Road to the Oscars Review: ‘The Brutalist’ is a Brutal Slog with Nothing to Say

Every year, in the time between when the Academy Award nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OUT FRONT Magazine movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot move of the movies are now available on streaming.

Last year was the first year since they expanded the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10 that River managed to make it through all 10 nominated films, and as she did so, she wrote reviews of them for OFM. This year, she aims to do it again, watching all 10 nominated films and writing about them for this site. She already saw and reviewed Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here as part of her coverage of this year’s 47th Annual Denver Film Festival. That leaves her with eight films to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10 films again? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!

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Movies don’t always have to have a neat little moral at the end. But I also feel like they need to have a specific perspective and a justification for being made. To take an example from the last movie I reviewed for this series, A Complete Unknown doesn’t have a neat little moral at the end that wraps up the story and leaves us with a life lesson, but it does seem to take the perspective that Bob Dylan, while a bit of a jerk, was a master of his own craft and made the correct artistic decisions in the first four years of his career, despite having people around him, like Pete Seeger, trying to tell him to stick to traditional, acoustic folk. As I got to the end of Brady Corbet’s immigration epic, The Brutalist, I found myself asking questions that I didn’t have answers for, such as, “What point was that film trying to make?” “Why did that movie need to be made?” and “What the everliving fuck did I just watch that for?”

In The Brutalist, we follow Hungarian-Jewish holocaust survivor and Bauhaus-trained architect László Tóth (Adrian Brody) after he immigrates to the United States for new opportunities. While László comes to America alone, he yearns to bring his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over to the United States with him. László gets a job with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), and Attila’s Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird) where they run a small furniture store and interior design firm. Attila gives László a small room to live in and a job helping him do design work, but when a rich client named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) throws a fit over a job, Attila blames his cousin for the lost business and falsely accuses László of making a pass and Audrey, leading to Attila kicking his cousin out of the house.

After Van Buren has some time to calm down, he comes to see that the work László did for him is exceptional and realizes that László is a famous architect in Europe. So Van Buren apologizes and hires László to build a massive community center for his mother, even giving László a place to live and bringing Erzsébet and Zsófia to the United States to reunite with László. But László’s newfound success comes with having to deal with Van Buren and his family’s arrogance and subtle racist microaggressions. As Van Buren finally crosses a line in his treatment of László, our hero starts spiraling out of control in response.

This massive movie clocks in at over three hours and, in the theater, even comes with a 15-minute intermission to let viewers use the restroom in the midst of this massive slog of a film. At that point, I have to say the same thing I said about last year’s Best Picture entry, Killers of the Flower Moon, that there’s no reason to make this a single film and not a mini-series. The only reason for the choice of keeping it as one film seems to be the fact that film still carries some more prestige than television, and an Oscar is more prestigious than an Emmy. But this story could have been told better as a four-or-five hour mini-series that gives the viewer regular breaks.

The film was really bizarre to me because, up until the moment about two thirds of the way into the film when Van Buren does something simply depraved and unforgivable to László, I sat here thinking, “How is this representative of the struggles of the immigrant experience?” For the most part, great things keep happening to László, and every minor setback is followed by another big opportunity that keeps him going. I was expecting a movie that showed the aggressive racism and bigotry faced by immigrants, but instead I got a movie where our immigrant hero seems to land on his feet so often that I began to wonder if the film was meant as some sort of “American Dream” propaganda. It’s not that, as László definitely goes through something awful towards the end of the film, but for a solid majority of the film the worst thing that László has to deal with are people being passive-aggressively racist towards him. I started to feel like the overall point of the film was that the immigrant experience can be very easy if you’re willing to flatter the egos of powerful white men.

Right up until the point of the film’s intermission, the movie set up László’s relationship with Erzsébet as the most romantic love story imaginable. But once she arrives in America, there’s a brief moment when László gleefully greets his long-lost wife, but after that, he seems to show little interest in Erzsébet and almost seems irritated by her. And it’s easy to see why: Erzsébet is an oddly unpleasant person. There’s this really weird scene where Erzsébet is trying to get her husband to forgive her for not telling him that she was now in a wheelchair, so, in bed, she starts dry humping her husband while telling him about all the ways she missed him while they were apart, and the whole time she seems kind of angry about it. It’s such a weird scene that I’m surprised nobody is talking about it.

