‘My uncle is, above all, a principled artist…’
Brady Corbet’s third feature film The Brutalist looks set to dominate at the Oscars with ten nominations including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. Despite some controversy (Corbet used AI to digitally enhance some of the cast’s Hungarian accents), having now watched The Brutalist, I can see why it has caused such a stir among the Academy. To describe it as Oscar bait would perhaps be unkind but anything involving the Holocaust, the immigrant experience in America or Adrian Brody usually tends to do well on Oscar night…
Laszlo Toth (Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, arrives in America as a pioneer of brutalist architecture inspired by his own difficult experiences. The first half of the film consists of his arrival in America and burgeoning relationship with Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) – a wealthy industrialist who tasks Laszlo with building a new community centre comprising a library, theatre, gymnasium, and chapel. In the second half of the film, Laszlo is finally reunited with his wife Erzebet (Felicity Jones) – a journalist and fellow Holocaust survivor who is forever physically scarred by her time at the Dachau concentration camp. While the two seem to genuinely love each other, Laszlo’s obsession with work and addiction to heroin begins to take its toll.
At almost three and a half hours (including an intermission), The Brutalist is a massive undertaking, but I watched it in one sitting and never found myself checking to see how long was left. The decision to split the film into parts pays off as both sections are distinct segments while making up a cohesive whole. That being said, Corbet could easily have shaved another 20 minutes off this thing and it wouldn’t have been detrimental to the finished film. The long run time does make the film feel genuinely epic, however, and it also provides a canvas for Corbet’s sensational cast to paint a masterpiece. Brody is spellbinding throughout, at turns arrogant and humble, kind and cruel, determined and desperate. It’s bravado work from a fine actor. For my money, however, it is Pearce who steals the show. Often used in a supporting role, the Australian actor is essentially a co-lead for much of The Brutalist and he threatens to steal the whole thing away from Brody whenever he is on screen. It must be said, however, that this is an ensemble project and everyone plays their part. Jones is the pick of the rest of the cast providing an aloof and driven yin to Brody’s more flagrantly emotional yang.
While The Brutalist is perhaps not quite worthy of its ten Oscar nominations, and I won’t be in a rush to watch it again, it has got under my skin in a similar way to something like There Will Be Blood or The Zone of Interest. It’s the kind of film that showcases what makes cinema so powerful. A triumph.
