This film is a brutally beautiful Oscar contender

In 2003, aged 29, Adrien Brody became the youngest recipient of the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Pianist. I’ll be surprised if he is not nominated again for this film.

Stephen Romei

@PairRaggedClaws

3 min read

12:00AMJanuary 10, 2025.

Updated 6:05PMJanuary 10, 2025

Adrien Brody is transfixing in The Brutalist.

It’s interesting to think that two epic and ambitious movies that straddle 2024 and 2025, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, have an architect as the lead character. Ayn Rand, author of the 1943 bestseller The Fountainhead (filmed in 1949 with Gary Cooper in the role of the rebellious architect Howard Roark), must be smiling in the afterlife.

The architect at the centre of the film under review is Laszlo Toth (the remarkable Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew who leaves Europe in the wake of World War II and lands in the US. His journalist wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), remains behind and he does not know if she is alive or dead.

It is 1947. He is put up by a cousin, Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a furniture store in Philadelphia. He dances, literally and metaphorically, with his cousin’s beautiful wife, Audrey (Emma Laird). The spell between them is tense to watch.

Laszlo’s life changes when he meets Harrison Lee Van Buren (Australian actor Guy Pearce, in a different role for him), a rich industrialist who wants to redevelop his Pennsylvania estate. The pair start out on the wrong foot, but that alters, both for better and worse.

Laszlo was a celebrated architect, who designed the Budapest City Library, for example, until the Nazis invaded Hungary. His brutalist style – modern, concrete – was “not Germanic enough” for the Reich.

Yet his overpowering ego remains intact, as his American employers soon discover. “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid,” he tells an American architect Van Buren brings in to assist him – and keep watch over him – “is your fault. But particularly ugly”.

Laszlo has his own demons, which emerge as we learn more about him. Some are self-imposed, while some are inflicted upon him by others. His relationship with Van Buren, for example, goes to unexpected places.

This film runs for 215 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission, during which a photograph appears on the screen and a timer counts down from 15. That’s a long run-time, but it didn’t feel overlong for this viewer. I was addicted from the opening frames, not least due to the camerawork by English cinematographer Lol Crawley. The American director, a former actor, does not make conventional films. His previous film, Vox Lux (2018), starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law, is a musical drama that opens with a shooting at a US high school.

Brody is transfixing in the lead role. In 2003, aged 29, he became the youngest recipient of the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. I’ll be surprised if he is not nominated again for this film. His main rivals will be Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, due for release on January 23, and Ralph Fiennes for the papal drama Conclave, now in cinemas.

French-US actor Timothee Chalamet arrives for the 82nd annual Golden Globe Awards. Picture: AFP

If Chalamet does win, aged 29, he will write Brody out of the record books by 278 days. The Oscar nominations were due to be announced on January 17, US time.

Brody was named best actor in a drama at the recent Golden Globes, beating Chalamet. The Brutalist also won best film in drama and best director for Corbet, who wrote the script with his partner in art and life, Mona Fastvold.

So what is this award-winning film about? That’s a good question. It’s about the post-war immigrant experience in the US, I think, though, the true theme is the hard core of beauty in all artistic and creative endeavour, and in this specific case, architecture.

Lazslo arrives in the US to start a new life. Yet his dreams are distinct from the American dream. At one point he says he believes his buildings will “transcend time”. That speaks to this viewer. It’s not how the buildings look, how they are used or what they are for. They just are.