Director Brady Corbetâs film âThe Brutalist,â a vast and imposing portrait of fictional architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor starting over in the United States, has already achieved near-universal acclaim. A Venice Film Festival winner and Oscar contender, including for Corbet and the movieâs lead actor Adrien Brody, it is both a new American epic and cinematic throwback, running over three-and-a-half hours, plus an intermission , and shot on VistaVision (a film stock which hasnât been used by an American movie since 1961).
Corbetâs film, written with his partner Mona Fastvold, required not one but two people to embody Tóth: as well as Brody, production designer Judy Becker was charged with imagining then constructing the architectâs work.
âI am fortunate to have an understanding of that immigrant experience and the many parallels of an artistâs journey,â said Brody in a video interview with CNN.
âMy mother is a Hungarian immigrant and emigrated to the United States after 1956 and the revolution in Budapest. There was a lot that I recalled from my youth of my grandparents, of things that were very familiar and very textural that were accessible to me to help shape him,â he added.
Brody was âthe outward projection â but I was the person writing the poetry,â Becker quipped in a separate video interview.
Becker designed everything by Tóth in the movie, from pieces of furniture to a library for Van Buren and his institute. âI do method design in general,â said the designer. âI really tried to think about what (Tóth) had learned and experienced in his life at each moment, and I took that seriously. Itâs always a dual process, me and the character, like it is for actors, except I donât just disappear.â
âSome of itâs not going to show on screen,â she added, âbut I think it helps make it feel real for the people on set, and that helps it look real on screen.â
â(Becker) brought so much to this,â said Brody. âTo have the material and the form and the structure and something tangible there to represent all these other layers of his (Tóthâs) storytelling too ⦠is really so meaningful and very artistic.â
We learn in the film that Tóth trained at the Bauhaus art school, âthe starting pointâ for the production designer. Becker researched Bauhaus alumni and Modernist and subsequent Brutalist architects. âIt wasnât my first foray into Brutalism. Iâve loved Brutalism since before it was popular,â she said of the divisive movement that utilized unfinished concrete.
âHe also went through one of the most horrible experiences a human could go through,â she said of the Holocaust, adding researching photographs and schematics of concentration camps âwas the hardest part for me.â
Both Tóthâs personal and the professional spheres collide in Beckerâs design for the institute, which takes on deep symbolic value.
The institute, a monolithic concrete structure perched atop a hill, needed to be radical, befitting a designer who can bluntly tell his patron, âYou were not prepared for what you saw â itâs understandable.â
Becker said she drew on the work of Hungarian-German modernist Marcel Breuer and contemporary Japanese architect Tadao Ando, among others, for her creation, which is only shown in snatches, preserving its mystique while keeping costs down. (The movie was shot mostly in Hungary on a modest budget for a feature film, with estimates at $10 million or less.)
From above, the building is shaped like a cross, featuring a chapel at its center and wings serving other community functions.
âThe concentration camps were divided by a road, there were barracks either side, it was very rectilinear,â said Becker. âEverything was kind of in the shape of a cross.â Tóth, she added, âwas Jewish and was constantly being forced into this Christian world, even when it came to America. So I wanted that to be a large part of the symbolism, obvious or not.â
The silhouette only tells part of the story, however. The buildingâs interior proportions â odd, impractical â are vital, to the point the architect refuses to budge when heâs advised to change them.
Related article
Aamir Khan is ready for his next act
âThere was a lot of references to imprisonment and freedom, and the visitor themselves is imprisoned in the building,â she added. âAll of that really went into my design of the building, even though I knew it would never be in the movie.â
The institute becomes the embodiment of Tóthâs struggle, his enduring love for his wife, and a reckoning with his trauma. Itâs also deeply subversive, in that itâs slipped inside the passion project of Van Buren, a man he comes to rightly loathe.
For Tóth, a heroin addict and rough around the edges, architecture is his most elegant way of communicating. âThis Brutalist structure is symbolic of the shell of a man that he is,â said Brody, but also representative of a âspiritual quest.â
Cinema has made architects its subject before, but creator and creation are frequently at a disjuncture. Megalomanic architect Howard Roark in King Vidorâs âThe Fountainheadâ (1949) is a man ultimately larger than his on-screen creations. Anthony Royal in Ben Wheatlyâs Ballard adaptation âHigh Riseâ (2015) is a cypher for free market capitalism more than a creative force. Cesar Catalina, the architect in Francis Ford Coppolaâs âMegalopolisâ (2024), is a Nobel Prize-winner, but thatâs the prime indicator of his genius, not what weâre shown (unless youâre wowed by travelators).
âIs there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?â This question, posed by Tóth midway through the film, highlights the pitfalls of using one artform to depict another â and helps explain why cinema sometimes falls short in portraying architecture. All too often whatâs rendered is a pale shadow of the real thing. âThe Brutalistâ succeeds in part because the architecture is impressive. But also because it inverts Tóthâs question: It imagines a structure which sums up its subject Ââ a man otherwise unable to describe himself.
For all the emotional turmoil of creatives being creative littered throughout cinema â and there is plenty of that in âThe Brutalistâ â Corbet and his collaborators also make space to highlight the grace, catharsis and redemption the act can offer too.
Brody had plenty of sympathy for his character. âPart of what makes the film so special is that it parallels the journey and the yearnings of an artist,â said the actor.
âAll artists, whether itâs an architect or a photographer or an actor or a painter, are somehow pushing to break past those boundaries and to build something of lasting significance to leave behind,â he continued. âThatâs my journey. What motivates me is to find material that speaks to people and shares things on a level thatâs much deeper than entertainment.
âThe beauty of film is to leave behind something indelible.â
Poured concrete or celluloid; the artist need only choose their canvas. We see them either way.
âThe Brutalistâ debuts in US cinemas from December 20, and in the UK on January 24.