Review: ‘The Brutalist’ is hand-wringing over the high price of a perfect masterpiece

Some five centuries ago, the artist Michelangelo spent months sourcing 100 tons of marble from the quarry of Carrara only to discover that his patron, Pope Julius II, refused to reimburse him for it. Angry, Michelangelo fled Rome without finishing the pontiff’s future tomb, causing the piqued and panicked pope to send men to drag him back. Even after this turn of events, Michelangelo agreed to work with him again on a new commission, the Sistine Chapel, where he painted the pope’s face on a portrait of the prophet Zechariah. If you look at the cherub over Zechariah’s shoulder, its fingertips are touching in that unmistakable Italian gesture that means: Eff you.

Art stirs the soul. But underneath transcendence, you’ll also find money, ego and angst. I’d advise you to keep that in mind watching “The Brutalist,” but its director, Brady Corbet, makes that point plenty. This whopper of a film, co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, traces the misery of a fictional Hungarian architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who shares Michelangelo’s best and worst traits: genius, perfectionism, stubbornness, sullenness, rage and a punishing commitment to one’s own brilliance. There’s even a humbling sequence set in the real Carrara, where, against the quarry’s raw splendor, the mighty modern excavators look as piddling as Hot Wheels on the basement stairs. (And, as a final point of connection, in 1972 an actual Hungarian named Laszlo Toth used a hammer to deface — or technically, de-nose — Michelangelo’s Pietà.)

This Tóth, however, is a Hungarian Jew who outlasted a concentration camp and a Nazi regime that deemed his creations “not Germanic in character.” Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) also have endured, but they won’t arrive until the second half of the 3-hour-and-35-minute-long movie. (More films should have intermissions, please — they’re wonderful.) Corbet and his cinematographer, Lol Crawley, introduce us to Tóth in the cramped quarters of somewhere mysterious, frantic and filthy, with the camera jostling to keep pace with Brody’s back, and then — democracy ho! — they reveal we’re on a boat that’s just sailed into New York Harbor. Most immigrant stories tend to shoot the Statue of Liberty with grandeur. Here, she’s filmed upside-down against a stark white sky with the old girl bobbing on an uneasy axis. The effect is sea sickness.

“The Brutalist” is set in 1950s Pennsylvania and, for its pope-ly antagonist, presents an American figure of reverence: a very rich man. The tycoon, played with constipated entitlement by Guy Pearce, has the pastiche name Harrison Lee Van Buren. (Was Warbucks too on the nose?) Van Buren’s callow failson, Harry (Joe Alwyn), is, in a roundabout way, responsible for his father commissioning Tóth to construct a massive building, and occasionally Harry postures as though he’s in charge. Pennsylvania, we’re told in a film strip, is the Land of Decisions. Yet the project becomes mired in miscommunication and take-backsies as it metastasizes from a cultural center into a combo platter of competing interests. Tóth is oddly insistent on constructing a skylight that glows with a sunlit cross. I suspect he’s trying to ward off these energy vampires.

Guy Pearce, left, and Joe Alwyn in the movie “The Brutalist.”

(A24)

Corbet, too, is an artist with ambition. It’s something I’ve admired in him since his first two films, “The Childhood of a Leader” and his marvelous flop “Vox Lux.” You can feel his brains whirring in every shot of “The Brutalist,” zooming as fast as his motif of POV shots from a speeding bus, train and gondola. He’s crammed the movie with so many ideas that you embrace its length, even with its drumbeat of newsreels and radio broadcasts that jump in to make sure we’re aware that Israel has been formed and heroin is bad. (One spasms out into a rousing chant of “Steel! Steel! Steel!”) There’s also an experimental score by Daniel Blumberg made of bangs and piano plinks and noises that sound like a dozen balloons screaming. It’s great.

Like “Tár” and “There Will Be Blood,” this is cultural psychoanalysis presented as a phony biopic. Anyone who’s ever had a headache-inducing boss or been on the losing end of a dogfight between taste and cash will see themselves in Brody’s kinetic martyr, a figure so scrutinized that in one closeup, you can count his pubic hairs. The movie announces itself as a modern epic and goes on to earn that gilded frame. You’re dead certain that at some point, someone must have come up with the elevator pitch that this is “Citizen Kane” from the perspective of Xanadu’s interior designer.

One of the ironies is that Tóth thinks the New World looks retrograde. Back in the old world, back before the war, he studied under the Bauhaus and dedicated himself to a structural purity that makes Manhattan’s loveliest skyscrapers seem fussy. The war stripped him of everything — papers, luggage, family, career — and left him with physical and emotional scars, as well as a drug addiction that catches us by surprise. It’s tempting to see Tóth’s blunt sketches as a metaphor for being pared to your essence. But Corbet rejects that kind of storytelling convention, holding out until the movie’s final five minutes to give us a full rundown of Tóth’s life story and what he believed his buildings actually meant.

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Tóth is who he is; his tastes are rooted into his very being. By contrast, his American-acclimated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has learned to blend in with the WASPs and kowtow to the wealthy, which makes him a moderately successful middle-class salesman and, in the eyes of this movie, a failure. My favorite scenes are the ones in which the Van Burens and their twit friends are befuddled that Tóth and his family aren’t more grateful, especially after Jones gets past her standard suffering-wifey thing and her character gets genuinely interesting. These immigrants make the Van Burens feel small — not special, just rich. As Beethoven is said to have sniped to his benefactor, the Austrian royal Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky, “Prince, what you are, you are by circumstance and birth. What I am, I am through myself.”

Corbet’s desire to stick it to the man takes over the film’s last stretch, which is also its flimsiest. Suddenly, the movie claims that clinging to your principles — something Tóth does over and over with painful results — will eventually result in magnificent art, although it doesn’t give us any reason for that optimism. Perhaps Corbet was in a generous spirit. His own producers agreed to fund a movie that feels very much his own, which is wonderful even given a few fumbles that could have used an outside voice piping up. Aren’t there too many glamour shots of blond actresses whose characters never merit the devotion? Shouldn’t the starving refugees have some reaction to sitting at a banquet table full of cakes?

The movie’s one outright mistake is suddenly shifting from emotional abuse to a literal assault that inadvertently plays like a queasy bad-taste joke about how artists get screwed. I can charitably imagine that Corbet saw it as an undercurrent in the tension between his characters. But the scene is so abrupt and out-of-joint with all the drama that we’ve become invested in, and so unsupported by the three hours we’ve already watched, that this pivotal moment comes across as cheap psychology that the script can’t afford.

Still, there would be no “Sonata Pathétique” without Prince Lichnowsky’s purse strings, no Sistine Chapel without Pope Julius II, no bold young talents like Corbet making their worthy magnum opuses without someone footing the bill. “The Brutalist” argues, and proves by its very existence, that the maddening thing about major works of art is that they demand invention and resources and cooperation. Those are also the building blocks of a society, a shaky foundation that forces the idealistic Tóth to flee one rotten country for another. But in his wake, he leaves behind a trail of splendors — and this movie, even for its flaws, is one of them.