A review of the new film “The Brutalist”
This is not the film that I was expecting. I thought it was about an actual architect and would narrate his career designing a series of dramatic buildings across post-war America. Instead it features a fictional architect and his travails in constructing one specific project.
Or maybe the architect and the project are not fictional at all. It would appear that Brady Corbet, who co-wrote (with his wife), produced and directed this grandiose film was inspired by the life of Marcel Lajos Breuer and his experience of building a particular church on a hill.
I thought the movie would be about brutalist architecture, but maybe it is more about brutalist behaviour. In which case, who is the brutalist? The architect who rages against everyone and everything or his wealthy benefactor who screws him over in one way or another?
At times, the film seems rather pompous with the architect spouting meaningless platitudes, such as: “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” To which his wealthy industrialist client replies: “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating.” Who’s kidding whom here?
Adrien Brody, himself of Hungarian Jewish extraction, plays Hungarian Jewish architect Lasló Tóth in an award-winning central performance. Guy Pearce is terrific as his rich benefactor. Felicity Jones does well affecting an Hungarian accent in her role as the architect’s wife. The cinematography is often stunning and the sound is invariably striking. So there is a great deal to admire here.
The film is quite heavy going with a running time of three and a half hours (with a 15 minute interval. Corbet chose to shoot the work in VistaVision which has an aspect ratio of only 1.66 : 1 and is a format popular in the 1950s, the time period for much of the film, but now long dormant. I saw it at the British Film Institute which had a 70 mm print.
There are unusually long stretches of conversation with significant jumps in time and some things are deliberately left obscure.
So it is a challenging film which asks the viewer for patience and endurance but it is never less than fascinating and absorbing.