The movie even tries to wrap everything up with a little moral at the end, but that moral is utterly offensive in how completely wrong it is. At the very end of the film, we see a flash-forward to 1980 when László is being honored for his life’s work and his great-niece introduces him and ends the whole film by saying that her uncle once told her: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” How close that statement comes to being a version of “The ends justify the means.” It seems to suggest that people should suffer and accept poor treatment to get what they want, which feels like a horrible, tacked-on lesson to add to a film that’s trying to illuminate the immigrant experience.

The film also takes place around the time that Israel was forming as a nation and, while that would have been a historical event worth ignoring, especially considering how controversial Israel is right now, Israel instead features heavily in the film’s background and in a way that is oddly uncritical of the creation of the nation on Palestinian land. Towards the end of the film, Zsófia and her new husband announce to László and Erzsébet that they intend to move to Israel because they consider it their duty as Jews to populate their new homeland.

At first, László and Erzsébet object and take offense to Zsófia’s rhetoric about Israel, arguing that they aren’t any less Jewish for choosing to stay in America. But, once László nearly kills Erzsébet by trying to give her heroin when he can’t find her pain medication, the couple decide to move to Israel to be with their niece. While they do not end up moving to Israel, it’s never out of any moral outrage over the colonial nation, but rather because other events end up getting in the way. While the film never comes down with a firm stance in favor of Israel, I was surprised that it wasn’t more critical of the nation than it was considering the current state of events in that area of the world.

The film has come under some criticism because of the fact that artificial intelligence (A.I.) was used to help improve Brody and Jones’ pronunciation of Hungarian, which has led some people to say that they don’t deserve any awards. In a way, I can see that. The role called for someone who could speak Hungarian flawlessly and, if Brody and Jones can’t do that without the assistance of technology, then did they really fulfill all of the requirements for the role?

At the same time, we shouldn’t try and take away all of the excellent work that both actors, or at least Brody, put into their roles. Brody has moments that are absolutely stunning in his performance, even if he did have to act out what I thought was an oddly-structured and uneven script. I don’t think we can take everything away from what he did. But I can also see why some people are talking about Timothée Chalamet pulling the upset for the Best Actor Oscar because, while Brody needed A.I. to help him with an important aspect of the role, Chalamet learned guitar and did a perfect impression of Bob Dylan’s singing, meaning he mastered the little details necessary for the role in a way that Brody simply didn’t.

Vegas odds* for the Best Picture Oscar have been bouncing around for weeks, and, at times, it has looked like Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, and Anora have been the favorite. Currently, Anora has overtaken The Brutalist in the Vegas odds while the odds for Emilia Pérez have taken a swan dive in the wake of fans turning up old, racist tweets from lead actress Karla Sofia Gascon. Even though the odds currently favor Anora, Covers.com is still picking The Brutalist to win Best Picture. I’ll comment on that after watching Anora, but it does seem like The Brutalist is a lot of people’s favorite after the downfall of Emilia Pérez’s Oscar campaign. I don’t think people should like The Brutalist, but they seem to.

Adrian Brody is currently leading the Vegas odds to win Best Actor, but Covers.com thinks Chalamet is going to pull the upset for the aforementioned reasons and I agree with them. Meanwhile, The Brutalist is much more distant in its odds to win Best Actress for Felicity Jones or Best Supporting Actor for Guy Pearce. Brady Corbet is currently the second favorite to win Best Director behind Sean Baker for Anora, but Covers.com is picking Corbet anyway. While the cinematography was pretty good in The Brutalist, I ultimately found it to be an overblown, pretentious film with nothing to say and, if Corbet wins for Best Director, I’m going to be pissed.

In the end, I have to wonder if the whole reason that people seem to enjoy The Brutalist is because of the Emperor’s New Clothes-syndrome by which people think that something they don’t understand has to be genius. The Brutalist is an uneven slog that can’t quite figure out what it wants to say, and it ends up being a muddled mess in the end. I realize I’m in the vast minority of reviewers to dislike this film, but I am all for this losing all the Oscars it was nominated for because the film was just too confused about its own purpose.

Rating: 42/100

*I’m going to be referring to the Vegas odds on the Oscars because I think they’re a handy guide to gauge the likelihood of a film winning a particular award, but I do want to emphasize that betting on the Oscars is not legal in the state of Colorado, and this is just something I bring up for fun in my predictions. We are not endorsing anyone gambling on the Oscars in an area where it isn’t legal.

The Brutalist is still in theaters and you can find showtimes here.

All photos courtesy of Zoey Kang (A24)