The Brutalist (2025)
Brady Corbet's The Brutalist received 10 Oscar nominations and is considered to be one of the favorites for Best Picture at this year's Oscars ceremony. While Corbet's sprawling, 3.5-hour film has its merits and is certainly not short on ambition, it is not one of the year's best.
Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a
Jewish-Hungarian architect who immigrates to America after World War II. After
an initial hostile encounter, his work and talent catch the eye of plutocrat
Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren commissions Toth to build a
community center in honor of Van Buren's dead mother. Along the way, Toth tries
to get his wife (Felicity Jones) to America and battles a heroin addiction.
Brody, Jones, and Pearce have all
received Oscar nominations for their performances, and they do good work here.
Pearce is especially a standout, able to shift gears from charming to
condescending to entitled to vicious. Daniel Blumberg's Oscar-nominated score
is the year's best and deserves the award.
However, The Brutalist's story
unravels in its final hour. A pivotal act of violence occurs fairly late in
the film and it seems more like a clumsy metaphor about the relationship
between art and commerce than an authentic interaction between the two
characters. As a result, the climax feels unsatisfying.
Corbet shows enough visual skill and
ambition to merit attention for whatever he follows up The Brutalist with.
Sadly, The Brutalist isn't quite as good as its reputation suggests.
