Review: 'The Brutalist' tells an epic story — of an architect battling small minds and personal demons — in an epic, 3½-hour masterpiece

“The Brutalist” is an uncompromising movie about an uncompromising artist — a 3½-hour epic drama about an immigrant architect battling his rich benefactor, capitalism, antisemitism and his own demons to see his vision to creation.

Director Brady Corbet, co-writing with his wife Mona Fastvold, tells the fictional story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect to survives the Nazi concentration camps and arrives in America in 1947. He’s given a place to sleep by a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a thoroughly Americanized furniture store owner. Laszlo, who designed boldly creative buildings in Budapest before the war, is now relegated to designing furniture. 

Attila manages to get Laszlo a commission from a business associate, Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), to design a new library as a surprise for Harry’s rich father in Pennsylvania. The father, Harrison Lee Sr. (Guy Pearce), hates the design at first — but when he figures out who Laszlo was back in Budapest, Harrison appreciates the work and wants him to do more.

Specifically, Harrison has a vision for building a cultural center on a large hill near his home in Pennsylvania — and he wants Laszlo to design and build it. Laszlo accepts, and soon discovers that was the easy part. Soon, he’s dealing with Harrison’s bean counters, local politicians who don’t understand his grand design, and the contradictory whims of his super-rich client. 

Laszlo also is working to get his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who barely survived the Holocaust, passage to America. And he’s in constant pain from the injuries he suffered in the camps, which he’s self-medicating with heroin.

Corbet (“Vox Lux”) takes his time telling Laszlo’s story — there’s a 15-minute intermission built into the movie’s 3-1/2-hour running time — but not a minute of it feels excessive or thrown away. Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley immerse the viewer in the period, both the gritty streets of Laszlo’s immigrant journey and the luxurious digs of the Lee family, to give context to the concrete and steel the architect aims to shape into something monumental.

The ensemble cast, particularly the three leads, ensure that audiences aren’t just admiring the design. Pearce channels the spirit of robber barons and Rockefellers in his portray of Harrison, who knows how much it costs to hire a genius but doesn[t comprehend the sweat that the genius expends in creation. Jones, who before the intermission is only heard as a voice through her letters, shows Erzsébet not just as a frail wife but as the emotional anchor Laszlo needs to finish this project. And Brody carries the heavy load of shouldering this grandly scaled movie by embodying both the intelligence at work and the frustration that others don’t see what he sees.

“The Brutalist” isn’t an easy watch, but it’s a rewarding one. People like Laszlo are the reason this country got built after World War II — often while in conflict with men like Harrison, who recognize and pay for talent without understanding how they decide on what they’re creating.

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’The Brutalist’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use and some language. Running time: 215 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission.