Natalie Portman Pens Column On ‘The Brutalist’ As “Transforming” Cinema

Editor’s Note: Natalie Portman previously worked with Brady Corbet in his 2018 drama Vox Lux, in which she played Celeste, the survivor of a high school shooting who is ultimately transformed into a tough-talking pop star. Corbet shot his 3x Golden Globe winning and 10x Oscar nominated The Brutalist in 33 days, clocking in at 3 hours and 34 minutes. For Portman, Corbet excels in delivering stories that follow lone pioneers who are crusading against the corruption of society and those who wield power.

I first saw Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist in a theater in Paris a few months ago. Having worked with Brady on Vox Lux, I thought I was prepared for the scale of his storytelling, but this film surpasses expectations.

In all three of his features, including The Childhood of a Leader, the story of a petulant child in early 20th century Europe who grows up to become a dictator, Brady tells big stories with epic (and epochal) sweep about individuals who become transformed by the eras they are living through, and who, in turn, imprint history with the fruits of their labor — which in Brady’s budding oeuvre includes everything from songs and buildings to furniture and leadership styles.

Brady’s big-swing, small-scale epics —The Brutalist chief among them — are transforming the way movies are made in our maximalist era of algorithmic content creation and franchise fatigue. The Corbet Way is a model of economy delivering a minimum of scale while exuding the intellectual heft and sprawl of a 19th century novel.

The Brutalist was shot in 33 days for under $10 million, bringing the 20th-century immigrant experience to life like no other film of its kind since the cinematic era of Lean, Leone and The Leopard. A soaring tribute to the human capacity for creation, Brady and his co-writer (and life-partner) Mona Fastvold concocted a riveting story of perseverance, artistry and the power of love in the face of adversity as László begins life anew in America after experiencing unfathomable horrors in Europe during World War II. Loosely based on the work and careers of several Brutalist architects like Marcel Breuer and Louis Kahn, Corbet and Fastvold succeed in making László, like their other films’ protagonists, feel like he could have walked out of real life and into history.

Like a cinematic experience from a bygone era, replete with a 15-minute intermission, the 70mm grandeur of The Brutalist is everywhere on screen, from cinematographer Lol Crawley’s sweeping VistaVision images, to production designer Judy Becker’s masterful mid-century interiors and majestic Brutalist design for László’s Institute project, to Daniel Blumberg’s resounding and intoxicating score employing slabs of sound to represent László’s instrument of choice, concrete. Like The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, The Brutalistis carried along by a first-rate screenplay once again positioning an individual protagonist against the machinations of history, culture, and political life.

László channels his wartime pain and grief into the monumental commission at the heart of The Brutalist much like how Celeste in Vox Lux reflected a national tragedy in her music and performance. “They wanted a show, I gave them a show,” quips Celeste, but those could be László’s words, or Brady’s. Brady’s movies exude showmanship at its most artful — worlds containing multitudes, and among those multitudes, singular people carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders like the Greek Titan Atlas.

How they carry that weight and become avatars of America, and citizens of the world, is what makes Brady’s work so fascinating and illuminating. Over the course of The Brutalist, László navigates and transcends his pain through his architectural projects, culminating in a career retrospective at the Venice Biennale. The power of art is that it helps us find light when we are in darkness. And like his protagonist László, Brady pursues his artistic vision doggedly against all odds to create lasting, deeply impactful beauty.