Am I reviewing The Brutalist or the brutalism? The film or the architecture? Elevator pitch: imagine Citizen Kane commissions Howard Roark from The Fountainhead to design a brutalist community centre. Okay, okay, nice try, but that’s not quite right. Because The Brutalist isn’t the story of two insiders chasing the American dream. No, it’s primarily the story of a Jewish concentration camp survivor, László Tóth, attempting to use his talent to rebuild his life in a new country, and to memorialise his pain. But there is something of both of those movies that hangs over Brady Corbet’s film like a heavy concrete cantilever. All three are about ambition, as much in their making as their theme. Yet The Brutalist does without Ayn Rand’s sense that achievement is the sole purpose of life, or Orson Welles’s nihilistic view that none of that is worth anything. In fact, the closing song in The Brutalist seems to explicitly reject this all-or-nothing purist approach. “One for you,” it goes, “and one for me.” It’s played in the upbeat synthpop of Vince Clarke, one of several unexpected tonal shifts in this curious construction of a film. It’s in those shifts that it really comes to life, the sudden broad jokes and shocks, the strange music of it.

While it sweeps up award nominations ahead of Oscar season, people connected to the architectural world seem hugely disappointed – embarrassed even – by The Brutalist. But why? Much as Raiders of the Lost Ark isn’t a lovingly respectful representation of the day-to-day work of an academic archaeologist, this – despite the title (or because of the title, really) – was never going to be a film about architecture or architects, even less brutalism. Architects in film never worry about the things actual architects worry about: building regs and planning portals don’t make much of a showing. Instead, it usually ends up feeling like a metaphor for movie making, another massive endeavour that requires a huge team of people, vast amounts of money and time, and which straddles the line of art and commerce, of technology and creativity.



If the brutalism of The Brutalist is taken literally, it is, of course, a travesty. I love the idea of this modernist church-cum-gym-meets-community-centre built high on a forbidding, infrastructure-less windy hill, far above – and remote from – its nearest housing estate. Great call, guys. It makes the concrete megastructure at Cumbernauld look utterly sensible in comparison. As such, László’s commission resembles less the kind of project modernists of his ilk were hired to design, and more a Georgian folly in the landscaped garden of a stately home. Fonthill, anyone?

In Ben Wheatley’s lurid adaption of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, the tower is the star of the show, and a convincingly brutalist one at that. But the model László presents to his wealthy client Harrison Van Buren in The Brutalist is about as unappetising a prospect as you could wish for, a huge blank box with none of the expression of internal functions, asymmetry or sculptural drama and texture that makes brutalism such a beloved – or contentious – style. Wisely, shots of the finished structure are generally either cropped, masked or shadowed. It’s certainly less convincing than the concrete fortress in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and his whole shtick was that none of those buildings were real.





Architecture aside, there are echoes here of Bauhaus refugees Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and László Moholy-Nagy, though the trauma of László Tóth’s life story – not least his concentration camp experience – is not directly drawn from their lives. Tóth is instead a symbol of Europe’s violent mid-century. If you ignore the architecture, or just take it as a notional symbol rather than a literal endeavour, it becomes just one of a series of metaphors: buildings flooded with the waters of rebirth; motherless characters set adrift; pain to be transcended through sex, drugs, and art.

As ever in wider culture, the word brutalist is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and obscures the object at its centre. The film pivots on a conjunction between the term brutalism and the lot of Jewish émigrés to the US, survivors from the horror of Nazi concentration camps. When Van Buren and his son begin to misfire at the architect, and enact their violent, WASPy dreams of superiority in sinister ways, who, it asks us, are the real brutalists? Well, with that title we might have seen that coming.




So, we’ve reached the interval of this review. Time for a comfort break, some Maltesers, a decision about whether you’re going to bail halfway.







What of The Brutalist rather than its brutalism? I’ve been a bit of a Debbie Downer on the architecture side, but as a film, an immersive experience, I found it a great watch. Much has been made of its length, but at three and half hours, even with the interval it kind of flew by. The performances are intense, the cinematography bold, the effect exciting and engrossing. Films of this length, such as Oppenheimer, trade on the notion of cinema as an event, a whole day out, a one-movie festival. And this delivered on that front, blotting out a chilly Saturday afternoon. But these movies also plug into the notion that the standard 90-minute film is too short for those seeking a Netflix box set binge watch. It’s hard to imagine either movie existing without the help of streaming, both as presenting a must-see-in-the-cinema answer to it, or in time as something so sprawling to be half watched while curled up on the sofa.



Ultimately, it’s the awkwardnesses of this story, its unresolved moments and heavily signposted symbols that help it rise above what might have been. It avoids the dead, tidy, respectful hand of the biopic precisely because it isn’t one, and strives instead to become an epic from a different era. So, being disappointed that it doesn’t stick too closely to one architect’s life or another is a bit of a red herring. That way the syrupy Hollywood melodrama of Maestro lies (which somehow managed to turn Leonard Bernstein’s life into a joyless retread of Behind the Candelabra) and for all its faults The Brutalist is not that. Instead, the awkwardness and freedom of this constructed life is what makes it so interesting, because it’s a pure piece of storytelling.

It’s not too hung up on trying to be realistic. It’s trying to build something lasting and of significance on its own terms. And just like the buildings it purports to represent, its legacy is going to remain contentious. If you like brutalism, you may not love The Brutalist. But if you can separate the two – add an interval between them, perhaps? – it’s possible to appreciate the movie as a monument in its own right.