Venice '24: "The Brutalist" is monumental

Please join us in congratulating Elisa Giudici on this milestone, her 100th post for The Film Experience. Direct from Venice, Italy. And what a film, apparently, for this occassion. 

by Elisa Giudici

THE BRUTALIST

After multiple attempts, Brady Corbet has finally made his Great American Film. It’s always risky to make such a statement, but The Brutalist isn’t just the standout film of this year’s Venice Film Festival, nor merely the most ambitious and monumental project of 2024; It's a work destined to leave a lasting legacy. With the right reception, this could easily become a landmark in cinema history...

Watching its sprawling 215-minute runtime (complete with a 15-minute intermission that feels organically woven into the experience), you get the rare sense of witnessing something truly momentous. While not without flaws—there’s a stumble in the third act, where the film leans too heavily into  exposition—it comes very close to perfection.

The overwhelming sensation is one of timelessness. The Brutalist exists outside of any contemporary context, searching for a kind of cinematic purity that makes it feel like a classic from another era. It’s untouched by current trends, by the episodic nature of modern storytelling, and by the need to coddle its audience. It demands patience, commitment, and attention. It invites comparisons to the great films of the past because it dares to do what those films once did: it grapples with the entire human experience, the existential.

This is why it feels so vast and sprawling. The screenplay, co-written by Corbet and his longtime collaborator Mona Fastvold, is breathtaking in its scope, offering the perspective of someone who seems to have lived a hundred lives. Even the starting point is unconventional: the protagonist, a Hungarian brutalist architect played by Adrien Brody, has already lived through a lifetime of pain and survival. He’s found the love of his life, been torn apart by the Holocaust, and somehow survived. Now, in the film’s stunning opening sequence, he arrives in America, full of hope for a new beginning. But the Statue of Liberty is inverted, a symbol of how this promised land will betray him—hostile, capitalist, and racist, ready to break what little remains of him after surviving Nazi horrors.

The film is permeated with narrative currents, chief among them a haunting epistolary voice that later becomes physical: that of his wife, played by Felicity Jones. In a brilliant structural move, the first part of the film is driven by her voice-over, reading passionate, heart-wrenching letters she writes to her husband while they are separated. Cruel fate keeps them apart even after both survive the concentration camps. The second part of the film sees their reunion, a love story of two bodies that have been ravaged more by pain than passion. Their connection is spiritual, almost metaphysical, so profound that it manifests in moments of brutal honesty. Her body, weakened by malnutrition-induced osteoporosis, becomes a living reminder of the physical toll they’ve both endured. She tells him, matter-of-factly, "They hurt our bodies," downplaying the trauma they now share—more in cries of pain than whispers of intimacy.

While the architect’s journey through America reveals its dark soul, his wife emerges as the wise, protective sage, offering the film’s most brutal truth: America is a poisoned land, its air, water, and food contaminated. What contaminates it? Her recurring line offers a clue. The grand architectural commission her husband receives from Guy Pearce’s character—a wealthy industrialist with echoes of Citizen Kane—is dismissed as little more than “kitchen decoration” by the magnate, a devastating dismissal of the genius her husband pours into the project.

Pearce’s character is a complex mix of lover, father figure, and antagonist. A monstrous father in the Old Testament sense, he can’t fully overcome his disdain for his architect’s humble beginnings and never truly understands his brilliance. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, his frustration leads to an act of possession, symbolizing his need to control everything, even at the cost of destroying it. They visit the marble quarries of Carrara to procure a slab of white marble for the altar in the cathedral-like building they are constructing. 

The marble quarries, a sacred yet secular space, are inhabited by stoneworkers who have never left the valley, their lives dedicated to the stone. Except for one trip to Milan—where they struck the body of Mussolini. Pearce’s magnate touches the marble with the same hands that seize everything in life, yet he fails to grasp its true beauty, its sacredness. His touch is an act of desecration, which is later mirrored by another hand, this time reaching out in desperation among the silent rocks.

In The Brutalist, love is both destructive and redemptive, a primal force intertwined with ideals of beauty and corrupted by wealth and power, particularly in Pearce’s character. The film, set in the aftermath of the Holocaust, presents a uniquely American villain—not Nazis, but those who offered refuge to European survivors only to exploit them. 

Adrien Brody in THE BRUTALIST

The Brutalist is a film of such magnitude that its brilliance almost precludes it from winning the Golden Lion. Its greatest achievement, however, is the performance of Adrien Brody. Already lauded for his work in The Pianist—a film to which The Brutalist feels like a spiritual successor—Brody reaches new heights here, transcending mere acting to become his character. He's visceral, raw, and unforgettable. The supporting cast is equally stellar, while the technical craftsmanship is exceptional: the score electrifies, the rich greens and reds captured on film evoke paintings, and the brutalist structure they build becomes a biblical parable, an architectural warning.

This is an extraordinary film, one so exceptional that its 215 minutes fly by in an instant, much like life itself. When it ends, you’re left wanting more.

Comments

[thevoid99]

I WANT TO SEE THIS!