MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

There’s a famous quote – which no-one seems to want to take credit for – which states that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’. It basically means that it’s impossible, and probably futile, to try to encapsulate in words what is, at its core, an entirely subjective response to art. As I have spent almost 30 years writing about music I disagree with this sentiment, and that is even more true when it comes to this review of The Brutalist, in which I will attempt to write about the music for a film which is in part about architecture, among many other things.

The Brutalist is the third feature film by writer/director and former actor Brady Corbet, following The Childhood of a Leader in 2015 and Vox Lux in 2018. It’s a sprawling, multi-faceted wannabe epic which tackles a variety of weighty subjects: the nature of the ‘American dream,’ the entrenched class system in American society, the experiences of Jewish immigrants to the United States post-World War II, and how trauma and anguish tears at the fabric of families. It does so by following the life of László Tóth (Adrian Brody), a fictional Hungarian-born architect who is forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and sent to a concentration camp, but survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the United States ahead of her. However, after eventually settling in Pennsylvania, he struggles to regain any semblance of his former life, and slips into depression, homelessness, and drug addiction, until a wealthy client changes his life.

László is a proponent of the brutalist architecture movement – a style that favors a minimalist approach full of blocky, geometric angles and lots of poured concrete, in contrast to the ornate and decorative style that dominated European architecture for decades previously – and his approach impresses wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who commissions László to design and build a community center in honor of his late mother. However, as time goes on, numerous issues arise, resulting in László’s plans for the building continually being put on hold. This happens in conjunction with the shifting personal relationships in László’s life: with his jealous cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), with Erzsébet who arrives in America many years later confined to a wheelchair as a result of her own experiences in a concentration camp, with his mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), and especially with the volatile Van Buren himself, who seems to both admire and loathe László in equal measure, depending on the day of the week.

Corbet seems to be wanting to make some intellectual and metaphorical parallels between the brutalist architecture movement and László’s life in America – something about how László wants to carve a new and different future out of a Europe shattered by war, how his designs are an extension of his complicated feelings for Erzsébet, or perhaps how America can be a cold and brutal place for immigrants – and it’s all very ambitious, but honestly, for me, all this got lost in a film which felt weighed down by its own pretentions of grandeur and importance.

Despite some impressive in-the-moment acting performances, especially by Brody and Pearce, the film nevertheless feels somewhat distant and standoffish to me. The dialogue veers from stilted to overly-talky, and the personalities of the characters seem oddly inconsistent from scene to scene, to such an extent that I was constantly confused by how people were interacting with each other, and in the end I didn’t really care what happened to anyone, which meant that the larger points Corbet was making got lost. Supporting characters appear and disappear without explanation, and the numerous time jumps made the narrative difficult to follow. It’s visually impressive, as one would expect considering its subject matter, but beyond this I don’t quite buy all the hype it has been receiving in the run-up to the 2024 Oscars.

The score for The Brutalist is by the 34-year-old British experimental songwriter and composer Daniel Blumberg; it is only his second film score, having previously scored The World to Come for director Mona Fastvold – Brady Corbet’s wife – in 2020. Both of Corbet’s previous films were scored by the late Scott Walker, who was a teen pop icon in the 1960s before becoming an avant-garde classical composer for more than 40 years prior to his death in 2019. Blumberg was introduced to Corbet and Fastvold by Walker’s producer Peter Walsh after Walsh produced Blumberg’s solo album ‘Minus’ in 2018, and the musical lineage from Walker to Blumberg is clear in how their writing style shares numerous similarities in approach and tone.

Blumberg and Corbet wanted the music to play a major part in the film but honestly, and apart from a sequence of continuous prominent music in the film’s first ten minutes, I actually felt that the film was somewhat under-served by its score. With the exception of the opening overture, which I’ll get to in a moment, a lot of the score is somewhat muted and insubstantial, focused mostly on low-key piano textures, long stretches of rumbling ambiance, and occasional cues which incorporate some musique concrete-style ‘open source music,’ including a prepared piano altered to sound similar to construction noises.

It’s quite odd to me that so many commentators are praising the score’s in-context effectiveness, because I found a great deal of the music to be understated to the point where it was essentially inaudible, and therefore has little impact on the film’s emotional drive. It is only when you listen to the score as a standalone album that Blumberg’s intentions become clearer.

The three-track “Overture” that opens the album features Blumberg’s chamber orchestra alongside three pianists – John Tilbury, Sophie Agnel, and Simon Sieger – plus trumpeter Axel Dörner, and saxophonist Evan Parker. It is by far the most impressive musical element of the score. The first of the three overture cues, “Ship,” underscores László’s arrival in the United States at Ellis Island, and is initially anchored by a fanfare-like 4-note motif for brass, which then gives way to a more abstract and aggressive sequence for the aforementioned prepared piano surrounded by intrusive and agitated percussion textures and scraped strings. Those first five minutes are disorientating and confusing, but when László first catches sight of the Statue of Liberty and we as an audience finally realize what’s going on, Blumberg’s music becomes raucously celebratory, acknowledging what László hopes is the beginning of his American dream. In the second of the three overture cues, “László,” the motif is carried by a languid and jazzy piano, and then in “Bus” the theme is accompanied by a more urgent, propulsive low brass pulse and abstract piano clusters that remind me of Philip Glass’s documentary scores for director Godfrey Reggio, like Koyaanisqatsi.

