Brice Ezell: The Brutalist belongs to a genre that I call “too-big-to-fail cinema.” These films, due to the reputation of their director and the boldness of their ambitions, spawn discourse that divides critics and fans into passionate dissenting camps. Think of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales—or more recently, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Detractors dismiss them as overzealous moonshots, while fans swear that the director’s achievement cannot be overstated. In contrast to Coppola, who famously had to sell off part of his winery ownership to finance his long-gestating labor of love, director Brady Corbet somehow assembled the three and a half hour Brutalist on a $10 million dollar tab, all the while shooting on film using VistaVision cameras, last seen on US movie sets in 1961. The technical details alone invite takes. 

To be sure, The Brutalist plays out like an extended flex by all parties involved. The script by Corbet and Mona Fastvold sprawls like a great novel. Lol Crawley’s gorgeous, fog-draped cinematography has a knack for finding extreme long shots that look like paintings. The booming horn sections in Daniel Blumberg’s score conjure a boastful air. To match that bravado, the actors swing for the fences. As a Holocaust survivor architect László Tóth, Adrien Brody delivers a multifaceted performance, while Guy Pearce is charmingly old-fashioned as the businessman Harrison Lee Van Buren, a guy who comports himself like he counts Charles Foster Kane as an inspiration. Citizen Kane becomes one of many nods to cinema history throughout The Brutalist, with two converging on the hill upon where Van Buren commissions Tóth to create an ambitious community center: before construction, a gaggle of people wind up the hill in a wink to Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and after shovels break ground the site looks increasingly like Xanadu. 

The Brutalist’s genius, however, is located not in its profusion of Important Signifiers, but rather its out-of-left field epilogue. Set in 1980, two decades after the core events of the film, the finale takes place in Venice, where an aging Tóth attends a retrospective of his career. His niece Zsófia (Ariane Lebed as an adult, Raffey Cassidy as a young woman) delivers opening remarks that describe the community center as Tóth’s way of processing his traumatic experience evading the Final Solution. Such a reading can certainly be justified abstractly given what we see of the center and know of Tóth’s background. But Zsófia’s account is far too tidy, like something one might encounter in an academic reading of a cultural artifact many decades removed from its creation—or, given her professed Zionism, political sloganeering that elides nuance. This brief but jarring conclusion throws the preceding three hours into a new light, and in doing so illustrates the chasm between history as lived and history as condensed into a museum placard or activist’s catchphrase. It is a massive gap, so it should come as no surprise that this movie takes such a grandiose shape. While no film can be too big to fail, The Brutalist is exactly as big as it needs to be.

***

Dylan Lewis:

A24’s The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet, is an impressive film obsessed with what’s real, what isn’t, and the pencil-thin line in between. Shot in breathtaking 70mm VistaVision—a widescreen variant of 35mm format that was created in 1954, around the same time the film takes place—The Brutalist immerses us in the life and work of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a fictional architect so convincingly conceived that, during my screening, the audience members behind me discussed waiting to look at Tóth’s Wikipedia page until after the film as to not “spoil anything.” Throughout The Brutalist’s nearly four-hour runtime, the harrowing physical and emotional realities of László and his wife Erzsébet’s (Felicity Jones) post-war lives are rendered with visceral brutality equal to that of László’s architectural accomplishments. While the Tóths are not historical figures themselves, they represent the very real struggles of countless displaced persons who immigrated to the United States after the Holocaust.

Of course, the people seated behind me in The Brutalist were not the only ones drawn in by the film’s realism, and their obliviousness to Tóth’s entirely fictional nature reminded me of similar audience reactions to Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár and the similar suspension of disbelief it demanded—its fictional protagonist felt so real that audiences were genuinely shocked to learn she did not actually exist. The Brutalist’s marketing team leaned heavily into this ambiguity. Elaborate artifacts like the display of Tóth’s architectural drawings outside the theater at screenings, or the brochure handed out with my ticket showcasing Tóth’s fictional Margaret Lee Van Buren Center, all push the illusion further.

Front and back of an A24 marketing brochure for the fictional Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity, as well as a postcard of the fictional Community Center for Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Photos by the author.

This fixation on authenticity is not just a clever promotional gimmick, though; it is a central pillar of the film’s own architecture, as its characters struggle to prop up the illusions they’ve created of themselves. The fictional Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity, the building around which a majority of the narrative revolves, feels like a character in itself—an architectural feat and homage to the primary antagonist Harrison Lee Van Buren’s late mother. But despite its name, the Van Buren Center is, in truth, a monument to the Tóths’ suffering and perseverance in both Nazi Germany and postwar America in ways that are hinted at but not fully revealed until the film’s epilogue. The film’s opaque position between fact and fiction becomes somewhat controversial when considering the number of similarities between Tóth and real-life Hungarian-Jewish architect Marcel Lajos Breuer, who is not referenced or credited at any point in the film.

