‘The Brutalist’ is an immigrant song
Actor/filmmaker Brady Corbet makes a big splash with the three and a half hour (with 15-minute intermission) immigrant epic “The Brutalist,” which recently won a couple of trophies at the recent Academy Awards. It’s a staggering work that took him and his crew eight years to complete, premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Lion, and now finally arriving in our theaters.
“The Brutalist” follows Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), an architect from Hungary who flees World War II to arrive in Pennsylvania, where he is welcomed by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a furniture shop. He exchanges correspondence with his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), still in Europe and trying to make her way to America. Working with his cousin, Laszlo eventually encounters the business mogul Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), through his son Harry (Joe Alwyn). While their initial meeting is a hostile misunderstanding, Van Buren seeks out Toth when he realizes who he is, and commissions him to design a building to commemorate Van Buren’s mother. Toth seizes upon the opportunity, seeing it as a means not just to help get his wife over and to secure the life he envisions for them, but to use the very creative muscles he honed in his homeland, which got him kicked out by the Third Reich.
Sweeping epic
Shot in Hungary with a $10 million budget, “The Brutalist” looks like a miracle. Gorgeous production design and costumes sell the period and historical setting, and Lol Crawley, who won the cinematography Oscar for this film, makes great use of every room, every vista, every face. Corbet and Crawley shot “The Brutalist” on VistaVision, an old format of 35 millimeters with an extra wide frame, which rewards viewings on the big screen. Shots of landscapes with human figures for scale, from Pennsylvania to Italy, bring to life the epic sweep and scope of Corbet and cowriter Mona Fastvold’s screenplay (which was nominated for an Oscar).
The story inspires some of the best acting in the careers of its cast, with Oscar-nominated turns from Pearce, Jones, and a winning one for Brody, who was last nominated (and won) for another man surviving the Holocaust in 2002’s “The Pianist.” Don’t let the runtime intimidate you; for one, the halfway intermission is there, and the story never drags. Corbet and Fastvold fit many intriguing roadblocks and obstacles in Laszlo’s way, some self-orchestrated.
“The Brutalist” is the kind of film they don’t do so often anymore. An immigrant story writ large, spanning decades, folding into itself themes of American imperialism, ambition, greed, strength of will, compromise or its lack thereof, love, endurance. It speaks about the capitalist’s treatment of fellow human beings as assets that are beneath them, of how one’s silence and hesitation to speak up and fight against inhumane treatment will get you erased.
It’s a capital-m Movie, that the filmmakers brought back an old film format for, because they knew they needed it to be the canvas for their ambitious undertaking, reflected by the ambitious undertaking of their main character in the story. The other miracle is that it was accomplished outside the studio system, at a fraction of the usual cost.
“The Brutalist” is playing exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas.
