It’s being hailed as a modern masterpiece on par with The Godfather, and now The Brutalist finally arrives in UK cinemas this week.
Shot for less than $10 million, the almost four-hour epic won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and took home Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director at the Golden Globes.
The period drama is the bookies’ favourite to repeat these big wins at the BAFTAs and is expected to do the same at the Oscars in March. So what’s all the fuss about?
Written, produced and directed by the actor Brady Corbet, the film stars Adrien Brody again playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor after his Academy Award win for The Pianist 20 years ago.
This time around, he portrays a Hungarian immigrant called László Tóth. Having survived the Nazi death camps, where he was separated from his wife and orphaned niece, he emigrates to the USA in 1947.
Reunited with his cousin in Philadelphia, we soon discover that László is an accomplished brutalist architect who begins looking for work. Eventually, he’s hired by Guy Pearce’s wealthy industrialist to construct an enormous public building in memory of the rich man’s late mother. Spanning over a decade, The Brutalist is split into two lengthy parts with an actual 15 minute interval with an on-screen countdown clock on the screen. This a welcome move by Corbet, allowing the audience to breathe and reflect on this incredibly deep and rich material. In fact, it actually helps make the mammoth runtime not feel quite so long as seeing it all in one go.
Mixing the epic scope of Once Upon a Time in America with the sledgehammering of There Will Be Blood, The Brutalist is full of subtle themes, imagery and details. This picture is certainly not for everyone and audiences may even dislike it at first until they’ve had time to process this work. That was certainly our feeling!
The film’s opening shot (and poster) of an upside Statue of Liberty indicates that the US and its American Dream are not necessarily the promised land that this Holocaust-surviving immigrant was looking for. Despite his initial fortune of gaining a grand commission, László cannot deal with or let go of the pain of his past trauma whilst being taken advantage of.
From constructing a brutalist castle reminiscent of the concentration camps he left behind to living at his place of work, the architect and heroin addict even struggles to allow himself the pleasures of sexual intimacy when reunited with his wife, played by Jones. Both she and Brody give emotionally convincing performances, but the standout is Pearce, whose character has a dark side beneath all that charm.
The first feature film since 1961 to be shot entirely on VistaVision, a higher-resolution, widescreen variant of 35mm, the picture is aged and gorgeous, especially on the 70mm print we witnessed. Overall, this piece of art, accompanied by Daniel Blumberg’s incredible two-hour score, is a bold epic – one with the narrative depth and scale of a rich classic novel that will stay with you for days afterwards.
The Brutalist is released in UK cinemas on Friday.