‘The Brutalist’ review: Adrien Brody’s visionary architect comes to America and meets his destiny

“The Brutalist” is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable.

Among the 2024 movie releases worth arguments and accolades, director and co-writer Brady Corbet’s third feature has the most evident problems — subplots and supporting characters left hanging, a modern-day coda that feels like a hasty summary judgment of the title character. There are films that emerge, somehow, as like the exhalation of a single breath, every creative element in rare harmony. “Nickel Boys” is like that for me. And there are movies like “The Brutalist” where the seams show, but there’s too much worth relishing to worry about the seams. “The Brutalist” is also an American immigration tale, as well as catnip for anyone with a passing interest in architecture or design.

Director Corbet wastes no time handing us his thematic declaration of principles. A fictional Holocaust refugee, László Tóth, Hungarian and Jewish and a Bauhaus-trained architect, has survived Buchenwald. The audience knows more than Tóth, in these early scenes, regarding the whereabouts of his missing wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy).

Our first sight of Brody is cloaked in darkness and chaos: He’s one of a cluster of refugees on a ship docking in New York City. Tóth, scrambling toward the upper deck, finally spies his destiny, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. His perspective, though, and ours, tilts Lady Liberty on her side, nearly upside down. Freedom in “The Brutalist,” at least for the outsider, is a profoundly destabilizing state of being.

In the lovely momentum of the film’s first half, Tóth tries to make peace with this strange new world, though he cannot make the accommodations his Philadelphia cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who emigrated years earlier, has made to fit in. This man, formerly named Molnar, now Miller, runs a small furniture store specializing in bland midcentury American design. Tóth loathes it, but finds a way up and out through his cousin’s contacts: There is a library renovation to be done in the grand home of Harrison Van Buren, an imperious plutocrat with airs portrayed by Guy Pearce.

From there, Corbet’s screenplay, co-written by his real-life partner Mona Fastvold, treats the story’s several-decade timeline as a battle royale between the brilliant, difficult artist and his insidiously controlling sponsor. The project that nearly kills them both, at least in spirit, is the Van Buren Institute, to be built north of Philadelphia outside Doylestown. Tóth moves to the Van Buren estate, where he learns first-hand what scads of American money, old or new, can do for — and to — a purist under the commission of a lifetime. The film’s second half brings Erzsébet into her husband’s lofty but suffocating new environs. Coping with osteoporosis, Tóth’s wife has brought along her surviving, traumatized niece, Zsófia. Meantime Tóth struggles to complete his twin-towered concrete creation, part community center, part Christian chapel (against the Jewish architect’s initial wishes) and part deeply personal memorial to loved ones, killed in the genocide.

Later scenes in “The Brutalist” relocate the action to the stark white wonders of Carrara, Italy’s marble quarry site, which is also the site of Tóth’s final subjugation at the hands of his client. Throughout the 3½-hour film, which is a little erratic in the second half, the Brody character uses his design aesthetic the way he leans on his heroin addiction, or the way he feels about the postwar American jazz explosion known as bebop: as a means of obliterating one part of his psyche, or history, while accessing another at great cost.

The great, undervalued Isaach De Bankolé plays Tóth’s friend and assistant, Gordon, who’s also his fellow addict. There’s a lot of movie in this movie, of course, but it’s too bad this character doesn’t get the scenes he merits, which is true also of Nivola’s character. In trade, I suppose, I could’ve used a little less of the wormy Van Buren family, though it’s more a matter of actors such as Joe Alwyn playing one hammy note throughout. (There’s a suggestion of assault involving this heir-apparent to the Van Buren fortune and the mute niece Zsófia, but it’s frustratingly opaque.)

The shortcomings on the page and, here and there, in the supporting cast don’t come to much because “The Brutalist” is a work of real cinema, with a visual stamp distinguishing Corbet’s spectacularly gifted collaborators. The movie was photographed, brilliantly, by cinematographer Lol Crowley on film, primarily in the nostalgic but vital widescreen VistaVision format. Production designer Judy Becker takes on what must be the most enticing challenge imaginable to someone in her line of work: creating a style of visual thinking for the film’s main character and seeing his ideas to cinematic fruition. On an extremely low budget. But that’s the “challenge” part of it. Elements of Louis Kahn’s glorious oceanside Salk Institute appear in the crucial library renovation sequence; Frank Lloyd Wright’s petal columns, a hallmark of the Johnson Wax administration building in Racine, Wisconsin, pop up as details in the Van Buren Institute construction. It’s amazing work, and if Tóth as written ultimately lacks a dynamic third dimension as a driving force, Brody’s performance gives the presence and details we need.

I haven’t mentioned the movie’s themes of postwar Judaism, or postwar American consumerism, or the push/pull sexual dynamics between the Brody and Jones characters, at war with their new land and often with each other. Director Corbet can’t possibly finesse everything he’s laid out. But “The Brutalist,” filmed primarily in Hungary, is a singular example of a mini-maxi epic, made up of small scenes, often between two or three people, visually placed against highly selective and evocative backgrounds mostly not dependent on digital effects, but rather on elemental things. There are no expansive, expensive shots of Philadelphia city streets circa 1947, for example. When the Brody and Nivola characters are reunited, the reunion takes place against the side of a Greyhound bus, because it’s enough.

There’s one scene in particular I love, and it’s one of the quietest: the completion, though not without some accidental destruction, of the Van Buren library. Here we see what Tóth is all about as an architect, and to Corbet’s great credit the camera actually pays attention to the workers putting it together. Without this sequence “The Brutalist,” which has its reductive, polemic bits, might not work at all. But it’s there, and it’s beautiful, and beautifully scored by composer Daniel Blumberg. We see and feel what’s at stake in mysterious ways.

A key later scene depicts the groundbreaking ceremony for the proposed (and to most of the guests, puzzling) Van Buren Institute. Tóth makes a few remarks, nervously. He knows he’s surrounded by skeptics and, very likely, antisemites. Here, Corbet keeps the camera at a sly middle distance, avoiding any underlining of the dynamics and side-eyeing going on. Tóth’s architectural intention, he says, is to become “part of the new whole,” i.e. a broader, warmer, inclusive postwar America. We’re still debating that one, which is why “The Brutalist” works as fictional but urgent history and as a reminder to the present.

Whose America this is, in 2025 or anytime, is a question we’ll be asking as long as the Statue of Liberty stands in the Hudson River.

“The Brutalist” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use and some language)

Running time: 3:35 (includes a 15-minute intermission)

How to watch: Premiered in theaters Jan. 10.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.