★★★★★ - THE POST
- The Brutalist is a sprawling masterpiece -
The Brutalist is set in the years immediately after World War 2.
László Tóth is a Jewish refugee from the horrors of Europe, newly arrived in the US. We meet László in the hold of a ship, steaming into New York Harbor. Soon, László and his friends emerge blinking into the sunlight, gazing up at The Statue of Liberty towering over their deck. It's a scene we have seen played out before, in any number of dramas of immigrants arriving to start a new life in America.
But director Brady Corbet finds a new way to stage and to frame the scene. The Statue is upended and dislocated within László’s view. It dominates the frame, but as something other than a welcome and symbol of hope. It's a powerful opening stanza and it sets the scene for everything that follows.
We learn that László is married, but that his wife and her orphaned niece are stranded in Europe. American immigration officers are sceptical of any refugee who claims to be married, but who can't produce the paperwork to prove it.
So László has come alone, to secure work and find a way for Erzsébet and Zsófia to follow him.
László takes a job at his cousin's furniture business in Pennsylvania. In Hungary he was a celebrated architect, so designing furniture and interiors is an easy transition. But a commission to create a library for a wealthy client ends in tears. And his cousin's gentile wife has made it politely but deafeningly clear that László is not welcome in their home for long. László is expelled from the company, and forced to start his life again.
Many, many things happen.
László comes into the orbit of a massively wealthy industrialist, who can change lives with a stroke of his pen. But we know as soon as we meet this Harrison Van Buren, that this preening blowhard is also a weak, manipulative and horribly dangerous man.
The Brutalist is a sprawling, madly ambitious and gleefully contradictory film. It is an epic of immigration, and of the waves of people who have built whatever it is that we call the American Dream. But it is also a drama of a fractured couple, trying to hold a marriage and a family together in a place of impossible riches and incomprehensible cruelties.
And, there is a level at which The Brutalist is a flawed hero's odyssey, playing out across a decade in mid-century America. Late in the film, László and Van Buren visit Italy and the quarry at Carrara, to view the marble cliffs that yielded the stone the Parthenon and Michelangelo's David are carved from. It feels like an appropriately mythic setting for a film that often seems to be bleeding between eras and parallel realities.
As László, Adrien Brody turns in an extraordinary piece of work. At times Brody's László is weak, fractious and battered by his own life. But he is also implacable, splendidly stubborn and giddily evangelical of how architecture can literally change the world and the lives of the people within it.
Next to Brody, Guy Pearce does career-best work as Van Buren. And Felicity Jones is a match for either of the men, as the stoic and resilient Erzsébet.
Brady Corbet (he made the dazzling Vox Lux in 2018. The Brutalist is his third feature. He is still only 36 years old) and co-writer Mona Fastvold have made something momentous here. Even at three hours plus - with an intermission - The Brutalist is a joy.
On the biggest screen you can find, with Lol Crawley's cinematography conjuring up worlds in front of you, and Daniel Blumberg's soundscapes pouring out of the speakers, The Brutalist is an intoxicating, overwhelming - and appropriately brutal film. Do go and see it.
- Graeme Tuckett, THE POST
The Brutalist is now playing at Light House Cinema!