The New Yorker:

Brady Corbet’s epic takes on weighty themes, but fails to infuse its characters with the stuff of life.

By Richard Brody

Most filmmakers, like most people, have interesting things to say about what they’ve experienced and observed. But the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn’t know firsthand: it’s, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth. As a result, it’s a severe test of an artist, demanding a rich foreground of imagination as well as a deep background of history and ideas. Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is such a film—one that proclaims its ambition by the events and themes that it takes on, boldly and thunderously, from the start. It begins in 1947, with the efforts of three members of a Hungarian Jewish family, who’ve survived the Holocaust, to reunite in America and restart their lives. Corbet displays a sharp sense of the framework required for a monumental narrative: “The Brutalist,” which runs three hours and thirty-five minutes, is itself an imposing structure that fills the entire span allotted to it. Yet even with its exceptional length and its ample time frame (reaching from 1947 to 1960 and leaping ahead to 1980), it seems not unfinished but incomplete. With its clean lines and precise assembly, it’s nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that’s still in search of its characters. (In order to discuss the film’s unusual conceits, I’ll be less chary than usual of spoilers.)

The movie’s protagonist, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a survivor of Buchenwald, first arrives in the United States alone. Upon reaching a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who had immigrated to Philadelphia years earlier, László learns that his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), is also alive, and is the de-facto guardian of his orphaned adolescent niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). But the women, who endured Dachau, are stuck in a displaced-persons camp in Hungary, under Soviet dominion, and the bureaucratic obstacles to a family reunion are formidable. Before the war, László was a renowned architect; Attila, who has a small interior-design and furniture firm, puts him up and hires him. A commission from the son of a wealthy businessman to transform a musty study into a stately library gives László—who’d studied in the Bauhaus—a chance to display his modernist virtuosity. The businessman himself, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), soon adopts László as something of an intellectual pet, housing him at the estate and commissioning from him the design and construction of a massive project—combination library, theatre, meeting hall, and chapel—that László calls his “second chance.” Meanwhile, Harrison’s lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), who is Jewish, lends a hand with the efforts to get Erzsébet and Zsófia into the country.

Go to link