Director Brady Corbet attempts to create a great American epic

About five centuries ago, the artist Michelangelo spent months obtaining 100 tons of marble from the Carrara quarry only to discover that his patron, Pope Julius II, refused to refund the money. Angry, Michelangelo fled Rome without finishing the pontiff's future tomb, causing the angry and terrified Pope to send men to drag him back. Even after this turn of events, Michelangelo agreed to work with him again on a new commission, the Sistine Chapel, where he painted the face of the Pope in a portrait of the prophet Zechariah. If you look at the cherub over Zechariah's shoulder, his fingertips touch in that unmistakable Italian gesture that means: Fuck you!

Art moves the soul. But beneath the transcendence you will also find money, ego and anguish. I would advise you to keep this in mind when watching “The Brutalist,” but its director, Brady Corbet, emphasizes it quite a bit. This enormous film, co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, chronicles the misery of a fictional Hungarian architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who shares the best and worst traits of Michelangelo: genius, perfectionism, stubbornness, bad mood, rage and a punishing attitude. commitment to one's own brilliance. There's even a humble sequence set in the real Carrara, where, in contrast to the raw splendor of the quarry, the powerful modern excavators seem as insignificant as Hot Wheels on the basement stairs. (And, as a final point of connection, in 1972 a real Hungarian named Laszlo Toth used a hammer to disfigure – or technically, remove the nose – Michelangelo's Pietà.)

This Tóth, however, is a Hungarian Jew who survived a concentration camp and a Nazi regime that considered his creations “not Germanic in character.” Tóth's wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) have also held on, but they won't arrive until the second half of the 3 hour and 35 minute long film. (More movies should have interludes, please; they're wonderful.) Corbet and his cinematographer, Lol Crawley, introduce us to Tóth in the tight spaces of a mysterious, frenetic and dirty place, with the camera struggling to keep up with Brody's back. and then… democracy! – reveal that we are on a ship that has just arrived in New York Harbor. Most stories about immigrants tend to photograph the Statue of Liberty grandly. Here, she was filmed upside down against a white sky and with the old woman balancing on an awkward axis. The effect is dizziness.

“The Brutalist” is set in 1950s Pennsylvania and, for its papal antagonist, presents a reverent American figure: a very rich man. The tycoon, played with constipated entitlement by Guy Pearce, has the pastiche name of Harrison Lee Van Buren. (Was Warbucks on the nose, too?) Van Buren's inexperienced, failed son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), is indirectly responsible for his father commissioning Tóth to construct a massive building, and Harry occasionally gets involved. like he was in charge. Pennsylvania, we are told in a film strip, is the Land of Decisions. However, the project is mired in miscommunications and retractions as it metastasizes from one cultural center to a mixed platter of competing interests. Interestingly, Tóth insists on building a skylight that shines with a sunlit cross. I suspect he is trying to protect himself from these energy vampires.

Corbet is also an artist with ambition. It's something I've admired about him since his first two films, “The Childhood of a Leader” and his wonderful flop “Vox Lux.” You can feel his brain whirring in every shot of “The Brutalist,” zooming in as fast as his motif of POV shots from a speeding bus, train, and gondola. He has packed the film with so many ideas that you accept its length, even with its pacing of newsreels and radio broadcasts that intervene to make sure we are aware that Israel has been formed and that the heroine is evil. (One spasms with a stirring chant of “Steel! Steel! Steel!”). There's also an experimental score by Daniel Blumberg made up of explosions, piano tinkles, and noises that sound like a dozen screaming balloons. It's great.

Like “Tár” and “There will be blood,” this is a cultural psychoanalysis presented as a fake biographical film. Anyone who has ever had a headache-inducing boss or been on the losing end of a fight between taste and money will see themselves in Brody's kinetic martyr, a figure so scrutinized that, in close-up , you can count their pubic hairs. The film is billed as a modern epic and earns that golden frame. You're pretty sure that at some point someone must have come up with the argument that this is “Citizen Kane” from the perspective of Xanadu's interior designer.

One of the ironies is that Tóth thinks the New World seems retrograde. Back in the old world before the war, he studied at the Bauhaus and dedicated himself to a structural purity that makes Manhattan's most beautiful skyscrapers look demanding. The war stripped him of everything – papers, luggage, family, career – and left him with physical and emotional scars, in addition to a drug addiction that takes us by surprise. It's tempting to see Tóth's forceful sketches as a metaphor for being limited to your essence. But Corbet rejects that kind of narrative convention and waits until the last five minutes of the film to give us a full summary of Tóth's life story and what he believed his buildings really meant.

Tóth is who he is; His tastes are rooted in his very being. By contrast, his cousin Atila (Alessandro Nivola), acclimated to the United States, has learned to mingle with the WASPs and kowtow to the rich, making him a moderately successful middle-class salesman and, in the eyes of this film , a failure. My favorite scenes are the ones where the Van Burens and their asshole friends are baffled that Tóth and his family aren't more grateful, especially after Jones overcomes her usual long-suffering wife attitude and her character becomes really interesting. These immigrants make the Van Burens feel small: not special, just rich. As Beethoven is said to have told his benefactor, Austrian King Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky: “Prince, what you are, you are by circumstance and birth. What I am, I am through myself.”

Corbet's desire to hit the man takes over the last section of the film, which is also the weakest. Suddenly, the film claims that sticking to your principles (something Tóth does over and over again with painful results) will eventually result in magnificent art, though it gives us no reason for that optimism. Perhaps Corbet had a generous spirit. Its own producers agreed to finance a film that feels very much their own, which is wonderful even given some missteps that could have used an outside voice. Aren't there too many glamor shots of blonde actresses whose characters never deserve devotion? Shouldn't starving refugees have some reaction to sitting at a banquet table full of pastries?

The film's only glaring mistake is suddenly moving from emotional abuse to a literal assault that inadvertently comes across as a bad joke about how artists get screwed. I can charitably imagine that Corbet saw it as an underlying current in the tension between his characters. But the scene is so abrupt and disconnected from all the drama we've engaged in, and so little supported by the three hours we've already seen, that this pivotal moment feels like cheap psychology that the script can't afford.

Still, there would be no “Sonata Pathétique” without the sons of Prince Lichnowsky, no Sistine Chapel without Pope Julius II, no daring young talents like Corbet making their worthy masterpieces without someone footing the bill. “The Brutalist” maintains, and demonstrates it with his own existence, that the maddening thing about great works of art is that they demand invention. and resources and cooperation. These are also the pillars of a society, an unstable foundation that forces the idealistic Tóth to flee from one rotten country to another. But in its wake, it leaves a trail of splendors, and this film, even despite its flaws, is one of them.