At time of writing, it’s unknown whether The Brutalist will follow its Golden Globe wins with Oscar nominations. It’s likely that this will be a Best Picture contender given the head of steam it’s built up since last year’s Venice Film Festival, where Brady Corbet took away the Silver Lion for best director.
But it is already by far the leading contender for this award season’s unofficial “least-fun movie” accolade.
That’s not just because it’s three hours 35 minutes long with an in-built 15-minute interval dividing its main two halves – more than mere length makes The Brutalist a slog. It’s also the depth of the misery to its story about Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor and architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who arrives in post-war Philadelphia only to find poverty, heroin addiction, anti-Semitism, artistic compromise, thwarted ambition, sexual dysfunction and, well, worse.
It’s delivered as a sort of fictitious biopic complete with a curious years-later coda. One that shows how history will remember Tóth – only for this art and architecture and not how much he suffered for it.
The film itself is the other way around. Yes, there is some architecture. Mostly one large slab of it after Tóth is commissioned by wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) to design a grand building as a memorial to his late mother to benefit the small Pennsylvania town near his estate.
The gig lifts Tóth out of his dead-end existence in time to be reunited with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), whose ordeal in a different concentration camp has left her physically disabled.
The inevitable battle between Tóth’s vision and Van Buren’s cost-counting flunkies ensues and the unfinished grey edifice becomes a white elephant. By which time we’re warming up for the second half, which takes place mostly in New York where the Tóth’s have shifted to work, only for Van Buren to invite László back to finish the project.
The two men take a trip to the mines of Carrara in Italy to order marble. While there, Van Buren shows his true colours in an incident that possibly makes him the real owner of the film’s title.
As a young actor, American Corbet had roles in films by the famously grim European arthouse auteurs Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, and there are echoes of their respective mean streaks here.
It’s also a story of capitalist arts patronage and how visionaries will never be left alone to do their thing, whether it’s groundbreaking building design or soul-sapping screen sagas.
Brody has been in this territory before, with The Pianist, and The Brutalist would be a lesser film without his committed, haunted performance. The other main actors struggle to leave their mark in different ways. Pearce can provoke unintended mirth with his Clark Gable line readings; Jones is weighed down with a Hungarian accent and a character whose job it is to remain noble throughout. The Tóths suffer a lot in the three and half hours of The Brutalist. The mystery of this film is why witnessing it feels such a hollow experience.
Rating out of five: ★★½
The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet, is in cinemas now.
