The Brutalist Is Great American Cinema
For the last decade or so, it has sometimes seemed as if Hollywood has lost its grandest ambition—not merely to entertain, provoke, or create art, but to pursue and portray America’s national myths, to reflect the nation back on itself in new and revelatory ways. In 2024, however, we got two such attempts.
The first was aging legend Francis Ford Coppola’s ill-conceived spectacle, Megalopolis, a movie that recast New York City as a modern vestige of the Roman Empire. Megalopolis was weird and wooden and flat-out bizarre in almost every aspect, but even in its failure, there was something vital about it, an urgency about taking life and society and the idea of the future seriously.
The second is The Brutalist, from the up-and-coming filmmaker Brady Corbet. Corbet is still in his 30s, and if The Brutalist is any indication, he has the sort of cinematic vitality that Coppola’s self-financed flub demanded. Yes, unlike Coppola’s sci-fi scenario, Corbet’s film is a look back at America’s post-war period, the story of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who comes to America after losing much to the war. But it is also a movie with a relentless forward drive, about the power to transcend history and horrors, to forge one’s own path and identity, even and perhaps especially in the shadow of trauma. It’s a movie about artistic ambition and the will to create, and it’s almost certainly the best movie of 2024.
The Brutalist draws its name from the school of mid-century architecture associated with sleek, imposing concrete block buildings. But it’s also designed with a double meaning in mind, a reference to the succession of horrors and indignities faced by its title character, the fictional architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody). Tóth is a survivor of the Holocaust, and while he has made it to American soil, his wife remains in Europe, blocked by the labyrinth of immigration bureaucracy.
One way to look at the film is as a tale of immigrant grit and greatness. The movie opens with Tóth arriving in New York. Before he goes thro
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