Brady Corbet's The Brutalist has grand ambitions, but The Master it is not

By now, you've probably heard a lot about Brady Corbet's daunting three-and-a-half-hour epic, The Brutalist. The film, about a holocaust survivor trying to find a sense of home and safety in the U.S., was shot anachronistically on VistaVision. It's the same beautiful, rich, large-format celluloid canvas that hosted John Ford's The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest — a surefire way to make cinephiles salivate. 

When The Brutalist premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Corbet won the best director prize, critics and bloggers christened it a "staggering," "monumental" "masterpiece," immediately making it the frontrunner to win best picture at the Oscars on every betting site. They also compared it to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master — high praise that I don't think The Brutalist earns so much as it admirably strives for, especially in the case of the latter.

But Corbet isn't really entertaining the comparison between his critics' darling and Anderson's masterpiece, which just happens to be my favourite film of the 21st century. "I don't love homage films and I'm not interested in pastiche," he says during an interview in Toronto when I bring up the parallels between the two movies. Both follow traumatized men trying to find their footing in post-WWII America.

Instead, Corbet says he was thinking more about the films from the 1950s — the ones Anderson also referenced. He speaks specifically about the way their camerawork was dictated by how large and relatively immobile VistaVision cameras were. That influenced how he would shoot his imposing film, with more restrained movements despite the fluidity today's smaller equipment could grant him. "It was important for me that there was one foot in the past and one foot very firmly in the present."

I'm not entirely convinced, but we'll get to that.

Corbet's Film Twitter favourite, which he co-wrote and produced with his wife Mona Fastvold, stars Adrien Brody. The actor, tweaking and fine-tuning some of the haunting notes he played in The Pianist, inhabits László Tóth, a once-celebrated brutalist architect who struggles with odd jobs in Pennsylvania, picks up a heroin habit and looks for anyone who can help him get papers for his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) who are still stuck in Europe. Eventually, László happens upon an oily benefactor, played by Guy Pearce, who at first admonishes the former architect's presence, but then quickly admires his work — or rather, the acclaim it attracts. Pearce's Harrison Lee Van Buren commissions László to build a community centre at the top of a hill. With an uncompromising approach, the architect develops an imposing structure, which seems to embody both the character's traumas and Corbet's own ambitions as a filmmaker in its cold, grey and cryptic designs.

Corbet acknowledges the self-portraiture built into The Brutalist. László is much like a filmmaker trying to make something monumental (as the film has been repeatedly called) while surrounded by predatory financiers who insist on cost-cutting — his grander vision finding appreciation decades later. 

Corbet, too, is hoping for some delayed gratification. "I don't want a film to be finished for a viewer as soon as the credits roll," he says. "I want it to carry on, like a piece of music. It's something that's stuck in your head. It's inconclusive. That's something that's very important to me."

That brings us back to the whole The Brutalist versus The Master thing — or rather, the way The Brutalist is to The Master what Paul Thomas Anderson's wildly ambitious and unwieldy Magnolia is to Robert Altman's Nashville. With Magnolia, Anderson used his young, hotshot director status (following his Scorsese-flavoured breakout Boogie Nights) to make a mosaic film much like Altman's Nashville and Short Cuts, as if trying to vault himself into the conversation among the greats he admired. The Brutalist has that same eagerness about it. 

A challenging and provocative immigration story about trauma and cycles of violence, Corbet's film shares more than just a passing resemblance to The Master, in which the late Philip Seymour Hoffman plays an L. Ron Hubbard-inspired cult leader trying to heal Joaquin Phoenix's shattered veteran, Freddie Quell. It's not just the '50s setting and the paternalistic relationship between a broken soul and a wealthy charlatan that's common to both, but also the narrative structure and artistry.

Consider the way Brody's László and Phoenix's Freddie encounter women who all have a certain look — square face blondes for the former and redheads (as projections of the girl that got away) for the latter. "He has a type," chuckles Corbet, when I point out how two of the women in bit parts are so identical that I assumed they were played by the same actress. (And, no, we're not referring to Cassidy, who very intentionally and much to the same purpose plays both László's haunted niece, Zsófia, in the '50s as well as that character's daughter during a coda set in the '80s.)

Consider also how neither László nor Freddie can perform sexually for most of their films. The playful in-joke in The Master, which nevertheless resonates emotionally, grows more oppressively grave in The Brutalist, where the architect who can't get it up insists on erecting a brutalist structure that reaches for the heavens.

There are even echoes in the way both films play with time. In The Master, there's a lot of talk about past lives haunting the present, and a sense that so much of the world and the characters around Freddie — who appear to personify his internal state — are frozen in time. Meanwhile, The Brutalist's exhaustive three-and-a-half-hour duration, complete with an intermission, plays against how little evolves for the characters over time.

The Brutalist lands that point — and truly becomes its own beast to be grappled with — when, in its thorny finale, we catch sight of Zsófia's daughter (Cassidy's face remaining a constant across decades). Spoiler alert: The moment takes place after László and his family have escaped the hatred they faced in the United States and realized the American Dream is just another myth. They've resettled in Israel, viewers learn, where they have supposedly found safety and that sense of home they had been searching for.

Giving a speech decades later in Venice at a retrospective dedicated to the architect, Zsófia spells out themes and projects meaning from her uncle's work, putting too neat a bow on things when she subverts the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote by declaring: "It's all about the destination, not the journey." 

There's something sinister about the tone in that moment, when Zsófia puts a period instead of an ellipsis on her uncle's story. The sense of resolution is undermined for audiences familiar with headlines from Israel and Gaza — as well as ongoing conflicts elsewhere — making an unsettling endnote in a narrative about how trauma begets trauma.

Thinking about how his film plays with time, folding the past onto the present, Corbet says, "It's one thing to say history repeats itself, it's another thing to really feel that history repeats itself."

The Brutalist is now playing in Toronto and expands to theatres across Canada throughout January.