Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable, Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic The Brutalist represents a near-perfect symbiosis of subject with film-making style. It’s a huge, uncompromising cinematic statement about the creation of a huge, uncompromising architectural statement. It’s a paean to purity of creative vision in the face of petty ignorance and tightened purse strings, of noble personal sacrifice in the name of art. The kinship between the misunderstood modernist architect who finds worlds of both opportunity and pain courtesy of the fickle whims of wealthy American philistines and Corbet, a former US child actor turned independent film-maker, is there for all who choose to see it.
The uncharitable may suggest that there’s a degree of self-lionisation at play in Corbet’s audacious third feature film (his previous pictures were The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux). But even the uncharitable would agree that The Brutalist is a remarkable achievement, the kind of immense and audacious passion project that is usually out of reach to all but a select few celebrated auteurs and veteran directors.