Thereafter, the main 4-note piano motif returns frequently, but to Blumberg’s credit he changes the emotional tone and style to keep it generally interesting: it is gentle and intimate in “Library,” forlorn in “Porn,” florid and summery in “Bicycle,” abstractly deconstructed in the 11-minute “Intermission,” oddly agitated and transposed to slurred horns in “Handjob,” off-kilter and out-of-tune in “Bath,” and tenderly sparse in “Looking at You”. There is a recurrent suggestion of sadness and melancholy to a lot of this music, which matches László’s personality, and is understandable considering the misfortunes and indignities he is continually forced to endure, especially at the hands of Van Buren. In fact, it’s only real moment of traditional romance comes in “Erszébet,” in which Blumberg expands the central motif into a longer-lined theme that represents the rekindling of the relationship between László and his wife that had been so cruelly interrupted by the onset of the war and their incarceration in separate Nazi concentration camps; it’s lovely, if perhaps a touch despondent.

Meanwhile, the brass pulses and metronomic rhythms return in cues like “Chair,” the forceful “Steel,” and the unusual “Carrara,” the latter of which pits the motif against a bank of wildly squeaking saxophones. These cues establish themselves as a sort of motif related to László’s creative process, his drive and sense of purpose, and the unusual way his mind works, how it sees the world, and how that translates itself into his design aesthetic. This idea comes to fruition in “Construction,” which combines the rhythmic ideas from those aforementioned cues with the prepared piano sounds from the “Overture,” resulting in a piece which feels almost aggressive in its relentlessness.

Also included in the score are five tracks of very authentic period jazz – “Jazz Club,” “Building Site,” “Ribbon Cutting,” “Gordon’s Dinner,” and “New York” – which remind me a little of the jazz music Justin Hurwitz wrote for Babylon in 2022, and which often have a raucous, intense, wild lack of control that goes a long way to illustrating the chaos that often overtakes László’s brain, and why he turns to heroin to numb his pain and make him forget the horrors in his past. The performances here by saxophonist Evan Parker are something to behold.

Other cues of note include the militaristic march-like percussion of “Up the Hill,” the unexpectedly Thomas Newman-esque lightness of “Pennsylvania,” and the curious combination writing in “Heroin” in which Blumberg takes the melody of the love theme for László and Erszébet and arranges it with the off-kilter jazz orchestrations, representing the scene where László injects Erszébet with some smack from his secret stash to ease her physical pain, but accidentally gives her an overdose. The conclusive “Search Party” is also interesting, as it turns the main theme dark and bitter in response to the revelation of what happened between László and Van Buren in the tunnels below Carrara; the music here reminded me of Carter Burwell at his bleakest.

I should also note that both “Monologue” and “New York” feature dialogue excerpts of Adrian Brody speaking in character as László, while the first moments of “Train Crash” feature excerpts of a synagogue congregation singing in Hebrew, amid a bank of ominous and unsettling layered brass textures that foreshadow the tragic accident about to unfold.

The final cue, “Epilogue (Venice),” underscores Zsófia’s meaningful speech about Tóth’s life and work and legacy at the architectural conference in Venice with a synth-pop arrangement of the main theme performed by Vince Clarke of the band Erasure, while the film’s end credits are not played alongside a score suite, but instead feature a completely out-of-place 1970s song, “One for You, One for Me” by the Italian disco duo La Bionda. These two pieces end the film on a peculiar vibe which stands at odds with, and in some ways completely undermines, the seriousness and thoughtfulness of everything that came before it. Thankfully, the song is not on the soundtrack album.

The score for The Brutalist has been receiving lots of awards buzz, and it’s not difficult to see why – it’s the type of score that more high-minded voters have been eager to acknowledge of late. It’s different and a bit obscure, and it’s by a musician who comes mostly from outside the confines of ‘traditional’ film music, and this is certainly true – it comes from the same world as recent scores by people like Jonny Greenwood, Mica Levi, Emile Mosseri, and Jerskin Fendrix. However, for me, this feels a little bit like the emperor’s new clothes, because in truth there isn’t much about The Brutalist that is especially new or innovative, and it’s in-context effectiveness is negligible outside the opening “Overture” and the romantic piece for László and Erzsébet.

Intellectually, I can see where many of these voters are coming from. There are some interesting parallels between the makeup of the score and László’s brutalist architectural aesthetic; both seem to favor bold, in-your-face blasts rather than elegant or stylized composition, and this is something that is well conceived, but like brutalist architecture itself, responses to this uncompromising approach will be mixed – some will find it beautiful and modern, while others will find it harsh and ugly. And therein lies the dichotomy at the heart of the whole thing. Dancing about architecture indeed.

Buy the Brutalist soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Overture (Ship) (4:49)
• Overture (László) (3:01)
• Overture (Bus) (2:12)
• Chair (1:44)
• Van Buren’s Estate (0:53)
• Library (3:26)
• Jazz Club (3:38)
• Porn (2:11)
• Monologue (2:38)
• Up the Hill (1:11)
• Pennsylvania (1:01)
• Bicycle (2:55)
• Steel (2:12)
• Intermission (11:22)
• Erzsébet (2:50)
• Handjob (1:35)
• Bath (1:02)
• Building Site (4:31)
• Ribbon Cutting (1:38)
• Picnic by the Lake (1:52)
• Gordon’s Dinner (0:55)
• Looking at You (1:00)
• Train Crash (3:13)
• New York (0:57)
• Stairs (1:37)
• Carrara (1:24)
• Marble (2:08)
• Tunnel (1:05)
• Construction (2:50)
• Heroin (3:33)
• Search Party (3:21)
• Epilogue (Venice) (2:55)

Milan (2024)

Running Time: 81 minutes 22 seconds

Music composed by Daniel Blumberg. Conducted by XXXX. Orchestrations by Daniel Blumberg. Featured musical soloists Daniel Blumberg, John Tilbury, Sophie Agnel, Simon Sieger, Axel Dörner and Evan Parker. Recorded and mixed by Peter Walsh. Edited by XXXX. Album produced by Daniel Blumberg and Peter Walsh.