The film’s interest in truth and authenticity gets even murkier when you confront the recent whispers about the film’s purported use of generative AI. While Corbet has since come out to deny the claims that generative AI was used for the architectural drawings we see in the film’s epilogue chapter, he doubled down on the film’s use of Respeecher, an AI voice generator technology used to polish Adrien Brody’s and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian accents. I cannot help but think of a scene when Tóth learns that another architect has made unauthorized changes to his design for the Van Buren Center, altering the critically important height of the building’s ceilings. Tóth quickly scribbles away on the plans while exclaiming: “There. It’s mine again. He cuts three meters from the top, I add it to the bottom!” These AI tools, which steal unknown quantities of other people’s work without credit or recognition, call into question who truly owns much of what makes the film feel so authentic and encapsulating.

While I immensely enjoyed The Brutalist, and I believe it will be regarded as a masterpiece of modern American cinema just as domineering and emotionally provocative as the Margaret Lee Van Buren Center it brings to life on the screen, there is a darkness to the film’s obsession with its own authenticity. For those of us living in a world suffused with fake news and artificial intelligence, The Brutalist offers an inadvertent yet timely look at the political power of making fiction resemble truth.

***

Tanner Vaughan: A24’s marketing campaign for The Brutalist has leaned hard on positioning it as an event film. 215 minutes long! Shot on VistaVision! With an intermission! When word of mouth says that something of this scope must be seen on the biggest screen possible, it is an easy sell for the most enthusiastic moviegoers among us. But event films are not only about seeing something momentous; they are about having something of the moment to discuss, and The Brutalist delivers more than enough to talk about. 

In a prior review of The Brutalist, I compared Adrian Brody’s László Tóth to Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár—yes, his performance is that good—but sitting with that comparison, I have found it more apt than I realized. If I am feeling reductive, I might call Tár a film about cancel culture. However, part of what makes Tár great is that it forces any such summary to be reductive. Tár is a film about cancel culture, but it is so much murkier than that implies. Ever since my first viewing of The Brutalist, I have been mulling over its relationship with Zionism. The Brutalist is a film about Zionism—amongst numerous topics—but it’s so much murkier than that implies.

This murkiness has me thinking about obligations—the clarity artists owe to their intentions—because Tár and The Brutalist are films that audiences anywhere on the political spectrum might watch and believe they see an espousal of their ideals (less likely for The Brutalist’s stance on capitalism, but true for Zionism). And I do not think either film begs misinterpretation, nor do I see them courting both sides. The issue is that if artists allow potential misinterpretation by insincere spectators to affect their process, it will strip their art of nuance, and one of The Brutalist’s most direct statements is that director Brady Corbet has zero interest in making concessions for viewers who won’t meet him where he’s at. Corbet presents Zionism with nuance not because he is uncertain, but because a point hits harder with a fuller picture.

The full picture is this: The Brutalist is about America being founded on a rotten promise. On first glance, exposing America’s cruelty provides Zionism an excuse, that some of those who settled Israel were pushed into it. This is Corbet allowing the situation its complexity, but he’s also drawing parallels. The Brutalist’s first mention of Israel comes courtesy of a historical broadcast announcing its founding. The voiceover promises freedom, prosperity, a new land without persecution, a land whose destiny will be made manifest. Familiar? For Corbet, America’s flaws are Israel’s flaws—rife with empty promises and established through the theft of occupied land—America has just been at it longer, long enough for the promise to curdle and sour. Israel will get there.

The Brutalist’s opposition to Zionism is at its most direct when illustrating the way the ideology fosters division within Jewish communities. When László and Erzsébet’s niece Zsófia announces her pending move to Israel, they are left feeling less true to their faith and their cultural roots for their disinterest in following her. Subsequent developments prompt them to question that disinterest, but their initial response lingers: “Are we not Jewish?”

Then there is the film’s closing line, “No matter what the others try to sell you, it’s the destination, not the journey.” There are various ways to take it—a statement about resilience in the face of hardship, or a metatextual joke about a lengthy film with a riddle of an ending—but the line is Zsófia’s, and from her, it could imply that the ends (Jewish settlement of God’s “promised land”) justify the means (Palestinian displacement and the establishment of an apartheid state). The winking irony is that if viewers have already accepted the parallels between America and Israel, the adage easily conveys the opposite. The ends and the means are inverted. If the destination is oppression, any justification of the journey is moot.

Brice Ezell is a critic and independent scholar based in Atlanta, whose work can be found in popular venues such as PopMatters and scholarly journals such as Modern Drama. He once high-fived Fred Willard at a Dodgers game.

Dylan Lewis is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Maryland where he studies book history, bibliography, and media studies. In his limited freetime you can find him playing video games, watching reality television, sitting in the cinema, or riding the metro.

Tanner Vaughan received an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a thesis collection of short literary screenplays. He spends all his free time keeping up with popular music and film, occasionally writing about it when he gets the urge. 

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