Grandiose in scope, essential in style, provocative in intent, sharp-edged and firm – “brutal” – in attitude: Brady Corbet’s third effort as writer-director is the cinematic equivalent of a Brutalist palace. One the leading contenders for the 2025 awards season, The Brutalist matches an up-to-date approach to American filmmaking (indie but go-getter, A24 is not surprisingly the distributor) with an eye to the epics of Hollywood’s glorious past (Corbet shot in VistaVision, with a 70mm film release in mind).

At a staggering runtime of 3 hours and 34 minutes, The Brutalist is the longest film to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama since David Lean‘s 222-minute Lawrence of Arabia (1962). And if it were to make it to the Academy Award for Best Picture, Corbet’s magnum opus would unseat William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (1959) in a podium that includes Lawrence of Arabia and Victor Fleming‘s four-hour epic Gone with the Wind (1939).

Regardless of the outcome, The Brutalist is here to stay. Its reputation precedes it. Whether future audiences will remember it as a 21st-century classic or as a monument to its creators’ self-indulgence is yet to be seen.

László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a disgraced architect and Holocaust survivor, emigrates from Hungary to the United States in search of a new life. After settling in Pennsylvania, Tóth crosses paths with tycoon Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who volunteers to become his patron to fuel his ambitions as a socialite. Van Buren sponsors constructing a massive, Brutalist community center on his estate – the cornerstone of a modernist utopia in the heart of small-town America. And, most importantly, Tóth’s second chance as an artist and a man. Soon, the architect’s unwillingness to compromise on his grandiose vision clashes with his temperamental client. And when László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) join him in the new world, the American upper class will show its true face.

• The Maximalist | Or to Expose the Fountainhead
• The Minimalist | Or to Awake From the American Dream
• The Iconoclast | Architecture vs. False Idols

The Maximalist | Or to Expose the Fountainhead

I believe in America

_{The Godfather (1972) by Francis Ford Coppola}

László Tóth (a nod to the Bauhaus artist and professor László Moholy-Nagy, born in Hungary and later naturalized as an American) is a man who sits between the Old and the New World. His larger-than-life art promises a glorious future while serving as a sign of the times for future generations.

In this sense, The Brutalist references Ayn Rand‘s much-discussed (and equally imposing, at 750 pages) novel The Fountainhead. Both works chronicle the struggles of an architect in creating his grand project and identify in architecture the better spirits of Western civilization – idealism, optimism, creativity, and proactivity.

But where Rand (herself an immigrant from the USSR to the U.S.) presented her Frank Lloyd Wright-like protagonist as a champion of the individual, capitalist will against any form of government intervention (be it the Soviet Union under Stalin or the more modest urban planners of New York City), Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold see their Brutalist as a renegade who can expose the predatory nature of the same American capitalism Rand sought to promote. After all, Brutalism was always meant to be communal: in Western Europe, it was the style of post-WWII reconstruction and the welfare state; in the bygone Eastern Bloc, it was the face of socialist urban planning.

At the same time, The Brutalist is an indie counterpart to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, also a grandiose, Ayn Rand-inspired (and self-financed) epic about an architect fighting for his utopian project and for his American Dream. It’s not hard to see self-portraits in these characters. Ultimately, neither The Brutalist nor Megalopolis calls for the actual implementation of their titular utopias in the real world. Instead, they call for a world – a film industry – in which ambitious writer-producer-directors can successfully realize their gigantic and thought-provoking projects. And then bring them to the biggest screen possible.

Provocatively, one could say there’s no need to sit through the 214 minutes of Corbet’s chef-d’oeuvre. The fact that the movie exists is an accomplishment in itself. The Brutalist is its utopia.

The Minimalist | Or to Awake From the American Dream

“l thought that in America everything would get better, and that we would finally reach our goal. But no. Bruno is being chopped off, as if he’d never existed. You wouldn’t recognize me any more.”
“Bruno, nobody kicks you here.”
“No, not in that way. Not visibly. But they do it mentally. […] These days, things are different, of course. They no longer do it like this or like that, they do it the gentle way, and that’s much worse than it seems. And there’s more. Who knows what fate has in store for you?”

_{Stroszek (1977) by Werner Herzog}

The opening of The Brutalist is an entire program. As Manohla Dargis points out in her review for The New York Times, “For László, who arrives destitute in the States, history is a wasteland.”

László and a fellow traveler run through a maze of dark tunnels, up flights and flights of stairs. They are on the lower decks of an immigrant ship about to dock in New York City, but the place is all too reminiscent of a concentration camp. Eventually, the men reach the ship’s surface, and sunlight strikes their faces. The thunderous Wagnerian brass of Daniel Blumberg’s score engages the viewer as the two men look up at the Statue of Liberty towering above them. They embrace and shout with joy: they have made it to America. But there’s a hitch in this crossing of the finish line. Because of the camera’s placement, Lady Liberty appears upside down.

This overture resembles or continues the theme of another unconventional American epic by another uncompromising American director – Terrence Malick‘s The New World (2005). In his retelling of the story of Pocahontas, Malick sets the landing of British settlers on American shores to the prelude of Richard Wagner‘s Das Rheingold. Such a pairing is bitterly ironic: the renunciation of love in the name of greed and power that kickstarts Wagner’s musikdrama is equated with the horrors of American history. If Malick suggests that the New World was born in blood, Corbet responds that the newcomers shall be welcomed with equal violence.

The land of opportunity is not what it seems. For László, a second chance may seem within reach, but his condition – immigrant, underclass worker, Jewish Holocaust survivor, heroin addict – makes it impossible. He may try for integration. But if he wants to partake in the American Dream, he must first learn a brutal lesson: to quote Fitzgerald, “There are no second acts in American lives.” And his WASP arts patron will go to great lengths to remind him that he can’t change who he is.

Through this lens, Tóth’s boundless, never-ending project looks less like the American Dream in the making and more like what Werner Herzog, recounting the troubled production of his Fitzcarraldo (1982), called “The Conquest of the Useless.” His Brutalist palace stands not as concrete proof of his utopia but as a sign of its impossibility. At best, it can be a metaphor for his personal history, forged in trauma, like all history, especially in the 20th century.

In the words of film critic Peter Bradshaw, László Tóth is genuinely an “American Ozymandias.”

The Iconoclast | Architecture vs. False Idols

The vanity of the Brutalist’s project and his life is best conveyed not by Tóth’s characterization but by the structure and the architecture of the script – vanity by design.

For a film that runs more than three and a half hours, The Brutalist is – surprisingly – far from complete in terms of narrative. Several pivotal plot points are left for the viewer, and the ending is also open to interpretation. All of this is intentional, of course. To watch The Brutalist is to experience life in its length (or lengthiness) and inscrutability. In this sense, the final line, “It is the destination, not the journey,” sounds less like a testament to the struggles necessary to make art and more like a band-aid on an existence that is impossible to understand, let alone illustrate.

But then again, this epilogue is also a rollover of the most famous quote from Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road – “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” As with the Statue of Liberty, Corbet takes Kerouac’s motto as an emblem of Americana, only to frame it upside down. The Brutalist can still provide some good old-fashioned iconoclasm if not the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. This is ironic but also quite fitting for a movie about the joys and sorrows of construction.