Adrien Brody is an immigrant architect working to build an American dream in this sprawling post-Holocaust drama
The Brutalist
Starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pierce & Felicity Jones
Directed by Brady Corbet
Rated R
In limited release Friday, Dec. 20
Adrien Brody gives an impassioned starring performance as Lázló Tóth, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America in 1947 to build a new life, hoping to draw on his pre-wartime work as an architect back in Hungary.
Taking its name from a mid-century architectural style, The Brutalist is big and bold as it majestically sprawls across the years and Lázló meets a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pierce) who wants him to oversee a monumental legacy project on a hillside in Doylestown, outside Pittsburgh.
This is a large-scale, epic movie, the kind of serious, soulful drama that generates significant Oscar buzz. It’s gorgeous and enormous (three and a half hours long), filled with dramatic intensity, terrific acting, a multi-tiered plotline, complex characters and over-arching themes about the immigrant experience, antisemitism, homelessness, the downside of the American dream and the lofty aesthetics of design. Add opium addiction, lusty sex, a deadly train derailment and a shocking rape for spicy seasoning.
Felicity Jones plays Tóth’s wife, stricken with osteoporosis from wrenching malnutrition in a concentration camp, forcibly separated from her husband in the turmoil of the battle of Budapest at the close of the war—and now confined to a wheelchair. Their teenage niece (Raffey Cassidy) is an orphan, rendered mute by the traumas of what she’s endured. Joe Alwyn is a pompous, smarmy son of privilege; you’ll want to reach through the screen and give him a good, hard slap across his smug face. A Black U.S. Army veteran (Zachari Bankolé) that Lázló meets in a soup line becomes a close friend.
It all looks amazing, with elaborate period detail and impressive, sometimes jaw-dropping visuals, the kind of grandiose skyscraper of a movie—with an overture, intermission and an epilogue—that harkens back to Hollywood epics of yore. The soundtrack—with originals by composer Daniel Blumberg—is auditory magnificence. The movie towers over most others by its sheer scope, unbridled ambition and elegant artistic vision, like the massive, concrete, steel and granite construction project at its core—an achievement designed not just for the present, but a thing to be admired far into the future. The Brutalist isn’t a popcorn matinee movie. It’s a cinematic triumph, a thing of beauty constructed for the ages, and one I promise you’ll watch in awe.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 