“The Brutalist”: A Modern Exercise in Classical, Epic Filmmaking

There were several factors for the decline of the Golden Age of Hollywood. One of these factors was the rise of television in the 1950s. Audiences could watch moving images from the comfort of their living room. This began a decline in sales at the box office and a major shift in the entertainment market.

The Hollywood studios reacted to this shift by telling larger stories more frequently in color, often with more grit than you would get from a television drama. These stories were projected onto larger screens with wider aspect ratios than a television set. Widescreen formats like CinemaScope, Super Panavision 70, and VistaVision gave audiences an experience of moving images that could not be recreated on a small, black-and-white television screen. A film like Lawrence of Arabia perfectly showcases the type of Hollywood filmmaking created as a reaction during television’s early days. This shift toward color, wider aspect ratios, and blockbuster storytelling has more or less been standard operating procedure for Hollywood productions since.

Now, Hollywood faces another shift in the entertainment market. The movie industry is still figuring out how to react to the streaming revolution. Perhaps the success of The Brutalist, which won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, can be a template for Hollywood going forward that partially emulates what they did during the rise of television.

Like Lawrence of Arabia, The Brutalist is an epic period drama. It tells the story of architect László Tóth, played by Adrian Brody (The Pianist) in another Oscar-winning role. A Jewish Hungarian who comes to the United States following World War II, he is ecstatic upon his arrival in New York Harbor, having left Europe after his liberation from the horrors of the Holocaust. He is ready to explore this new land of opportunity.

He then goes to Philadelphia, where he joins his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola, Kraven the Hunter), who has shed his Jewish identity and married a Catholic woman. He gives László a job at his furniture store. László finds a benefactor in business tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, Memento), who tasks László with designing a community center and chapel in his unique architectural design. László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) are brought to the United States with Van Buren’s help. A family is reunited against all odds.

Like many of those epic films released by Hollywood in the early days of television, The Brutalist is over three hours long and includes an intermission. It is the first movie to be filmed in VistaVision since 1961 and Lol Crawley’s stunning, Oscar-winning cinematography is best experienced at the cinema. The film was also produced on a net budget of under $10 million and has grossed over $45 million worldwide as of this writing. A powerful, epic-length story set in the past and produced on a modest budget can be successful in the age of streaming television. Streaming audiences may be weary about the film’s running time, but those who can binge hours of television at a time are already primed for watching The Brutalist.

The story is a fractured American Dream story. Though László fled the ruins of a war-ravaged Europe to find a better life, he still faces ugly, unbridled bigotry in his adopted homeland. Though Van Buren admires László for his talent, he is not above exploiting László and never sees him as a true American. The Brutalist forces audiences in America to confront how their nation lives up to its ideals of welcoming the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.