From the very beginning through the bitter end,  inextricable from the philosophy of its very subject matter, the film places you amongst the materials of its construction. Vision, power, perspective, strength, aesthetic, patronage — supporting beams of concrete jutting out of the natural earth, of which class may afford only a select few the opportunity to claim ownership over. 

Its characters, like its themes, are laid out plainly (sometimes too obviously) enough so as to draw your eye unmistakably to the conflict of the America it interrogates. The Statue of Liberty, standing on its head. A cross, flipped upside down. Like its brutalist structures, this is all presented without subterfuge, the materials themselves strong enough to withstand the weight of expectation and trauma of the story. It’s intentional, essential even, that you understand the terms. The fee that Laszlo has agreed to pay back. 

The feeling of watching the film’s materials (literally in VistaVision, opening credits rolling not-so-subtly horizontal) be laid in front of you is as exhilarating as the feeling our title architect must feel sketching the immutable visions he sees onto paper. You can’t go five minutes on the collective film internet without seeing the phrase “big swing” applied to the very act of a film so long, so large, and so thematically load bearing. But the feeling of watching it (especially turning myself over to it a second time) is less like watching the soaring construction of a monument and legacy that will stand the test of time, and more like being one of the screws that gets turned to hold together the foundation of that monument. 

The score thumping, the camera panning, the dialogue cutting, the facial expressions chilling. The pace of the editing remarkable, the run time robust and digestible. All the while, the “American dream” being revealed as never real, so never unrealized.

As the screws are turned on Laszlo and Erzsebet, so too are they turned on the viewers, and our expectation of that dream being realized in a way that fits the blueprints we are programmed with (the archival of glorious Pennsylvania, the dream of a political architect in his own right, is so expertly used in this way, reminding us of the cynical manipulation of our expectations of America that we cannot avoid).

At times in its second half, it fails to deliver on the carefully constructed expectations of its first half. As those screws turn, sometimes they’re at the wrong angle, needing to be taken back out and turned again. Fits and starts. The Felicity Jones performance remains the most out of gear — not bad, and not underwritten like I thought on first viewing, but rather tuned differently than the rest of the symphony. We fail to ultimately occupy the mind of Laszlo, instead opting to metaphorically reside in the spaces that he’s created in the epilogue. I know that’s intentional, but I can’t decide if I like it. 

In the end, what’s undeniable is that it’s quite a blueprint for a movie. It’s quite a feat of movie making. It’s quite a recommendation for staying the course and sticking to your vision. Above all, it’s just a lot of movie. I like that, and it seems like a lot of other brutal boys do too.