Brady Corbet (Vox Lux) is a young director (36 years old) with barely three feature films to his credit, including the one motive of this writing. When reviewing his career as an actor, several titles come to mind such as Melancholia or Clouds of Sils Maria, although always in a supporting capacity.
But everything seems to point that his anonymity will no longer be such, as of now and especially when speculations commence around possible Academy Award nominees and even more when those are actually announced.
The Brutalist is a rather lengthy film, since we are not talking about two hours or more, which is usual nowadays, but a film that far surpasses the 180-minute runtime, to the extent the screening includes an intermission halfway through.
It has all the features of a classic film, including the fact that great deal of the plot takes place in 1950’s Pennsylvania, although the story begins towards the end of World War II, when Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) manages to emigrate into the United States, fleeing from Nazi hell. He abandons Hungary, leaving behind his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), when both were in several concentration camps, although they managed to survive.
His wife would later on study and earn a degree at Oxford (England) and when the reunion happens, many years later, she will be accompanied by her niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).
The first half of The Brutalist will be dedicated to László, in what seems already a habit of Adrien Brody’s of portraying Eastern European characters (The Pianist for instance, comes to mind). The beginning with an image of the Statue of Liberty, upon arriving on a boat and entering Ellis Island, is of great visual beauty.
An encounter with a prostitute and a dispute from which he will not leave unscathed will involuntarily turn him into a heroin addict, to which he resorts to in order to ease the pain from the beating he took.
Already in Pennsylvania, the encounter with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife will be of no use, that is until his luck begins to change when he is hired by Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), son of Tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to restore the library in his father’s manor.
When Harrison sees what László made, alongside Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), his assistant, he will explode in rage, expelling both and not even paying them for the job done. But when a magazine specialized in design (Vogue) publishes an article, praising the Hungarian’s work, he will radically change his mind and end up hiring them again. Van Buren will then imagine a pharaonic project in Doylestown (Pennsylvania) and László will initiate its construction.
The tycoon’s character brings Charles Foster Kane to mind, among many other characters, not so much for his physical appearance, but as for the “megalomania” of his vision, making it a curiosity given that Coppola chose a similar term for his recent and rather failed new feature.
It will be Erzsébet, already arrived to the United States and with some Physical issues of her own, product of the famine she suffered during her internment, who begins to perceive some sort of perversity from her husband’s employer.
One of those manifestations will take place during a visit Van Buren and his architect will pay to the Carrara rubble mines, with images of enormous beauty and great potency. In said location an event will take place that will end their relationship, making it one of the most impactful scenes during the film’s second half.
It is very curious that Corbet has based his lead character in someone who committed a wild outrage in the Vatican. It was László Tóth, wielding a hammer, who struck the Michelangelo’s Pietá fifteen times screaming “I am Jesus Christ and I’ve come back from the dead”, until he was detained. In the film, the “brutalist” architect (member of the Bauhaus school) is left better standing given that in the epilogue, after his wife passed away and with Zsófia left to take care of his uncle, is to be paid an homage at the Biennale in Venice. It could not be just a simple matter of chance that this fictional scene takes place at the same festival where the director of this story was bestowed the Silver Lion. If it was not by Almodóvar and his great film, The Room Next Door, perhaps The Brutalist would have won the Golden Lion.
Director: Brady Corbet. Screenwriters: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold. Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Jonathan Hyde. Producers: Nick Gordon, D. J. Gugenheim, Andrew Lauren, Trevor Matthews, Andrew Morrison, Brian Young. Runtime: 215 minutes.
