The Brutalist did well at the Oscars, winning three (Best Actor, Music, Cinematography) from a total of ten nominations. It is the sort of film the Academy likes – it’s got class written all over it, from the fancy opening credits and the high-end VistaVision process (not used for more than 60 years), to its built-in intermission and tackling of a pertinent issue.
To wit: immigrants get the job done, as Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in Hamilton. One immigrant, in this case, an architect who survives the death camps of Europe, arrives in proud and confident America as it’s enjoying its finest flowering and then, through a series of adventures with a moneyed American family, rises to become the modernist, brutalist architect he trained to be back in the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany.
Adrien Brody won one of those Oscars, his second, interestingly again for playing a European Jew trying to pick up his life after a devastating setback, much as he did in The Pianist (where he was also a high-tone, cultured soul, though Roman Polanski’s story put him through a different sort of wringer).
Here, director Brady Corbet and regular co-writer Mona Fastvold pick up the story of Brody’s Lászlo Tóth as he arrives on Ellis Island and then lodges temporarily with his old friend Attila (Alessandro Nivola) – who’s gone native by abandoning his Jewish faith – where Lászlo lucks into the connection to old money that’s going to shape his life.
The Van Buren family, headed by Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce), will henceforth be Lászlo’s means of rising in the USA, his talent as a modernist architect exempting him from their thinly veiled anti-Semitism. The Van Burens’ pet architect puts up with the family’s condescension because, Brody’s performance suggests, Lászlo has not quite shaken off the experience in the camps – PTSD manifesting itself also as a drug habit. (The fact that the vast modernist project Lászlo winds up building for the Van Burens resembles a death camp is a dark joke on Corbet’s part.)
This is the story of how WASP Americans built and shaped the country in the 20th century, roping in whatever talent they could from ethnic groups held at arm’s length. How Jay Gatsby and those like him made their millions, you could say, as seen through the eyes of one of the guys who helped them make it.
Reassuring cast. Brody, of course. Guy Pearce excellent as the mansplainy blowhard with a very high opinion of himself. Joe Alwyn incredibly good as his entitled son, always tasting dad’s air to see which way he should lean. Felicity Jones as Lászlo’s wife. Isaach De Bankolé (best thing in it) as a down and out Lászlo meets outside a soup kitchen early on who becomes his conscience.
It’s the sort of film the Weinsteins used to make, middlebrow posing as highbrow, the beach read in a fine, leather-tooled cover. For all its many pluses and its roll-around-in-it sumptuousness, at over three-and-a-half hours it’s too long, introduces characters only to abandon them (De Bankolé’s Gordon), hasn’t quite got Lászlo’s character all of a piece (the drug-taking seems to just come and go) and at a certain point, clearly worried that things have gone a bit flat, injects a bizarre plot turn that has nothing to do with any other aspect of the film. You’ll know it when it comes along.
Corbet and Fastvold are fascinated by the intellectual intersection of Europe and America, how they interact and how they don’t. The film is at its best on this territory, even though the need to demonstrate that the film has Something To Say (Jewish identity post-Holocaust, art versus commerce, architecture versus engineering) gets a touch wearing. After Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, The Brutalist makes it three in a row that have shown that tendency. An admirable, fascinating, beautifully crafted and played film all the same.
The Brutalist – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
