‘The Brutalist’ Review: Adrien Brody Leads a Bold Architectural Saga

Soon after László arrives — Attila puts him up in a small room off the showroom, like the hired help — he begins designing new furniture for Miller & Sons to replace its heavy, Colonial Revival-style pieces. His first piece, a cantilever chair with a frame made of tubular metal, looks like something that the Hungarian-born designer and architect Marcel Breuer would have designed. Breuer apparently said that he was inspired by a bicycle to make his first such chair, an association that Audrey echoes when she says László’s chair looks like a tricycle. She’s skeptical of László and his creations, maybe even suspicious.

Corbet, who wrote the script with Mona Fastvold, doesn’t explain Audrey’s attitude outright. He folds a great deal into “The Brutalist,” slipping ideas and meaning into reminiscences and privately whispered confessions, but he also lets his larger themes surface in actions and in hard, cold gazes. If Audrey never openly says why she doesn’t like László, she doesn’t have to. He’s family, so she’s polite. But he’s a stranger, a foreigner and a reminder of her husband’s heritage. When she looks at László, it’s as if she were examining a strange, somewhat distasteful creature. Soon after they first meet, she says that she knows a doctor who can fix his nose, which seems broken; she all but asks him to fix his identity.

It’s a quick, pointed scene in a movie that grabs onto you immediately and builds steadily with measured, insistent force. Corbet can be subtle, though that’s not his usual preference (his earlier movies include “Vox Lux”), but he’s going for monumentality here. He likes big, bold moments and grand, metaphorically resonant images that he often pushes to the near-breaking point. One of the first images in “The Brutalist” is an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty, a disorienting, topsy-turvy angle that conveys László’s literal point of view as he emerges from the darkened depths of the ship that has carried him to America. The statue is already heavily freighted with complex, contradictory meaning that László embodies and is a harbinger of his destabilized story. It’s also an emblem of Corbet’s ambitions.

These extend to the movie’s presentation. “The Brutalist” runs three hours and 20 minutes, not including a 15-minute break that counts down on onscreen. (The movie never drags, but the intermission is welcome; more long movies should have them!) Releases like these were known as roadshows, and they signaled a movie’s importance or at least its scale and scope; in the 1950s, when much of “The Brutalist” takes place, roadshows also indicated to audiences that these films could only be seen in theaters. Much as Corbet does throughout, with beauty and soaring camerawork, the presentation of “The Brutalist” states his intent: I imagine that he’s announcing that “The Brutalist” isn’t made for distraction. It isn’t on Netflix.