The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet’s swaggering 2015 debut feature about a fascist dictator in the making, wasn’t a masterpiece, but it held itself like one: declaratively, even cockily, ambitious in its thematic reach, formally grandiose in its execution. If you didn’t think it was a truly great film – if, like this critic, you found its brio verged on the pompous – it nonetheless promised one from the American actor turned director, then still a few years shy of 30. Vox Lux, his brilliant cracked-mirror portrait of the pop machine, enthralled many while deterring others, but in The Brutalist, here it finally and undeniably is: the big, brawny chef d’oeuvre that makes the case for Corbet joining the ranks of modern American majors.
That Corbet’s graduation in this respect is an epic-scale film about an artist doggedly pursuing his own legacy-sealing magnum opus – in this case, an architect designing a vast, imposingly severe mountain of concrete modernism, in the face of public scepticism and practical opposition – hasn’t escaped critical notice. On its festival debut in Venice, so many critics reached for the adjective “monumental” that A24 winkingly grouped their quotes together on a poster: uniform bricks of praise, if you will. And yes, at a muscularly sprawling, decades-spanning 215 minutes, elegantly bisected with a built-in interval, The Brutalist is a near-overwhelming feat of construction, inviting some degree of awe by sheer dint of heft.
