Best Picture nominations for the 97th Academy Awards have been mired in unusual levels of controversy, from the questionable lack of Mexican representation (and poor behavior of star Karla Sofía Gascón) in Emilia Pérez to on-set crew support under director Sean Baker in Anora. Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is no exception, coming under fire for use of AI, including to improve Hungarian accents and (allegedly) create some of the architectural renderings. And while discussions of AI are certainly relevant, the unwanted press has pushed discussion of Corbet's actual film, a 3:35-long, intermission-wielding immigrant epic, to the sideline.

That's a shame, as The Brutalist is a visual and auditory masterpiece that merits extensive discussion not just of its use of AI, but of its ultimately flawed story and thematic decisions. 

The film follows László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew immigrating to the United States after World War II. Arriving at Ellis Island during the brief "Overture" section, we're greeted with askew shots of the Statue of Liberty — as one graces the movie poster above — that suggest Tóth's journey towards the American Dream will be less smooth than he hopes. This worry is quickly confirmed in the film's first part, "The Enigma of Arrival". Although László is hosted warmly by his Hungarian-Jewish cousin Attila and his cousin's Catholic wife Audrey, and the two men are offered a lucrative carpentry job for a wealthy benefactor's son. Unfortunately, the job soon blows up, Attila comes to believe László is hitting on Audrey, and László ends up out on the street. To make matters worse, he spirals into heroin addiction (although, frankly, seems to function just fine as he holds a construction job and hangs out with new friend Gordon). 

Things begin to turn around, though, when the wealthy benefactor finds László having changed his mind on the job — a beautiful home library — especially once it gets him featured in an architectural magazine. Wanting to continue stroking his ego and viewing László's work as a path to do so, the benefactor, Harrison Van Buren (no relation to the president?), invites László to a party. There, Harrison makes a surprise announcement to his family, the party guests, and László: that he's selected László to design and build a community center in their small town dedicated to the memory of Harrison's dead mother. Despite wariness around Harrison's ostentatious wealth, arbitrary whims, and insistence that a Christian chapel be part of the community center, László takes the job. 

The remainder of The Brutalist, contained almost entirely in a chapter titled "The Hard Core of Beauty", follows László's years-long struggle to build the community center in the face of derision and suspicion from his Christian-majority workforce, town, and employers. He also has to face an increasingly tense relationship with his wife, Erzsébet, and their mute adopted daughter, who are sponsored to come to the country with the help of Harrison's well-connected lawyer. The women both suffered greatly in the Holocaust, and László doesn't have time to be the kindest husband or gentlest father figure while sourcing marble from Italy, dealing with lazy employees, fending off anti-Semitism, or doing more heroin. 

For such a substantively heavy movie, The Brutalist matches its subject thanks to strikingly grandiose cinematography by Lol Crawley, who frames cranes and men and hillsides and skyscrapers with both physical heft and powerful imbued meaning. The long movie also zips by, with patient yet commanding pacing by Hungarian editor Dávid Jancsó, who lets scenes take their time without ever dragging. Both men do their jobs respecting the centrality of harsh beauty in The Brutalist, as does production designer Judy Becker, whose architectural designs, sketches, and constructions are convincingly the work of László's tormented genius.

In the same vein, music by Daniel Blumberg is a stirring highlight and without a doubt the single best original score in a 2024 release. László's arrival by ship is announced with blaring horns, yet a sole cowbell underscores uncertainties about the fate that awaits him. In Philadelphia, as László's mental wheels spin, metallic tinkering sounds pair with swelling brass to mirror the process of building and creation. In the beautiful library László creates for an initially unappreciative Van Buren, gentle piano matches the natural light streaming in the newly-opened windows. When the industrialist insists on his party guests marching up the hill to see the community center's future site, drum rolls evoke a band of toy soldiers. Puff pieces for Pennsylvania's growing economy are radioed in over music that sounds perfectly old-world propagandistic, just as New York is introduced in a jazzy, fast-paced ditty, Carrara in a nervous woodwind-heavy song, or 1980s Venice in a determinedly electronic clap-step track. 

The two lead performances, from Adrian Brody as László and Guy Pearce as Harrison, consistently match the excellence of the movie's visual and sonic execution. Brody is painfully lean, nervous, clear that he doesn't fit in but lacking alternatives. Pearce is suave and confident, taking up space in every room but hiding perhaps deeper insecurities about his single-mother upbringing or notable absence of a wife. The early scenes the two men share together, especially a long dialogue over brandy, cigars, and stories about their challenging pasts, completely engage the audience and are the most compelling of the film.

It seems that great scriptwriting moments are only for tragic leads (Brody) or larger-than-life villains (Pearce), though, not all the hangers-on who get in the way of great men. Thus, the supporting cast is disappointingly weak, since they're mostly not given much to work with. Harrison's boy (Joe Alwyn, whose most famous role is as the ex-boyfriend of Taylor Swift) is an unassailably snide failson. The one Black character (Isaach de Bankolé) is literally a drug addict and a delinquent dad, and mostly just sticks around to virtue-signal that László can have associates other than rich WASPs or white employees. Cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola, hot off his atrociously weird performance in Kraven) is decent, and offers a brief glimpse into immigrant assimilation, but is quickly written out. 

