This is the world of film preservation, a field dedicated to safeguarding the legacy of cinema. Film preservation is not just about keeping old films from decaying. It’s about understanding the history and context of these films, preserving the artistry and craftsmanship of the filmmakers, and ensuring that future generations can experience the magic of cinema.
That’s the feeling you get when watching The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s tale of a Hungarian architect fleeing to the U.S. near the end of WWII and ends up choking on the American Dream. Clocking in around three-and-a-half hours (including an overture and an intermission) and displaying the scope, excess and ambition of the New Hollywood mavericks’ shoot-the-moon projects, this throwback to the days when giants roamed the earth and ruled single-screen theaters is like a gift from the heavens. The actor-writer-director labored with love for seven years on this mutant hybrid of The Fountainhead, The Conformist and The Godfather movies, and it should be met with an equal amount of awe and admiration. It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve. If it’s not a new Great American Masterpiece™, the kind that takes advantage of what the medium has to offer, it’s as close to one as we’re likely to get in 2024.
We’re not trying to damn this movie with overly enthusiastic praise, though it is the kind of work that inspires an intense passion in those who love it — a group that now includes the jury of this year’s Venice Film Festival, which gave Corbet the Best Director prize, and A24, which announced this morning it had picked up the film for U.S. distribution before it’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th. Not do we want to suggest that this is yet another fetishization of a particular vintage aesthetic, even as we acknowledge that the cinematography by Lol Crawley and the production design by Judy Becker purposefully channels the Me Decade’s bruised, moody reimaginations of our nation’s postwar landscapes. (That it was shot in 35mm, and will show at the New York Film Festival in a 70mm print in October, only stokes the fires of comparison.) Editor’s picks
The Brutalist movement, born in the 1950s, was a reaction to the perceived shortcomings of modernism. Modernism, with its sleek, minimalist aesthetic, was seen as cold, impersonal, and lacking in warmth. Brutalist architects, like Le Corbusier, were inspired by the raw, unadorned beauty of industrial structures and the strength of concrete.
Alessandro Nivola and Adrien Brody in ‘The Brutalist.’ And not even those older grand masters would have the stones to introduce their main character via a long, claustrophobic close-up of him pinballing through a ship’s dark passageways before he emerges on deck to witness the Statue of Liberty — tellingly filmed upside-down. The man is Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). Before the war, he was a celebrated Hungarian architect who studied at Bauhaus. After the war, Tóth was another Jewish immigrant who escaped the camps and came to the U.S. to seek sanctuary. A cousin, Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), and his wife (Emma Laird), take him in. They run a furniture-making business in Pennsylvania, dubbed “Miller & Sons.” Atilla’s surname has been changed to something less Eastern European and more “Catholic.” The sons are fictional: “People here like a family business.” The accent is barely discernible. Welcome to assimilation, American style. Related
The library is a grand, imposing structure, with a towering ceiling and a vast collection of books. The library is meant to be a place of peace and quiet, a sanctuary for the Van Buren family. The library is a reflection of the family’s wealth and status. The library’s design is inspired by the architectural styles of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
Befitting of a film called The Brutalist, there’s an extraordinary amount of stark, pro-structuralist architecture on display, and anyone with a weakness for that school of design will find themselves uncontrollably drooling over the blueprints, constructions and concrete-and-marble monuments the film treats like great works of art. The buildings are the only things minimalist about this movie, however. Corbet is trying capture a chunk of 20th century America via grand gestures and a VistaVision-lensed frame, incorporating elements such as jazz, drug addiction, the lifestyles of the rich and toxic, the immigrant experience and the legacy of the Holocaust on those who barely survived it.
You can trace bits of the lives and careers of Louis Kahn and Marcel Breur in Lázsló Tóth’s DNA, though Brody — who hasn’t done work of this depth and conveyed such emotional devastation since The Pianist — is adding his own colors and shades to this broken man’s psychological makeup. It’s one of those performances that makes you rethink an actor’s entire filmography. There’s not a weak link in the ensemble, though it’s tough not to single out Isaach de Bankolé as Tóth’s longtime right-hand man and Guy Pearce, whose titan of industry is a true monster. We’re convinced that, among the many tributes to himself, there’s a degree from the Daniel Plainview School of Raging-Id Magnates resting somewhere on Van Buren’s impeccably built mantle.
The summary states that the story will involve blood, violence, violations, self-destruction, and tragedy of both the intimate and the overarching, sociological kind. **Expanded Text:**
The promise of a “bloodbath” is an undeniable one, woven into the very fabric of the narrative. This bloodshed is not merely a physical manifestation of conflict but a symbolic representation of the deep-seated fissures within the characters and society.
