Film: “The Brutalist” starring Adrien Brody
Almost from the get-go, Brady Corbett’s film “The Brutalist” signals that you are about to watch a Serious Film. Among its very first scenes: an emaciated Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), arriving in America and glancing at an upside down Statue of Liberty from the deck of a ship.
Laszlo, we soon learn, is a Hungarian Jewish refugee who thrived as a Bauhaus architect before WWII but was dismissed by the Nazis because his buildings, as he puts it, were “not Germanic enough.” The good news: his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture store owner in Philadelphia, was able to sponsor his arrival in America. The bad news: he has had to leave his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) behind, pending resolution of a bureaucratic snafu.
While working at the furniture store, the cousins receive a proposal to renovate the library of Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who lives in nearby Doylestown, PA. Harrison’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) wants it to be a surprise; unfortunately it is, but not a happy one. Harrison, a man with an extremely short fuse, comes home to the sleek finished product, but is nevertheless enraged that someone “has made a mess” of his library. “I hate surprises!” he shouts and immediately orders the cousins off his property.
Reduced to living in a homeless shelter and digging ditches—-even his cousin has kicked him to the curb—Laszlo is shocked when Harrison pulls up in a limo at the construction site and wants to take him to lunch
. Harrison’s finished library has since been featured in Look Magazine. He apologizes for his behavior, and invites Laszlo back to his estate. “I find our conversation intellectually stimulating,” Harrison says.
Over dinner, surrounded by guests, Harrison impulsively asks Laszlo to design a community center in Doylestown as a tribute to the millionaire’s late mother. Laszlo has free rein to spend as much money as he needs and to design the monument as he wishes. He can also live on Harrison’s property. Later Laszlo is introduced to Harrison’s influential lawyer friend (Peter Polycapou) who says he can help bring Laszlo’s family to America.
Laszlo is incredulous at his turn of good fortune; his dream has always been to create a building that reflects his vision alone. Once construction begins, however, the locals become suspicious of this foreigner who “speaks like he shines shoes for a living,” as Harrison puts it. They also try and put the kai bosh on some of his grandiose, expensive visions, which inflames the uber-aesthete Laszlo.
Besides having a compelling story, the film provides a great character study of two men representing the polar opposites of art and commerce: Laszlo, the lonely, “Fountainhead”-type artist versus Harrison, the bottom-line, tightly wound industrialist who collects first editions and madeiras, and now can now add a world-class architect to his collection.
There’s also an underlying us-vs-them battle going on between the “foreign people” and the bigoted WASPs. As Harry, Harrison’s nasty white-privileged son, tells Laszlo, “we tolerate you.”
“The Brutalist,” the first film in decades to be fully shot in VistaVision, a technique Hitchcock used in “To Catch a Thief.” It wowed audiences at the Venice Film Festival last year. The gorgeous score is by Daniel Blumberg and the script was co-written by Corbet and his wife Mona Festvald. As far as the acting, critics are right: Brody and Pearce deliver their best performances in years. And in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I really really liked it (in fact, I saw it twice.)
Please be advised that the film’s running time is close to four hours including a 15-minute intermission. That 15-minute break offers you just enough time to hit the restroom and the concession stand. Get the Twizzlers. After two hours of watching such a Serious Film, you’ve earned it.
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