Put ecclesiastical matters aside, just for the moment, and ask the question: what is a cathedral? What distinguishes a cathedral from a parish church? Having put aside ecclesiastical matters, we risk now an interweave of contradiction. There are small cathedrals; there are grandiose parish churches. But that very concession proves the general rule. A cathedral is a parish church but far the grander, the taller, the bigger. It is a question of scale. If we question the style of the architecture, the basic principles are generally the same. Spire; transept; altar. There is no part of a cathedral that is more holy, and if we are to take architecture as an artwork of messaging, the message of the small church is no different to that of the large church. They are all constructed on the same principle, in a generically similar design, pointed to the same object. Glorification, gathering, and skyward piercing. In a strictly spiritualist interpretation of either religion or art, one might then accuse the cathedral of being in some way superfluous, even vulgar. And yet there remains a cathedral quality. There is a mood and an effect in bigness that has no particular function or idea; or rather, the function is bundled up in the mood. It is a question of spectacle, of volume: the effort of constructing such a magnitude itself gives the same basic material an additional swathe of outer glory. It becomes necessarily significant. Take the story of Babel: what significance is that tower if not in its scale? In Bruegel’s two depictions of Babel, we cannot read its ultimate purpose. Merely that the tower is peering into clouds; that Babylon is small in its shadow; that something great is achieved. Bruegel litters his towers with signals or symbols of confusion; a sense that either in its construction or its design this tower’s magnitude will prove its undoing. But had this tower been small — had this been a tower of Pisa-size, which itself seems to represent that same folly of vanity — then its narrative would be in so many respects diminished. There is, in the absurd scaling of the cathedral, and of Babel, a magnification of effect that does not require any likewise expansion of intellectual or theoretical content. There is a philosophy in scale alone.
So enters The Brutalist, a film so contrived to represent scale that it seems to have defied all the manners of its making in so doing. Six million bucks somehow becomes the most significant-feeling film of the last several years. Every effect is made use of: an overture (that lasts barely a minute); an intermission; the grand-old VistaVision format and logo; 35mm footage and 70mm prints; a three-and-a-half-hour runtime; a brassy score; overlooks of vast landscapes; scene-devouring performances; and a totality of themes. Perhaps we are not, in fact, seeing a cathedral, but rather a parish church, which — by ingenious use of mirrors and projection technology — has been magnified to thirty times its size. This illusion can be sussed with closer interrogation of the material: we are watching a chamber drama, set across just a few rooms, in which much of the colossus is merely hinted at: we see his feet, and dream the head. But that is the trick of The Brutalist: we open with a shot of the Statue of Liberty, the camera tilted upside down. He gives us the head, and cuts the feet. To describe The Brutalist as kitsch is then not entirely wrong, insofar as it intentionally co-opts dated signifiers of magnitude so as to invest itself with a scale otherwise far outside its means. One might also insinuate this same process in Corbet’s most obvious artistic debt: to Paul Thomas Anderson. The relatively modest budgets of most PTA films still far outgun Corbet, but he has nonetheless carved out the generic shape of the Great American Epic. By tapping this format and style, Corbet has amalgamated a movie that must necessarily tower. There is a temptation, in diagnosing this sleight of hand, to therefore call it out: to declare that The Brutalist is 5,000 children in the biggest trench coat ever woven. That it is all posture, dedicating so much energy to the illusion of magnitude as to therefore skeleton a vast cavity: an inner chamber, household of echoes. Certainly this is the most prominent criticism of The Brutalist as an artwork: that it has scraped up the viscera of the epic without remembering such key components: the heart, the brain. Take its thematic cross-section: immigration, racism, sexuality, disability, genocide, drug addiction, post-trauma, nation-building, colonialism, art, life. Here is the cross-section of prestigious work; here is the reverse-engineered epic. Richard Brody accurately describes it as a “backward construction,” an apt phrase for this film’s every sinew. Brady Corbet builds Babel from the peak down, with the foundations unfinished. The film must therefore float on air: the exhilarating cloud-capped opening must thrust downward, ever in search of grounding, and finding it only in the very last scene.

