Susan Granger’s review of “The Brutalist” (A-24)
Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is 3 1/2 hours long with an intermission, making it the first film to have an interval since “Gandhi” (1982).
It’s a compelling immigrant tale with Oscar nominee Adrien Brody delivering one of the best performances of the year as Lazlo Toth, a renowned Hungarian Jewish architect whose vulnerability leads to addiction.
His tale begins in 1947, as traumatized Lazlo arrives on Ellis Island, having survived Nazi incarceration at Buchenwald. An anonymous, penniless Holocaust survivor, he’s been separated from his beloved wife Erzebet (Oscar nominee Felicity Jones), who is stuck in Budapest with their young niece, Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy).
Making his way to Philadelphia, Lazlo is given a cot in the back of a furniture store run his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) and his cynical Catholic wife (Emma Laird).
One day, they’re commissioned by Harry (Joe Alwyn) and his sister Maggie (Stacy Martin) to renovate an ornate study in a palatial mansion in nearby Doylestown as a surprise for their father, millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Oscar nominee Guy Pearce).
When Lazlo transforms it into a minimalist Bauhaus masterpiece, Harrison is – at first – shocked but he soon comes to admire its discreet beauty, commissioning him to design a vast hilltop community center. “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating,” Harrison explains, inviting Lazlo to move into his guest house.
The second half begins in 1953 during the massive building’s construction when Harrison arranges for Erzebet and Zsofia to emigrate and join Lazlo. But their feisty independence soon irks the autocratic Van Burens and erupts into conflict.
Credit Oscar-nominated cinematographer Lol Crawley for the jaw-droppingly, almost mythical sequence, a visual allegory in which anguished Lazlo and nefarious Harrison visit Italy’s famed Carrara white marble quarry where Michelangelo carved the Pieta.
Co-writing with his partner, Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, Oscar-nominated director Corbet seems to have fashioned visionary, perfectionist Lazlo after Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” as he sacrifices everything to bring Brutalist architecture to his adopted American home.
The film’s audacious themes cover individualism vs. capitalism, creativity vs. compromise, and immigration vs. assimilation – citing Israel as the Jews’ homeland – closing with an epilogue about an architectural aesthetic surreptitiously reverberating from the past.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 1o 10, “The Brutalist” is an electrifying, epic 8, playing in theaters.
