', what questions it asks and what answers it wants. An easy comparison to this film (and one I would argue it encourages) would be to those great masterpieces of U.S. cinema exploring the notions of the American Dream and its collision with capitalism - 'Citizen Kane', 'There Will Be Blood' and 'The Social Network'. It carries itself with the same magisterial quality, but it never comes close to unpacking its subject with the same dexterity or innovation. A more appropriate comparison might be Todd Field's equally magisterial 'Tár'. Both films provoke with bold questions on art and power, and both leave you having to do a bit of the final work yourself. The difference is that the provocations in 'Tár' are deeply complex, genuinely confronting and very well-considered. Those in 'The Brutalist' don't reach that same level of complexity, even if they operate under the assumption that they do. As I sat there, credits rolling, trying to put those last pieces together, I started to resent that the film itself hadn't done the work for me, or at the very least, given me a reason to want to do the work on my own.

Another issue with the film is its length, a marathon it never wholly justifies. A film is as long as it needs to be, whether that be a tight 90 mins or seven hours. Whatever its length, it needs to justify it by telling the story it needs to tell in the amount of time that story requires. This strange length of three-and-a-half hours has started to become more common of late, such as with Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon', Damien Chazelle's 'Babylon' or Ridley Scott's director's cut of 'Napoleon'. In all three cases, that length felt justified in the way they accumulated story, character and theme as each minute passed, and in the case of 'Flower Moon', making that length feel vital. The same can be said for the great mid-century epics such as 'Giant' or 'Lawrence of Arabia'. I didn't feel the same way about 'The Brutalist'. By the end, I was physically exhausted and increasingly impatient, the length seeming to sap energy from the film rather than building it. Could Corbet have made his point in a shorter film, and still have given it that epic quality he was reaching for? I argue he could have, and made its impact all the sharper. There's too much time wasted in the second act with repetition and obvious characterisation. By the end, much of the sympathy you have for László has started to dissipate, to the point where, when a truly terrible thing does happen to him, I found it hard to muster much of a reaction.

It's a pity, because there's so much good work here. This is Corbet's strongest work as a director to date, the enfant terrible quality of 'Vox Lux' settling into a more mature, considered tone. The film mostly looks gorgeous, making great use of the VistaVision format. Adrien Brody is genuinely stellar as László, and Guy Pearce almost steals the film as Van Buren. Felicity Jones though is once again held back by poor writing and characterisation that she simply cannot overcome, and much of the supporting cast likewise are given half-formed ideas of characters to play rather than fully-fleshed.

For all its formal brilliance, I must admit that I missed Brady Corbet's arrogant bravura in 'The Brutalist'. It's a far more conventional film than I had expected and never as profound or moving as it seemingly wants to be. I found myself wishing it was bolder, stranger, more melodramatic, more stylistically in line with the U.S. epics it places itself against rather than just an algorithmic imitation of them. It seems to be reaching for enormous questions with its enormous canvas - can art really survive under a capitalist system? How great a lie is The American Dream? Is the United States a land of opportunity for the privileged and a land of subservience for the underprivileged? Again, I use the word "seems" because, for me, I never felt it reached anywhere new or radical with any of its conclusions.

Maybe in the future, I'll revisit 'The Brutalist' and find in it the kind of majesty it appears to evoke. After all, isn't that the case with the very art movement it takes its name from, buildings once seen as eye-sores now accepted as radical acts of artistic subversion? Maybe that will be the case and I'll eat the words I've written here. For now though, 'The Brutalist' for me is an impressive monolith to look at, but lacking the grit or the clarity to make it truly great.