It is in this last scene that Corbet, himself, reveals the sleight of hand: we discover that the mega-building (that can bear no other title) built by László over the film’s runtime is in fact based precisely on measurements taken from Buchenwald and Dacau, where László and his wife were each interred. What was premised as a vanity project, patronized by a man whose only vision is that he must appear visionary, was all along a Trojan horse, in which is hid the dimensions of László’s inner mind. We then must question the basic definitions of architecture as it is generally understood: that a building must at once provide form and function. It appears that László’s Holocaust-memorial fails spectacularly in its proposed function (as most other characters, perhaps shrugged off as rubes by the discerning viewer, make frequently clear), which apparently covers every aspect of conventional living. It is to be a library, a gymnasium, an auditorium, a chapel. Here one may think, move, perform, pray. It is, in the less impressive metaphor slung beneath this enterprise, an allusion to cinema. It is demanded that the great film be intellectual; that it be visceral; that it be theatrical; and that it plumb the metaphysical. The four-buildings-in-one requirement, that so often lopsides the medium. Corbet finds a little comedy in the final compromise: that the library be removed. But if we rid ourselves of this metaphorical notion for a moment, we return to the building as-built. A cold, vast, dark chamber. One cannot imagine this place as host to light reading, or exercise, or all but the most austere music. It is a bleak church, lit coldly by a cross. In obligatory style, Corbet must end the film-proper with this cross inverted. László’s deception is therefore complete: this is a building that defies the basic assumption of architecture, it is a j’accuse to those who would repeat the ignominies of its measured source, and it is most pointedly not that which it purports to be. So too does The Brutalist itself seem to make use of its implied-patronage — that of the Great American Epic, so broad and touted — in order to construct a film that veers far from that weary course; a film that seems to defy its form and forgo its function, or rather reshape these to other ends. Again, we are reminded of Paul Thomas Anderson, though this time in reverse. PTA’s films typically begin with a premise that might speak to the Nation or to History, but as his films progress, these ideas are muddied, lost in his convolutions, until at last their historical pertinence is both the least interesting and least successful thing about them. They become personal, intimate, searching. The Brutalist begins in this latter mode, and then travels dutifully into the former. It strips off its personality and reveals a musculature of Message, of Metaphor, of broad-beamed Ideas. The film’s final line — which has been taken all-too-seriously by various critics — expresses the gag itself. “It’s not the journey, it’s the destination.” This is a conclusion that would necessarily reduce the film to its most basic line (László’s secret building project; its eventual completion) while forgoing the causal relationship between the building’s theme and its maker; and between all the things that came to pass during its making and afterwards. History does not suddenly pause. If this film, and if Corbet’s filmography, has a major theme, it is specifically that the journey determines the destination; that even the singular act of commemorative construction contains within it new reflections, new time, and new outcomes. The Brutalist develops this idea by means of scope and a necessary scale: it does not culminate so much as stretch one obsession across the contents of the following epoch. It is a squeezing of time: present, past, future.
But we must return to cathedrals. Specifically, we must think of the high baroque, in which cathedrals are lacquered in white and gold, in which ceilings are masked with vast murals, in which every Renaissance artist must compete for eye-space in such dazzling array. I have found that this arrangement of art is, at least for the passing visitor, deeply flawed: that in this magnitude, each work robs from the other. If ever I should want to hide the greatest work of Italian art, I should install it on full display on the ceiling of a church. Its qualities would go unnoticed; it would blend into a headache of angels in flight, Christs on crosses, stiff necks peering up. My argument is not that The Brutalist contains the sum-work of the Renaissance masters. Indeed, I should reiterate the first metaphor: this is a parish church magnified thirty-times: any artwork on its walls and ceilings has become a blurred slew. Rather, it is a question of crowding: a point by which total magnitude has robbed the building of its precision; it is, in its operation, the total opposite of László’s own chapel, which contains an altar alone. This is the effect of Corbet’s thematic avalanche, in which a great slob of problems and details are introduced to the narrative without adequate time to treat or resolve them. I am not opposed to a film built of mutual, partially developed textures, but here there is an unnecessary impulse — in pursuit of bigness — to throw as much paint upon the wall as possible. That this must be a film about Israel, and about America, and about Art, and about Drugs, and about Sex — not merely containing these things, but in some way threading them into the grand tapestry. This ambition is not fulfilled, with an often skeletal account standing in for flesh-and-blood. The attempt necessarily dilutes the ale. And it is here that the trick seems to betray itself. A film that trades in the illusion of enormity — which requisitions the fabric of the monumental — must eventually show its hand. Not empty, but padded with so many blanks. It is the same as the final reveal of László’s mega-building. Not, as advertised, as expressed, a combination of so many contrary aspects. One thing — one monolith — built on false pretenses. It must at once be admirable and vacant; grand and empty; important and useless. I commend this attempt at scale; it proves at last that the grandeur of 20th century filmmaking was not lost in methods of production or in a transfer of cash, but in a mentality; the low-budget cinema is not merely small by necessity, but foists smallness on itself. A triumph and a warning: the cracks down Babel’s wall.
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