Review: ‘The Brutalist,’ while ambitious, is a brutal failure

By Max Scholl     1/21/25 10:46pm

Review: ★

If there’s anything “The Brutalist” is, it’s ambitious. Following visionary architect László Toth (Adrien Brody) through some thirty years of his life — from his post-World War II immigration to the U.S. to his struggles with a wildly ambitious project — “The Brutalist” reflects its namesake architectural style: massive, angular and carved out of stone. 

As much as it is a film about Toth’s ‘tortured genius,’ it is also a film about the sort of personal processes that go into moments of extreme, ‘humanity-defining’ grandeur. 

Yet, the problem with “The Brutalist” is the direction it takes with such a story — it is completely serious and uncritical about everything offered, making it very limited in its purported self-awareness. 

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The three-and-a-half hour long film is pretentiously segmented into four different parts – “Overture,” “Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival,” “Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty” and “Epilogue,” not to mention its unnecessary 15-minute long intermission. 

“Overture” and “The Enigma of Arrival” concern László’s arrival to America, getting his feet on the ground and the beginnings of his career as a designer for a small family-operated furniture store in Pennsylvania. In Europe, he was forcefully separated from his wife, Ezsrébet (Felicity Jones) and awaits her arrival while attending brothels and developing a heroin addiction. 

However, when a wealthy client Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) takes up an interest in Toth, he is commissioned to design and oversee a massively ambitious, multi-million dollar project — a ‘future-looking’ community center built atop of a hill, in commemoration of Harrison’s late mother. “The Hard Core of Beauty” follows the development of this project, alongside the mental and professional difficulties Toth faces along the way. 

Some of the film’s individual moments are absolutely incredible when taken at face value— undoubtedly, it is stunningly shot and the opening scene is really one for the books. 

The problem, however, lies in what it does with the narrative and how it is contextualized. It is a film entirely structured around the trope of the ‘tortured genius,’ but doesn’t do anything to offer an actual critique of why he is tortured and properly address the historical circumstances surrounding his ‘genius.’ 

It is no secret that Toth is meant to be some generational genius. He is the forebearer of some eternal light of freedom and beauty who, displaced from his own home, arrives at some corrupt land and overcomes his struggles by fixating on his divine skill — architecture, or, to this film, the material foundation of humanity. 

It is a film that is entirely about the churning of history and attempts to build a future space of belonging. However, the way in which it argues this as comes off as distinctly reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s historicity – a rejection of modernity in favor of some lost authenticity, that Toth as a figure literally bearing the torch of some divine authority is existentially situated in the grand historical-cultural forces of his time. 

His genius comes from the fact that, by the irascible force of his intellect, he is carving some eternal destiny and legacy, appealing to precisely the same ‘transcendence’ as the German Romantic tradition. 

Likewise, it comes off as ostentatiously masculine, and while there are some attempts to critically self-reflect on the sort of machismo at stake here, it never once reverses upon this: at the end of the day, Toth is just an egoic architect pulling towards some high-romantic, vaguely-Wagnerian idyll of human progress and the labor which builds nations and communities, and just that. 

The women that surround Toth only exist in relation to him (and for the perverse sake of shock value, as you will see). To the film, they are entirely subordinated to him. 

One could make the argument that this is purposeful, and that director Brady Corbet’s vision is one of a representational parlor trick, but even if such was the case, it would pale against the film’s much more vocal thematics. 

“The Brutalist” never exposes the guise of hyper-masculinity and instead, in its half-baked attempts at postmodernist self-reflection, opts for the claim that Toth’s phallic fakery is the ‘makery,’ and that there is some substance to a completely totalitarian aesthetic. 

The same type of valorous, monumental logic that fuels these frankly corny ideals of truth and beauty is precisely the same one behind a dogmatic nationalism, the sort of self-absorbed genius that creates a repressive and prescriptive vision of what ‘home’ ought to be, marked as holy in the act of creation. 

What begins with a good intention to blend Holocaust trauma with American xenophobia and the birth of 20th-century America (insofar as the film could almost be read as a genealogy of America’s rise to the national superpower) becomes corrupted; Corbet simply can’t help himself, he must make this a monumental vision and pride the lofty and disconnected ideals of eternity over any genuine political rootedness. 

Its seemingly-haphazard treatment of pretty much everything 20th-century — from America to Europe, from Nazism to technology to culture, art, and beauty — is actually strikingly coherent in that it, like a glove, fits into an imposing vision of an uncompromisingly-idealistic future. 

This film is best viewed as an ethnographic case study of this particular historical moment, exemplary of a deep nostalgia, the towering greatness of a gesamtkunstwerk ‘old guard’ and engendered by a flailing attempt at materialist critique. 

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