A novel approach: ‘Brutalist’ a captivating, ambitious epic that feels like a book, looks like a painting

“The Brutalist” — 4 stars

Austere, foreboding, harsh and intoxicatingly masculine.

What’s to like about Brady Corbet’s third movie “The Brutalist”?

Not much.

This ambitious, novelistic art movie has little interest in pandering to audiences with the usual likable elements.

Likable? Not the characters (sympathetic? sometimes), not Lol Crawley’s color-bled cinematography, not Daniel Blumberg’s unhummable pounding score, not the parade of intriguingly cold and blocky architectural designs.

And yet, it’s the best picture of 2024, just now opening in Chicago after Academy Award-qualifying runs in Los Angeles and New York.

A true epic clocking in at 3 hours and 35 minutes, “The Brutalist” deserves to be experienced on a big screen where Corbet constantly throws big ideas all over a big painterly canvas like a crazed, cinematic Jackson Pollock.

The story looks, feels and sounds like a documentary, or at least a biographical drama based on a real person.

Nope.

Adrien Brody juxtaposes resolute sadness with quiet inner strength as the fictional László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who travels from Budapest to America after World War II, looking for a better life for himself and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones).

For the first half of the movie, she remains in Europe confined to a wheelchair, suffering from osteoporosis caused by a famine in a concentration camp.

Tóth moves in with his Pennsylvania cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture store hustler with a slightly devious wife (Emma Laird).

If “The Brutalist” seems to be short on exposition for a while, be patient. Corbet strategically sprinkles in the necessary details as we need them.

The plot kicks into overdrive after Tóth meets wealthy, pretentiously aristocratic Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce, delivering a career-best performance laced with transparent self-interest and an obsession for total control over his limited world).

“I find you intellectually stimulating,” Van Buren tells Tóth. This comes only after Look magazine publishes a glowing pictorial about the stunning, cornea-crackling landmark library Tóth builds for Van Buren in his mansion.

Van Buren hates it so much, he kicks Tóth out of his house and refuses to pay him.

Thanks to Look, Van Buren suddenly shifts into great pride having “discovered” this new artistic talent, and proposes Tóth design and construct a massive complex that includes a chapel, a library, gym, auditorium, everything short of a bowling alley.

Think of it as Van Buren’s version of Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu in “Citizen Kane.”

It’s that epic.

“The Brutalist” taps the often-explored conflict between artistic vision and capitalism, but nothing simplistic or trite will be found in Corbet’s nuanced examinations of art vs. commerce, antisemitism, postwar Jewish immigration, the elusive American dream, and a complex, boldly realistic look at marriage devoid of Hollywood cliches.

Corbet extends his densely novelistic approach by dividing his hefty story into chapters. (He includes a 15-minute intermission actually built into the movie, which is still running even though we see nothing on the screen.)

It occurred to me after watching Pearce’s riveting portrait of an entitled control freak that “The Brutalist” would make a dandy double-bill with Hugh Grant’s “Heretic.” Thematically, that works.

Oh, before I forget, “The Brutalist” is being presented in 70 mm exclusively at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. Tickets purchased for “premium” screenings during the opening weekend come with a movie poster, a limited-edition brochure, plus a set of postcards celebrating the life and work of László Tóth.

As if Brody, who won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama on Sunday and the Best Actor Oscar in 2002 for Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” didn’t make him real enough already.

• • •

Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Emma Laird, Alessandro Nivola

Directed by: Brady Corbet

Other: An A24 theatrical release. Rated R for graphic nudity, language, sexual situations and assault. 215 minutes.