By Peter Keough

Like all accomplished directors — and architects — Brady Corbet has orchestrated a team of outstanding collaborators into shaping his vision.

The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet. At the Alamo Drafthouse, Boston Common, Kendall Square, Somerville Theatre, and Coolidge Corner. The Coolidge and Somerville Theatres are showing The Brutalist on 70mm film.

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. Photo: A24

Appropriately, the Statue of Liberty is inverted at the beginning of Brady Corbet’s epic (200 minutes plus a 15 minute intermission) paean to the fate of genius at the hands of capitalism. Indeed, The Brutalist is itself a kind of inversion of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, with its visionary architect hero László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody in a performance that picks up where the Munch-like angst of The Pianist left off) a victim rather than an exemplar of the free enterprise system in action. At the risk of spoilers, this victimization takes place in a scene of grotesque violation — a mirror image of a similar moment in Robert Eggers’s remake of Nosferatu, another tale of a perverse oligarch’s depredations.

Tóth has just managed to emigrate to the US with a boatload of other refugees after being held up by Cold War bureaucratic paranoia. A Bauhaus-trained, rising star Jewish architect from Budapest, Toth had his life and career disrupted by the Third Reich. He barely escaped from the death camps (he relates how his leaping from a train resulted in the nagging nose injury that would lead to his heroin addiction), and was separated from his wife and his niece, who now languish back in Europe in the gray area between Soviet and Western control.

Like Benjamin Franklin of old, he hopes for a new life in Pennsylvania, which the first of several period PSAs included in the film describes as the nation’s leading state for industrial development. It’s a modest start — his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has invited him in to work in his hole-in-the-wall Philadelphia furniture store as a designer. In hopes of achieving his own Horatio Alger success story, Attila has changed his name to Miller, his religion to Catholic, and has married Audrey (Emma Laird), a shiksa wife. Commenting on his cousin’s relentless commercial attitude, Tóth complains affectionately “Why are you always such a businessman?” Asked about the dismal items for sale in the dreary showroom, he replies more pointedly, “They are not beautiful.”

Nonetheless, Tóth enthusiastically cooperates when Attila arranges an assignment to rehab a wealthy client’s father’s library. He takes charge of the negotiations, haggles a fair price, and seals the deal. However, this materialistic, mercenary attitude, which Attila embraces and Tóth reluctantly accommodates, seems also to involve an underlying, unwholesome sexual component, exemplified when the cousins and Audrey celebrate their success with a bibulous dinner. Afterwards, Attila bullies Tóth into dancing with his wife when it is clear neither party is interested. This twisted pimping is a sinister precursor of similar pathology to come.

But first, the library project undergoes what becomes a familiar pattern of exaltation at imminent success followed by shattering disappointment. Just as they are putting on the finishing touches, the client’s father returns unexpectedly. Unaware that his son had prepared the renovation as a surprise, he is furious and demands answers that he does not listen to. He is especially irate about the “strange Negro man” — Toth’s friend, assistant, and heroin connection Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé) — on his property. Compounding this humiliation, Attila later blames Tóth for the debacle, adding that his wife told him that he tried to hit on her. Speechless at these accusations, Tóth leaves and is next seen bearded and on the nod under a bloody blanket in a mission refuge.

As far as I can recall, the film never mentions the word Brutalist, the stark style of architecture, of which a much maligned example is Boston City Hall. But in a broader sense, as their initial encounter portends, the term is embodied by Tóth’s future patron.

With the overpoweringly American name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce in a plummily perverse performance), the formerly noncomprehending beneficiary of Tóth’s genius, has tracked him down to where he is at work shoveling coal. He bears with him a check, a copy of Life magazine with a glowing article on his library, and an invitation to visit him at his Versailles-like compound outside the city. There he invites him to design and oversee the construction of his dream project — a portmanteau community center dedicated to the memory of his mother that would combine a gymnasium, theater, library, and, at the insistence of the civic agency that would underwrite the costs, a Christian chapel.

Felicity Jones in The Brutalist. Photo: A24

At first all goes well. “As a person of unique privilege,” Van Buren pontificates, “I’ve always thought it was our duty to nurture the defining talents of our epoch.” Though others in his circle roll their eyes at the design’s stark unconventionality — a model of it when carried by Tóth and three others looks like a cross between a coffin and Hagia Sophia — Van Buren for a while is doggedly supportive. And, most compellingly, he uses his connections to reunite Tóth with his wife and niece, though the renewed relationship at first appears rocky.

But cracks also appear in the alliance between patron and artist, especially when Van Buren assigns a bean counter to oversee the project. More tellingly, he displays his contempt and resentment in an excruciating dinner scene when he tells Tóth, all in jest of course, that his accent makes him sound like a shoeshine boy and then tosses him a penny (shades of the shine box scene in Goodfellas). But, though submissive for the most part, Tóth still has grit, as he demonstrates in a truly satisfying scene in which he confronts the hack architect whom Van Buren has hired to rein him in. “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid, but most importantly ugly,” he tells the intruder, “is your fault.”

But not until a trip to the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, where they are seeking a slab for the altarpiece, is the true nature of the beast revealed. An old comrade of Tóth — an anarchist and former partisan who previously participated in the deconstruction of Fascism (and Mussolini) and now works to provide materials for the reconstruction of civilization — has offered him a deal on the same kind of pristine stone favored by Michelangelo. In a key scene, the mason pours water over a sheet of marble, revealing the shimmering intricacies of its beauty, and the marble panel fills the screen. It becomes the material of the film as well as that of the future chapel. But that epiphany will be eclipsed by a moment of horror exposing this kinder, gentler Van Buren as a monster and a malignant parasite no better than the pestilential vampire (and real estate developer) Count Orlok in Nosferatu.

Like all accomplished directors — and architects — Corbet has orchestrated a team of outstanding collaborators into shaping his vision, including the exacting and ravishing cinematography of Lol Crawley and Daniel Blumberg’s throbbing, thrilling score. He has tapped into the zeitgeist of the era in which the film is set (with its troubling echoes of today) with incisive period details, including surprising choices for music drops and the best neckties of any film this year. Perhaps most impressive is his range of cultural allusion, ranging from his choice of chapter headings (“Part One: The Enigma of Arrival,” referring to the title of the novel by V.S. Naipaul), to a passing allusion to the Borges story “The Library of Babel.”

In the early, optimistic stage of their relationship Van Buren asks Tóth why he has chosen to be an architect. Tóth explains how, despite the war, he has heard that many of his buildings have survived. “When the terrible recollections of what happened … cease to humiliate us,” he says of his works, “I expect them to serve as a political stimulus sparking the upheavals that frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.” Maybe that’s why Corbet makes films.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).