The Brutalist review: Grand vision matched by ambition but intermission does this long movie no favours

The Brutalist is nothing if not incredibly ambitious.

For one, it’s a sweeping mid-century historical epic whose central character is a modernist architect. Secondly, it cost less than $US10 million to make, which is a fraction of so-called tentpole movies whose visual effects bills are easily multiples of that.

Third, it comes in at three and a half hours long, with a 15-minute intermission that’s hard-coded into the print. There’s confidence in asking audiences to stay with you for that long.

At no point does The Brutalist pretend to be anything other than what it is, old-fashioned filmmaking that’s increasingly rare in an industry that favours inoffensive, “four-quadrant” homogeneity.

Case in point, The Brutalist was funded outside of the Hollywood system and took seven years to get off the ground.

Art, even most commercial art, is not supposed to be broadly appealing so that men and women over and under the age of 25 (that’s the four quadrants) all more-or-less like it.

Art should provoke love and revulsion; a reaction, a resonance, and challenge your perspective.

The Brutalist and its self-serious director and co-writer Brady Corbet certainly want to provoke something in the audiences game enough to see The Brutalist, either out of curiosity because of its awards-season credentials or just excited to see someone doing something different.

It’s kind of wild that old-fashioned could now be considered different as Corbet evokes the spirit of film icons such as David Lean, not necessarily in style but in scope and zeal.

The story is centred on fictional Hungarian Holocaust survivor Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), who arrives in the US after the war.

In his former life, he was a celebrated architect who created beautiful brutalist buildings. Now, he is living in charity housing, bunking in a room with dozens and picks up some construction work.

Into his life walks Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who wants to commission Laszlo to design and build a grand project that is part monument, part community centre and all legacy-stamping.

Laszlo agrees and Harrison also agrees to help reunite Laszlo with his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy, who was in Corbet film Vox Lux), who are both still in eastern Europe.

The Brutalist explores the thorny relationship between artist and patron and the imbalance between the person with the talent and the person with the resources and wrapped up in that dynamic is that of the Anglo-American-born elite who dangles the promise of success and the American Dream to the immigrant.

If you just work hard enough, if you play by the rules, if you are gracious and submissive, then you too can be part of it.

It was always a myth, but the US has built a nation on exploiting that broken promise where the riches and rewards are so unevenly divided.

The Brutalist is a romance and an ode to art and creation. It is also a tragedy, reflecting not only the limitations of being an artist but also the trauma of war that seeps into your very being, unable to find catharsis.

The film almost mimics the progress of Laszlo’s story. The first half before intermission, clocking in at almost exactly 90 minutes, is a flawless piece of cinema, full of intoxicating performances and sequences, in which The Brutalist’s ambition is set out and executed.

That 15-minute break, while welcome, almost works against it in that it gives you time to sit with the movie, almost giddy at how great it is, only for the second half to be more narratively muddled.

Jones was miscast, Cassidy’s character is frustratingly unknowable (she’s mute for most of the film) and you do start to feel the drag of its length.

But, as a whole, this is still highly accomplished filmmaking with stunning cinematography by Lol Crawley, superb performances from, in particular, Brody and Pearce.

Above all, The Brutalist is a big swing, a grand statement on storytelling.

Rating: 4/5

The Brutalist is in cinemas on January 23