THE BRUTALIST“Don’t bury me in this prairie”, sang Dinah Shore in 1948, longing for some of that big-city living.“Take me where the cement grows”. The song, “Buttons And Bows” shows up early in Brady Corbet’s intense, dazzlingly ambitious epic, and the words, if not the levity, set the tone for the three hours to come.
The Brutalist is a film about concrete dreams: the ones dreamt by László Tóth (Adrien Brody), the visionary modernist architect we follow from war-torn Budapest, through the squalor and wonder of postwar New York, to the fields of 1950s Pennsylvania. And those of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), the brash, bullying industrialist who commissions Roth to design a lasting monument to his beloved mother.
It’s a film that is proudly swinging not just for the fences but for the city limits. Born in Arizona, director Brady Corbet was a jobbing child actor who appeared as the teenage Alan Tracy in the misbegotten live action Thunderbirds (2004), but has since remarkably reinvented himself as a protégé of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, adapting a Sartre short story for his directorial debut The Childhood Of A Leader (2015) and then casting Natalie Portman as a damaged, demented pop diva in 2018’s Vox Lux.