A classy potboiler – but it’s no Citizen Kane: The Brutalist reviewed

The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of Oscar buzz and has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an inversion of the American dream’ and ‘up there with Citizen Kane’. It’s three and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) and while the running time isn’t an issue, as it is engrossing enough, it did frequently feel familiar. What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream? I couldn’t fathom if it had anything new to say. It felt more like classy potboiler – love! Sex! Money! Power! Raw concrete!

It is produced and directed by Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) from a script he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold. The main character is Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), who has survived Buchenwald and must now survive in a society that will often refuse to accept him just as, I suppose, it refuses to accept anything that’s unfamiliar (see also: brutalism). Toth is Bauhaus-educated, with many projects to his name back home, but he’s dishevelled and broken-nosed when he first arrives at Ellis Island in 1947. We see the Statue of Liberty – but inverted. I think you know why.

Toth initially stays with his cousin and his cousin’s glacial shiksa wife, who run a furniture store together in Philadelphia, but he is then swept up into the world of powerful, wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (a fantastic Guy Pearce – who will put you in mind of Clark Gable). He hates Toth’s work and then loves it. He is supportive, befriends him, becomes his patron.

Toth had designed the interior of a library for him that is stunning – the light! The minimalism! The way the bookshelves fold out! – but, disappointingly, we spend almost no time in there.