Brady Corbet’s amazing and engrossing epic The Brutalist is about the design of postwar America and what was mixed into its foundations at the building stage. It asks us to decide if and how the brutalism of the title applies to something other than architecture, and wonders about the future ruin of what we all imagine at the drawing board of youth: an American Ozymandias.
It is about antisemitism and the capitalist adventure, about the unassimilated immigrant experience and about American can-do naivety versus the tragic, painful depths of European culture and expertise.
