Dir/Wri: Brady Corbet | Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pierce, Alessandro Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, Joe Alwyn | US Biopic Drama 235′
Brady Corbet’s exhilerating epic imagines the life of a penniless Hungarian architect who arrives in America having the fled Nazi concentration comps where he was forcibly separated from his wife due to red tape.
Recalling and reinforcing his tour de force in The Pianist Adrian Brody is once again magnificent, in the lead role of László Tóth, a enigmatic character whose creative energy and initiative shapes the foundations of post-war America as he revives his once illustrious career in this engrossing piece of filmmaking. The film is so exciting because it confirms that Cinema as a form of artistic expression is still alive and kicking thanks to Brady Corbet who won Best Director at Venice.
The title could refer to Brutalism as a style of architecture that showcases the bare beauty of the building materials, such as marble, over the decorative design, as seen during the Belle Epoque. Or it could refer to the rich client that Toth meets when he arrives in New York emerging from the depths of the immigrant ship that brought him from worn torn Europe. Guy Pierce is Harrison Lee Van Buren, a wealthy but quixotic industrialist who recognises and envies Toth’s brilliance and vision that shows up his own innate lack of style and sensitivity. This unleashes dark forces within the American that project as contempt. he continually undermines Toth’s efforts to deliver the project while, at the time applauding and encouraging his artistic talents and exquisite attention to detail. A metaphor for America’s gradual decline into mediocrity.
Tóth is at first welcomed and given board and lodging by his cousin Attila (Nivola) who has converted to Catholicism, and offers him a job in his Philadelphia furniture store. But Toth allure and magnetism stirs up unsettling feelings in Attila’s American Catholic wife who suggests sexual impropriety with her inlaw and this forces the architect back onto the streets where he meets Gordon (de Bankolé) who becomes his only male friend. Toth emerges as an imperfect hero with temper and his reliance on opioid drugs as a result injury during him time in Dachau makes him all the more human
Van Buren and his family are deeply antisemitic and embody the same fear and deep-seated envy that had given rise to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and was now seeping into Wasp America and whipping up an unsettling xenophobic in its cosy community whose cultural mediocracy resented anything new or different such as European culture and finesse.
Despite his vast wealth Van Buren exerts his authority over Toth by employing a project manager to cost-cut and knit-pick on the massive project to design a vast community centre in the town in memory of his late mother. This undermines Toth’s artistic control of the scheme and causes angry confrontations between the parties with tragic results.
The Brutalist is a thrilling and confident adventure that lives up to its three and a half hours running time filling the screen with its dynamic storyline and artistic flair, yet there is also a mysterious quality at play that makes it all the more enthralling, along with a daring and discordant score.
Brody’s Toth embodies the creative personality that is by turns vulnerable and confident, and his indomitable wife Erzsébet (Jones), a gifted writer, is equally endowed on the creative front as the two soul mates drive each other forward with their deep and enduring love anchored by mutual suffering. Their orphaned niece Zsófia (Cassidy) is denigrated in a plot involving a sexual encounter with Harry (Alwyn), Van Buren’s conniving son.
Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold seem to be basing their narrative on a real story but the fact that it is all entirely fictional adds another dimension capturing the imagination as we cast our minds back through the possible sources for his extraordinary creative inspiration. @MeredithTaylorr
THE BRUTALIST is in UK Cinemas from 24 January 2025 |