It is exactly as galaxy-brain’d or pat as you, personally, think it is. Is it about assimilation? Sexuality? Compromise in high-budget artmaking? 20th century Zionism; 21st century Zionism? Art/artist discourse? Addiction, physical ability, trauma, cultural Jewishness, genius, idiocy, wealth, sexual coercion, partnership, the American dream? Sure, and also lotsa other stuff too, like “what if Adrien Brody had and then did not have a beard?”

A helpful contrast is Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral, a movie that is geometrically designed as load-bearing and ode-bearing: it adapts the formal tools of religious architecture into the medium of family cinema. The Brutalist’s citations of its immigrant-epic forebears do evoke a certain feeling of bodily smallness within a vaunted sanctuary, but past a certain point it cares more about reflecting on (replicating?) a seemingly obligatory biopic texture. I honestly thought of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story more than once. In any case, the analogical utility of architecture— or even brutalism as a formal tradition— is not so much the point for Corbet as it is for D’Ambrose.

All of which returns to that vexing question: what does this movie want to do? Is it a slyly frustrating credo on x thematic concern, or is it more concerned with what Russell aptly calls the “cable rewatchable” experience?What’s accomplished by sifting out the difference, and does Corbet know I’m kinda wasting my time trying to do just that?

I don’t know if The Brutalist’s ability to be projected onto— hey, just like a wall of solid concrete— is a statement or an avoidance, a virtue or a fault. But it certainly is a continuation of Corbet’s apparent inclination to set up thorny branches in the first half of a film and then saw them off to sanded nubs in the second. It’s hard to not feel disappointed by that self-erosion.

All I know is 1. I don’t buy the ending for a second (I mean this as praise), and 2. it’s hilarious to leave this movie and immediately see a Cybertruck drive past.