By Sandra Hall
THE BRUTALIST ★★★★½
(MA) 215 minutes
Is cinema dying? Brady Corbet’s film, The Brutalist, is replying to that question with an explosive no. It’s the unlikeliest success story of the past year – or any year. The film is a saga about Brutalist architecture spread over three-and-a-half hours and punctuated by an intermission, a movie device I had thought was extinct. Yet, it’s already won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion, as well as notching up three Golden Globes, which puts it in line for an Oscar.
Adrien Brody plays a tormented architect creating his masterwork in The Brutalist.Credit: AP
The pitch meetings must have been dramas in themselves. In an industry that ranks familiarity as its favourite selling point how do you peddle a script so original that it defies comparison? According to Corbet, it wasn’t easy. At one stage, the knockbacks he faced had him believing that he didn’t have a hope. Nonetheless, he persevered.
The script – by Brady and his wife and regular collaborator, Mona Fastvold – does contain certain borrowings from reality, but you probably need to be an enthusiastic architecture buff to make the connections.
Its main character, Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), was partly inspired by the modernist architects, Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer. As well as having the same first name as Moholy-Nagy, Toth is a Hungarian Jew like Breuer, with whom he shares a talent for furniture design, and his buildings, like van der Rohe’s, are bare of ornamentation used for its own sake.
But, unlike the Bauhaus architects, he’s a Holocaust survivor who arrives in the US in 1947, not knowing if his wife and orphaned niece are alive or not.
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist.
For a while, he works with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), in his furniture business. Then a chance encounter with Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a Philadelphia business tycoon, gives him the opportunity to resume his career as an architect.
As well as arranging for his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to join him, Van Buren commissions Toth to build an elaborate community centre on his estate. So begins a power game that will take years to resolve and eventually turn the pair into the bitterest of enemies.
They make a mesmerising study in contrasts. Brody’s Toth is a sad-eyed depressive whose work is the only thing that makes him feel fully alive, while Van Buren is a genial bully whose condescending manner is as natural to him as breathing. He likes to think Toth belongs to him, as if buying his talent entitles him to control the man. It’s a convincingly scary performance from Pearce, partly because it’s so calculating – an unpredictable mix of snakiness and counterfeit charm. You never know when he’s about to pounce.
Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce play characters who make a mesmerising study in contrasts.Credit: AP
The two do have one thing in common. They’re both so caught up in their obsessions they can’t let their guard down. Toth may love Erzsebet as dearly as he says he does, but he’s awkward and inhibited in their scenes together. And although Van Buren has children, it’s his mother who has dominated his emotional life.
Corbet’s budget was a relatively modest $US10 million, but he’s constructed the narrative on a grand scale. In essence, it’s an intimate account of two men locked in a mutually destructive battle of wills, yet we never lose sight of the historical context. It’s a tug-of-war between the old world and the new, between European intellectualism and the wily ruthlessness and can-do-spirit of the rising class of American entrepreneurs. And it’s played out against a spectacular backdrop shaped by the changes which re-made America during those post-war years.
I’m not sure that the ending works. It’s a slightly hasty finish to such a magnificently conceived and executed tale, but that’s a small thing when measured against the wonders that Corbet and Fastvold have performed here.
The Brutalist is in cinemas from today.
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