Within a few years, The Brutalist will be consigned to oblivion, where it belongs

Telegraph

23-03-2025

Much has been written about Brady Corbet's epic, Oscar-winning film The Brutalist, whose 215 minutes (including an interval, as in the old days) I experienced recently. Some say high art is for the few, and Corbet clearly intended his film to be high art. I happened to be in Australia and saw the film in Sydney, where, only three weeks after its release, I struggled to find a screening. When I did, it was in a tiny auditorium, in the company of no more than 20 others.
These days, perhaps box-office takings matter less than later home-entertainment revenue from Blu-rays and streaming. The Brutalist is released on disc here next month. It already has a review on Amazon (the film, not the Blu-ray package) that calls it 'Possibly the dullest film ever made. Nothing to like anywhere' and gives it one grudging star, perhaps because one can't give it zero. Doubtless, Corbet would feel it confirms the view that high art is not for the masses.
His film is self-indulgent and far too long: I found myself wondering what a master editor such as David Lean would have done with it. The story itself, though not bad, is implausible: the idea that a Bauhaus-trained, prize-winning architect would, on surviving the Nazi death camps, arrive in the United States and end up shovelling coal is hard to believe, given the construction boom in post-war America.
That also brings me to a nagging doubt about the originality of the conception. Almost from the moment it started, I was reminded of Ayn Rand's vast (and almost unreadable) 1943 novel The Fountainhead, and the preposterous but enjoyable King Vidor film of it made in 1949, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The Brutalist is effectively The Fountainhead with an added backstory of the persecution of the Jews and their displacement into an ever-wider diaspora.
In both films, the main character is an architect (in Corbet's, László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody; in Vidor's, Howard Roark, played by Cooper) who is not allowed to execute his particular vision, is wronged and ends up doing manual labour (Roark goes to work in a quarry, but both the book and the film suggest an element of psychosexual masochism behind that decision; Tóth does so solely because he'd otherwise starve).
Both men acquire a wealthy patron, and their relationship goes awry. Yet in both cases, the architect triumphs in the end – Roark after a court case in which he justifies blowing up a block of flats for which his ultramodern design has been unilaterally altered; Tóth after many years of brutalist constructions. Both films end with a speech of justification: Roark delivers his; a wheelchair-bound Tóth has his delivered by his niece as he prepares to be honoured at the Venice Biennale.
Roark's speech is philosophical, about the importance of the integrity of art, and the importance of it conforming to the artist's conception. Tóth's niece discloses that his original radical work in America, the Van Buren Institute, was designed to include spaces reminiscent of Buchenwald, where he had been incarcerated, and Dachau, where his wife and niece had languished. But the stories of the two films are fundamentally the same: architects (whom we are invited in both cases to take as symbols of the artistic firmament) must be allowed to create without interference from others, if their work is to have its most profound meaning: all else is worthless.
Unlike The Fountainhead, The Brutalist is not overacted or absurd. Adrien Brody probably deserved his Best Actor Oscar, though his performance is not so profound as it was in 2002's The Pianist, which was a far better film. Felicity Jones as Erzsébet, his wife, is superior, and Guy Pearce deserves high praise for playing the repulsive Van Buren, Tóth's patron.
Although ridiculed and slated by critics in 1949, The Fountainhead has become a cult film, perhaps for the wrong reasons – certainly for reasons Rand herself would find offensive, as they revolve around its unintentional humour. Whether in three-quarters of a century The Brutalist will have attained quite such status is, I think, doubtful.
As Corbet embarks on his next project, he might profit from being less of the auteur, with all the pretentiousness that goes with that, and a bit more of the good old-fashioned film director.