The Brutalist: Adrien Brody Shines in Epic Tale of Survival, Revival and Architecture

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A 

Director Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is quite an achievement.  The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival to a 13-minute standing ovation, is ambitious, and accomplished.

It’s an epic saga built around the life of an immigrant who is a brilliant architect and survivor of the Holocaust, with an ambitious storyline that pulls on many threads of cultural forces of post-Second World War America. 

Like his main character, a man who is true to his work and his designs, Corbet (who co-wrote the script with Mona Fastvold), has not compromised on his vision for the film. It has a running time of three-and-a-half hours - which includes a 15 minute intermission. Helped along by a fantastic cast, the storytelling is so rich and vibrant and the characters so well drawn that the film never flags.

Adrien Brody and e

The film centers around visionary Jewish Hungarian refugee László Tóth (brilliantly played by Adrien Brody), a leading architect of the Brutalist movement, whose life was ripped to pieces by the Nazis. Ultimately we learn he survived Buchenwald concentration camp, and was forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) who was sent to a different camp..

In the meantime, he has a relative to welcome him to the U.S. A cousin Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), who has his own furniture business in Philadelphia, takes him in, gives him a room and lets him work in the business.

Atilla greets him with the news that Erzébet has also survived the camps. The joy pours out of him, but it will be many years before they’re reunited. 

Atilla is approached by Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn) the son of a self-made wealthy businessman Harris Lee Van Buren, Sr. (Guy Pearce). While their father is away caring for his ailing mother, Harry and his sister Maggie (Stacy Martin) want to revamp their father’s grand and somewhat chaotic library as a surprise present. The room ends up being the perfect showcase for Tóth, who creates a modernist dream room, where his design brilliance is evident.

But an angry Van Buren comes home early and his fury leads to László’s eviction, working as a construction laborer to survive.  That is, until Van Buren, who has calmed down and realized László’s talent, seeks him out to apologize (with an agenda).  With his great wealth, he offers László a commission to build a monument to his mother in the Brutalist style, a building on his property to serve the community in her name.

As the project proceeds, László reunites with Erzsébet and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). To his surprise, Erzsébet is in a wheelchair. Malnutrition from the camps has damaged her physical health. They’re all damaged in both physical and emotional ways.  László, who was treated with methadone on the ship over for his pain, is now an addict, although he keeps that secret from everyone. 

Meanwhile, the project becomes a test of wills between László’s vision and Van Buren’s bullying ego.

There are a lot of ideas in the film, most obviously the immigrant experience, and notions of assimilation and identity, along with racism, anti-semitism.

There’s also the damage that human beings do to each other in the brutality of war, themes about wealth, status, and the myth, that in America anyone can achieve, and yet we see fancy manners covering up entitled attitudes.

Of course, the film implicitly looks at the idea of the value of architecture, art and what the artist means to a society - as well as the role of  the funder, and therefore of capitalism in that regard.  One of the ingenious things about the film is that every character is well drawn, and yet can also be seen as a metaphor. 

This is all fleshed out by a superb cast, notably Brody who channels a character who is driven by a creative brilliance and whose pride and pain exist side-by-side in every frame.  Also fantastic, is Pearce as Van Buren, whose veneer of gentility hides uglier truths; and Jones, who, in spite of her character’s obvious wounds, is the strength and stability in their family.  

The Brutalist is an epic film, with a lot of ideas to ponder.   But at its core, the film is about a man with PTSD, damaged physically, mentally and emotionally, and yet quietly aiming to get back to being a normal human being.  

When Erzsébet and László are reunited, it’s been a decade apart. A decade of suppressed longing, of surviving day to day is the easy part. Finding their way to each other again in intimacy is a different matter.  Surviving broken bodies, broken spirits isn’t at the center of the narrative, but it may be the spiritual core of The Brutalist. 

The Brutalist. Directed by Brady Corbet, written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Stars Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola.

Opens in theatres December 25.