Oscar hopeful ‘The Brutalist’ takes too long to say too little


Anyone who’s heard me gush and rave about my favorite films knows that I love a massive epic with an overbearingly inflated runtime.

There are few cinematic memories as strong or precious in my mind as seeing “The Return of the King” on opening night and reveling in all three hours and twenty minutes.

I still believe that 2023’s mammoth three-hour “Oppenheimer” was genuinely the best and most powerfully impressive film of that year.

The famously long, three-hour-plus “Magnolia” is a legitimate contender for my favorite film of all time.

So understand that when I say “The Brutalist” – the Golden Globes’ winner for Best Picture: Drama and a possible frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar – is unnecessarily over-long, I’m taking more issue with its heart than with its length.

The story of a destitute architect and Holocaust survivor that arrives in America in the 1940s and is eventually taken in by a potentially shady and dangerously rich industrialist, “The Brutalist” assuredly carries the narrative and conceptual potential to make good use of its three hour and thirty-five minute runtime.

But it eventually just starts to crack under the weight of its clear desire to just be so big.

The end result is a film of rich visual artistry, gorgeous design, and staggering performance that after three and a half hours still left me scratching my head as to what it was even trying to say or do.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a complete disaster or even that it’s not worth the time.

The Brutalist
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist 2024

First and foremost, the performances really are incredible.

The three leads – Adrian Brody, Guy Pearce, and Felicity Jones – are each fantastically dense and realized in their roles, with Jones being the easy standout for me as Erzsebet, the long-separated wife and partner to Brody’s brutalist architect Laszlo Toth.

Secondly, the overall design and aesthetic are truly wonderful. From the scrolling orientation and movement of the credits to the fonts and logos and symbolist designs throughout, director Brady Corbet establishes a clearly unique and lovingly considered visual language for the film.

Even the way that the fifteen-minute intermission enters and announces itself before counting down the remaining time feels brilliant and beautifully conceived.

That design focus, along with composer Daniel Blumberg’s modernist, unnervingly loud score and the much ballyhooed choice to shoot in VistaVision – a long-forgotten supersized film format – all combine to create something that just feels like it should be important and groundbreaking in cinema. And when you marry all of that to such a masterful leading cast and performances, it’s easy to just believe that it is.

And yet, none of those elements can quite create something more than the sum of their parts.

There’s just no real core to the story. There’s nothing to connect to conceptually and little to grasp emotionally beyond all the persistent bleakness.

The Brutalist
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist (2024)

Contrary to what many people seem to think, “The Brutalist” isn’t based on any true story. It’s not a biographical film of any real person (though the Laszlo Toth character is very loosely based on real-life brutalist architect Marcel Breuer and he shares a name inexplicably with a famous geologist and vandal.)

So this is a fully fictional story where a once-acclaimed architect spends three hours of screentime obsessively attempting to build just one building in suburban Pennsylvania. That’s pretty far from the grand, sweeping, global epic that the film’s marketing insists it is.

A lot of reviewers and critics have made a big deal out of the film’s consideration of “the immigrant experience” and the hardships faced by a culture clashing and raging to fit into a new land. And that would absolutely be the heart of the story if it ever felt like it was really explored in that way or if it had anything substantive to say about it.

Instead, that “immigrant experience” that people keep attempting to highlight is really just three hours of tragedy after tragedy with nothing that resembles a deeper meaning or anything like resolution or catharsis.

The Brutalist
Guy Pearce, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Stacy Martin, and Joe Alwyn in The Brutalist (2024)

Others have written about the film as a story of grappling with trauma and of attempting to process the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust through an unrelenting and uncompromisingly obsessive artform.

But again, that’s not ever really explored in any meaningful way.

In fact, the single most compelling and interesting idea in the story – the one revelation that would give the film’s events the meaning they seem to crave – is just simply told to the audience in the final five minutes with no time to land or to bear any emotional weight.

You get the sense that Corbet may have believed that to be the big cohesive “aha!” moment for the audience, the big revelation that puts everything into perspective and lays bare the emotional themes of his story. 

But with no time to consider or explore or examine that idea within the story’s context, it amounts to little more than another interesting idea in a film full of interesting ideas that all largely go nowhere and that get buried under all the trauma porn.

It all culminates in its final quarter with a sudden new trauma and tragedy that comes so far out of left field – and that feels so unnecessary and so thematically unneeded – that I could honestly feel the entire theater simultaneously asking “why?”

Ultimately, I feel like I’ve never wanted so badly to love a film that I just couldn’t connect to.

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Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist (2024)

The aesthetic and the presentation and the music and just the overall feel of “The Brutalist” all speak to me so deeply, and the strength of the performances alone elevates the film into legitimate contention in this awards season.

I even personally love brutalist architecture and design. In fact, that’s one of the biggest elements that had me so excited for this movie.

But just like the enduring criticisms of the brutalist style itself, the final film just feels inelegant and sometimes even unnecessarily ugly, full of sharp corners and cavernously hollow interiors.

Maybe that was the whole point, actually. I really don’t know. 

Because after three and a half hours on screen and another full week in my head, I’m still not sure what “The Brutalist” was trying to say or do.

“The Brutalist” is in wide release in theaters now and runs at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art February 21st through 27th.

For times, tickets, and more information – and to keep up with all of OKCMOA’s screenings of Oscar-nominated films – visit okcmoa.com.


Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.


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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.