American cinema at its best

The extraordinary success of The Brutalist is not something that Hollywood, or anyone else, anticipated. When it was announced for last year’s Venice Film Festival, it was regarded with a degree of interest but not much else. After all, Brady Corbet’s previous two films — The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux — had attracted a degree of critical attention but neither had been an awards player, let alone making any money at the box office. Auteurs can auteur, but the wider Hollywood establishment will only take them seriously if their films make some decent bank. When Chloé Zhao won Best Picture and Best Director for Nomadland, her reward was to be given hackwork on Marvel’s first major flop, Eternals: fingers crossed that her next picture, Hamnet, restores her to critical favor.

In the case of Corbet, however, The Brutalist represents a Christopher Nolan-esque swing for the big leagues. It has a decent amount in common with Nolan’s Oscar-winner last year, Oppenheimer: considerable length, a 1940s setting, a decidedly adult-skewing perspective on the American Dream and a titanic lead performance, to say nothing of an almost casual disregard for the shibboleths and tropes of contemporary Hollywood. Likewise, neither Corbet nor Nolan have ever struck the wider world as laugh-a-minute figures, but project a measured and considered intensity when discussing their films that would be easy to dismiss as pomposity, even arrogance, if the work wasn’t so damn good.

That is, however, where the similarities between Corbet and the acknowledged king of intelligent Hollywood filmmaking end. Nolan earned his considerable reputation through making films that attracted a huge amount of commercial success. Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, Interstellar and Inception — all difficult, intellectual pictures that owe as much to arthouse and experimental filmmaking as they do to mainstream thrills — were hugely profitable Oscar-winning behemoths, and even if one does have to prepare oneself before watching them, it is an experience very much worth having.

The Brutalist, meanwhile, was made on a minuscule budget of $10 million, which will barely make you an independent drama featuring people talking in Los Angeles coffee shops these days. And Corbet’s picture is nothing if not hugely ambitious, a decades-spanning account of the life and work of Adrien Brody’s László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who comes to postwar America a broken man. He is taken in by his cousin Attila, a thoroughly assimilated Yank, and comes to the attention of the wealthy industrialist Harrison van Buren when he redesigns his library in a modernist, brutalist style, to van Buren’s initial displeasure and later pride.

The relationship between the two men comes to dominate the rest of the film, with the two lead actors giving career-best performances and perfectly capturing the mixture of resentment, pride, respect and anger that tends to permeate any business arrangement where one party is very talented and the other hugely wealthy.

There are unexpected twists — including one especially grim moment when Guy Pearce’s van Buren, makes his power and dominance over the other man brutally clear — and it is possible, even probable, that Corbet is intending to make a point about what it is like to be an artist working defiantly outside the mainstream in an increasingly debased Hollywood. Not for nothing does The Brutalist end with the disco song “One For You, One For Me” by the Italian duo La Bionda.

This is something that Corbet has been clear about in interviews, too. It was clearly a struggle to raise even the relatively meager budget (a tip: if you want to see how difficult it was to fund an independent picture, look and see just how many executive producers are included in the credits). In interviews earlier this year, Corbet and his wife-cum-writing-partner Mona Fastvold said that they were yet to make any money out of the film, which took years to conceive and realize. That should have changed by now. At the time of writing, The Brutalist has made over $30 million at the box office: a decent return for a 215-minute picture that comes complete with a fifteen-minute intermission but much less than the near-billion that Oppenheimer made in 2023.

Still, money isn’t everything, and one of the greatest pleasures of The Brutalist is in luxuriating in an old-school cinematic experience of a kind that can seldom be had these days. I saw it in my local cinema, a civilized place that boasts armchairs, wine coolers at every seat and cocktails on demand: I cannot think of a better or more appropriate place to have spent four hours. The film’s influences are clear. Corbet was inspired by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, the designer of the former Whitney Museum of American Art, who fled Germany in the mid-1930s when it was becoming increasingly clear that the rise of fascism was unlikely to be sympathetic toward Jewish artists.

It is testament to the film’s commitment to telling Tóth’s story that many have left the cinema believing they have seen a biopic of a hitherto little-known architect, and indeed some have even felt outraged at a perceived con. Yet Corbet and Fastvold never pretended that The Brutalist was based on a real-life story, and indeed its chilly, precise evocation of van Buren’s seemingly limitless wealth and influence suggests a large number of quite different films.

I was variously reminded of Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, still one of the definitive American pictures made about the immigrant experience.

There are other forebears. Ayn Rand’s once-totemic, now-ridiculed The Fountainhead, with its evocation of a visionary architect, is certainly in there, and also, quite unexpectedly, are the screwball, swift-talking screenplays of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. I laughed frequently and hard at various parts of the film — some of Pearce’s line readings and facial expressions are memes for the ages, waiting to be plucked out — and most of the (packed) audience seemed almost surprised that someone in their midst was finding as serious a picture as this damned funny.

The Brutalist presents fortune and fate, in all their horrendous and wonderful twists, not as enemies to be overcome, but as compatriots to be walked with and understood. The film’s treatment of sex, in particular, is more real in its matter-of-factness than the overrated Babygirl. It connotes financial expediency — in one of the earliest scenes we see Tóth being fellated by a sex worker in a New York brothel, immediately dispelling any idea that we are about to watch the journey of a Great Man — or, in a series of heartbreaking vignettes between Tóth and his wife, Erzsébet (which gives Felicity Jones a role to compare to her still-underrated work in The Theory of Everything), their marital relations are shown with tenderness and compassion. This is a film for adults, by adults, and is all the richer and more successful for that.

Awards do not confer lasting reputation on a film. There have been enough second-rate winners of Best Picture over the past few years that the title has lost the gravitas that it once had: CODA, Nomadland and Green Book, let alone the truly dismal Crash. Corbet’s film should nevertheless stand on its own considerable merits as a great example of American cinema, a ballsy, risk-taking exercise in spectacle, intelligence and originality that makes the vast majority of what has been released in cinemas in the past twelve months seem dull and anemic indeed. And it means that its writer-director — a former actor who quit the profession because he was bored with playing minor supporting roles — has ascended into the reputational A-list. Where he goes next will be fascinating to watch. Let’s hope it’s not Deadpool & Wolverine 2: This Time It’s Brutal.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.