Most disappointingly, the women are overwhelmingly weak, as Brody (and his long-time romantic and scriptwriting partner, Mona Fastvold) take a page from the Christopher Nolan playbook for female characters in creating women who are powerless, annoying, sexually obsessed with the protagonist, or all of the above. Despite her Academy Award nod, Felicity Jones is terribly out of her element as Erzsébet, whose autonomy is only glimpsed fleetingly between trying to goad László into sex or complaining about a journalism job. Raffey Cassidy's Zsófia is literally silent; Stacey Martin's Maggie Van Buren is frustratingly meek; Emma Laird's Audrey only exists symbolically, to look sexy in red lips and a red dress to drive Attila and László apart; and every other woman, from a sex worker in an early scene to an Italian dancer in a late one, only grace the screen to be turned on by László.

Three core themes are broached, with varying degrees of success (spoilers ahead). The first, of the financial entrapment faced by artists at the hands of their backers, is the most nuanced. Harrison is definitely an annoying millionaire, which we gather from his introduction via dismissive outburst towards László and Attila, and from subsequent developments such as cutting the funding for the community center due to high insurance costs and a potential lawsuit. But although László repeatedly acknowledges that the art is simply a plaything to the industrialist, Harrison does seem to care... sometimes. Listening to his architect describe fanciful designs against town hall unpopularity, he consistently vouches for the Hungarian because he recognizes the man's genius. In an Italian marble quarry, he stares in awe at the stone, visibly moved and whispering, "It's just as beautiful as you said." Even though they're mostly doing it for themselves, Corbet seems to argue, financiers aren't completely bad. The epilogue, which opens with a quick montage of beautiful art in Venice, hammers this point home; although these works were all financed by blood money of the Medici family and their ilk, their beauty outlives the earthly wrongs that funded them. And in Venice, when an adult Zsófia quotes her father as saying, "it is the destination, not the journey," we can take it as ultimate approval of artistic creation by any means necessary. As a director in today's Hollywood, there's no doubt Corbet feels this from experience. 

Meanwhile, the power dynamics of sex and rape are handled much more coarsely. Having already discussed the ludicrous need of every woman in The Brutalist to be attracted to its protagonist, scenes in which László has sex are consistently unpleasant, such as when Erzsébet masturbates besides him while muttering vague hypnotic threats as he refuses to touch her, or when László causes Erzsébet to overdose on heroin before they have incredible sex with heavy erotic asphyxiation. (Note to self, courtesy of Corbet: heroin is good for one's intimate relationships.) But these instances are nowhere as frustrating as the repeated use of rape as a trope to signify that a character is evil. In the first instance, Harrison's son, who we already know isn't a good guy, rapes Zsófia offscreen, who continues her silence and, as far as we can tell, never speaks of it. Then, later and even more upsettingly, Harrison rapes László in a mineshaft. Corbet thus not only undercuts all the hard work of characterizing Harrison as a flawed but critical figure for László, but also gives his film an overly simplistic resolution when Harrison uncharacteristically commits suicide from the guilt of his action. There are many ways characters can be drawn as evil; rape and sexual violence are one of the least creative (and most triggering) symbols in a director's toolkit. 

Finally, The Brutalist approaches the question of Judaism and post-Holocaust Jewish faith with stops and starts. Moments of lucidity, such as when László is forced to explain the enormous concrete cross atop the community center while demurring intrusive questions about his own faith, do exist but are few and far between. And for the most part, they are tied up too neatly; László's ultimate distancing and departure from Judaism are explained as egotistical impressions of grandeur, overwork, and psychological decline, as opposed to engagement in his faith. Similarly, one of the most fascinating central tensions of the movie — László being forced to build a monument to a faith that is not his — is hand-waved away by dual unearned reveals: first, that the church was actually designed in a way that processed his Holocaust trauma, and second, that he went on to build synagogues later in life, so don't worry about that. 

Instead, Corbet, an atheist with no personal connections to Judaism, seems to be more interested about the defense of Israel as a Jewish state than Jewish conflicted expressions of faith. For example, only two newsreel voiceovers mark the film; the first, about the foundation of Israel and the need for a Jewish state at all costs; the second, an announcement about the first ICBM launch, implicitly tying the importance of Israel to its defense by military force. In the same vein, the behemoth community center quite literally appears by its completion to be a "city on a hill," historically used to describe Jerusalem and later broadened to refer to the United States. 

At every turn, Corbet goes out of his way to paint Israel as the solution for Jewish marginalization in America. Zsófia is silent until she finds her voice to announce her move to Israel and explicitly state that her adopted parents are lesser Jews for not following her. She's ultimately given the final words of the film (over a now-silent László), implying that Israel was singular in its ability to empower her. And her aforementioned final words are unquestionably in support of Israel: the journey of hardships faced by László, Erzsébet, Zsófia, and the Jewish people more broadly are ultimately inconsequential next to the successful destination of holding of Israel. Erzsébet co-signs this argument, too, telling László she must "go home" before dying in Israel off-screen. These are disappointing conclusions given current events, to say the least, and feel like selling short the personal struggles of László, his family, and Jews everywhere.

The Brutalist is a sumptuous audiovisual feat; stills from the film are pure art, and the score is already downloaded on my Spotify. And its lead performances will hopefully bestow well-earned awards season victories for Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce. But in writing two-dimensional supporting characters (especially women), and fumbling tougher themes such as artistic financing, sexual violence, and religious faith, Corbet misses important marks.