Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on various players.
If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.
It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.
Make no mistake—that’s exactly what The Brutalist is about. The architect in question (Tóth) survives the Holocaust and comes to the U.S. in 1947, moving to Philadelphia to be around his cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a furniture store. Tóth has been separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who has become mute from the trauma she endured at Dachau. Some of the story is told in letters between the married couple as he works to bring them to the U.S.
Lázsló is hired by Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to build a library in the family home for his father, Harrison (Guy Pearce). It goes poorly when Harrison reacts badly to the library being built in a room that he had the way he wanted it. The loss of money gets Lázsló fired, and a few years later, he’s hit the skids, loading coal, living in charity housing, and addicted to heroin. It’s at this time that Harrison Van Buren finds him again, having realized that the library renovation is actually genius, and the work of someone who was highly acclaimed in Europe. Soon enough, he is hiring Lázsló to design a community center for him, another project that eventually falls through, only to be picked back up again in the future.
The Brutalist is in large part about trauma, about the battle to live in the face of trauma, and about the art that can be produced both because of and in spite of that trauma. It’s about the fact that Lázsló survived the death camps, survived his addiction, and eventually brought his wife to the United States and survived the trauma of that relationship as well.
Make no mistake: The Brutalist is fictional, and Lázsló is not a real person, and not specifically based on a real person as far as I know. It’s more about the story itself and the idea behind it, and the architecture in question is done in the Brutalist style.
For what it’s worth, I actually like brutalism. The style is about huge structures, geometric forms, and utilitarian materials like concrete. Designed initially to be affordable, ironically a lot of classic Brutalist sites are out of the price range of most people—Habitat 67 in Montreal costs something like $1.2 million to buy into, hardly the affordability that was intended. My love of the style might have something to do with the Brutalist-inspired foreign language building at the University of Illinois, a building I spent a lot of time in during my short time on campus.
Because of this, I would have loved to have seen more actual architecture in the film. We get some glimpses of it, but the huge structures, the massive surfaces and geometry is the point of what we’re told Lázsló Tóth was all about, inspired we learn eventually by what he experienced in the concentration camps.
Adrien Brody, of course, is good in the role, but he generally is. Felicity Jones is also excellent here, and the film is better when she is on camera—I’d have loved to have had her in the film more.
But is it worth the running time? I don’t think it is. The film is fine. It’s well-made, and surprisingly inexpensive for a film of this time, with the total price evidently coming in under $10 million, a bargain for all of the acclaim it got. This is a story that could be told in 140-150 minutes without losing a lot. In a sense, the length of the film mirrors the excesses implied in the size of the architecture it is at least marginally about.
Why to watch The Brutalist: There is a stark beauty to these buildings.
Why not to watch: It needs at least 45 minutes cut from it.
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