As a fan of the durational cinema of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr and twentieth century concrete architecture, I was the prime audience for Brady Corbet's almost four hour The Brutalist about a Hungarian modernist architect fleeing the horrors of World War II to make his mark in the United States. The trailers composed of strangely angled panoramic shots soundtracked by a sonorous brass leitmotif promised a large canvass cinematic epic. I was expecting an experience akin to wandering around a capacious concrete cathedral, marvelling at the intricacies of its labour and being overcome by its vast scale and to feel like I was close to encountering the divine. Instead it felt more like my eyes were merely following the flat and schematic lines of an architectural drawing; impressive at first but ultimately just the skeletal plan for a project yet to be realised.
Lol Crawley's often surprising cinematography, Daniel Blumberg's sumptuous but spiky soundtrack capturing post-war harmony with its undertow of broiling anxiety and the creditable performances of Adrien Brody as the maverick architect László Toth and Guy Pearce as his dyspeptic patron cannot mask that its ultimately all in service to a premilinary sketch that is still to be shaded into a fully fleshed portrait. All of the constituent parts are here to evoke the ideals and moment, but the humans who ultimately make these are eclipsed. The messiness of relationships is never allowed to intrude upon the structural engineering of its plot, they are just necessary surface tension. When a freight train derails, destroying much of the material for Toth's big commission, he is dismissed from the project, years elapse then he is reappointed, all within a few minutes of screen time. The only glimpses we get of Toth's anguish as an immigrant are some passing remarks about his heavily accented English and his heroin addiction.
For a film that takes such pains to evoke a historical period, its utterly uninterested in how this history has shaped its characters. They are all seemingly self-willed monads that just bounce off each other, blown together by circumstance. Its only in the epilogue, at a retrospective of his works at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 that his niece delineates how Toth's architecture was inspired by his experiences in the Buchenwald concentration camp. What could have been slowly unveiled throughout the film, characterisation if you will, is reduced to some post factum exposition.
Much has been made of the use of AI in the making of this film, notably to perfect the Hungarian accent of Adrien Brody and to create the architectural drawings that feature at the Biennale. While I find some of the contemporary anti-AI hysteria overblown (generative AI could imaginably be channelled into labour-saving to benefit workers rather than just capital but that's an argument for another day), it completely makes sense that a film superficially bearing the hallmarks of a competent cinematic work would employ the parasitic Silicon Valley toy that mistakes content curation for creativity. Both tragically miss that its our mercurial and mysterious humanity that bestows art with its immortality and it’s us humans, after all, that have to bear witness.