Home Entertainment BRIAN VINER reviews The Brutalist: Tipped for an Oscar, this movie is full of grandeur and great acting

BRIAN VINER reviews The Brutalist: Tipped for an Oscar, this movie is full of grandeur and great acting

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Adrien Brody (left) and Felicity Jones (right) in The Brutalist

The Brutalist (18, 214 minutes)

Verdict: Impressive but flawed

Classification:

There’s no avoiding the irony that The Brutalist, a radical drama about the American immigrant experience, hits theaters the same week that the 47th president of the United States begins the process of expelling many of them.

Of course, almost five months have passed since its world premiere, at the Venice Film Festival, and the film has not stopped accumulating awards since then.

Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his lead performance as a Hungarian Jewish architect who, freed from the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, comes to the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career.

Brody is one of the favorites to win an Oscar. Meanwhile, all kinds of lavish adjectives have been thrown at writer-director Brady Corbet (also anointed with a Globe) and his co-writer Mona Fastvold, who is also his partner. Never mind their pillow talk, imagine their pillar talk.

His film, with its twin themes of assimilation and architecture, has been described as “immense”, “monumental”, “dizzying”. And now I can add “elated,” but only because that’s how I felt when the 15-minute intermission rolled around. The Brutalist is very long.

Adrien Brody (left) and Felicity Jones (right) in The Brutalist

Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a Jewish-Hungarian architect who, freed from the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career.

Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a Jewish-Hungarian architect who, freed from the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career.

It feels almost curmudgeonly for not polishing more superlatives, but I can only speak what I find. There are many impressive things about this film, not least the acting, but for me it too often loses its narrative control in the second act, veering off into tangents that seem unnecessary, distracting, and self-indulgent.

Also, petty as it may be, I don’t think that in the mid-20th century even educated Hungarians could arrive in America with a near-perfect understanding of English grammar.

They have a strong accent (which in Brody’s case was reportedly made more realistic by partially cloning him, using Artificial Intelligence to merge his efforts with the film’s editor David Jancso’s real Hungarian accent). But what’s the point of making vowels sound convincingly foreign when the construction of the sentence is so improbably immaculate?

Apparently, The Brutalist is mostly about construction. Laszlo Toth (Brody) is a Bauhaus-trained architect whom we first meet amid the tumult of liberation from the Nazis in central Europe. But before long he reaches New York Harbor, where he gets a skewed view of the Statue of Liberty, strongly symbolic of the experiences to come as the American Dream turns out to be, if not illusory, then decidedly compromised.

To begin with, however, it is full of intoxicating promise. There is a very moving scene when Toth meets his already assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and the pair embrace as if defying fate to separate them again.

Guy Pearce plays the volatile millionaire industrialist and socialite named Harrison Lee Van Buren.

Guy Pearce plays the volatile millionaire industrialist and socialite named Harrison Lee Van Buren.

Atila owns a furniture store in Philadelphia called Miller & Sons. He anglicized his name and invented offspring because, he says, Americans love family businesses. That’s the kind of thing European Jews have to do to fit in, but the intense and passionate Toth never does; he never completely escapes the scourge of anti-Semitism which, in a way that only becomes clear with time, even shapes the style and philosophy of his brutalist architecture.

Attila gives him a job, but after an assignment goes wrong, the cousins ​​fight.

Increasingly dependent on alcohol and heroin, Toth is forced to work on construction sites until he falls under the patronage of a volatile millionaire industrialist and socialite named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).

Once Van Buren hires him to design a powerful community center named after his beloved late mother, Toth’s American dream seems complete, despite the cunning enmity of his employer’s arrogant and arrogant son, Harry (Joe Alwyn). ).

Along with dozens of tons of concrete, he puts his heart and soul into the project. However, it is built, metaphorically, on quicksand. Toth may be difficult, stubborn, and loud, but the Van Burens are not worthy of his heart and cannot buy his soul.

All of this unfolds absorbingly, but the narrative takes an unwanted lurch after that blessedly welcome interlude when, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act and some moves by Van Buren, Toth’s wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), is affected. due to osteoporosis, and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), an elective mute, joins him in the United States.

Alessandro Nivola, left, with Adrien Brody. The couple hugs each other as if defying fate to separate them again.

Alessandro Nivola, left, with Adrien Brody. The couple hugs each other as if defying fate to separate them again.

Erzsebet’s arrival introduces a shocking psychosexual dimension to the drama that it simply doesn’t need. And later, be warned, there’s a rape scene even more shocking for being completely unexpected.

As an exercise in storytelling, The Brutalist has genuine grandeur and ambition. It is beautifully filmed and scored, and in many ways compares to the great films coming to America, such as The Godfather: Part Two (1974), except that it replaces the guns with beams.

Brody is excellent, as is Pearce. But the film doesn’t take off as expected.

It takes us well beyond the mezzanine level of expectation, but never to the ceiling.

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Classification:

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Lucy Liu stars in Steven Soderbergh's Presence. In less than an hour and a half, Soderbergh creates a clever supernatural thriller that exerts an immediate grip and never lets go.

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Classification:

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Flight Risk stars Michelle Dockery (pictured) trying admirably to erase all traces of Downton Abbey's Lady Mary.

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Classification:

The title of the Netflix movie Back In Action could refer to Cameron Diaz, who stars alongside Jamie Foxx. He’s been off the big screen for over a decade.

The title of the Netflix movie Back In Action could refer to Cameron Diaz (left), who stars alongside Jamie Foxx (right). He's been off the big screen for over a decade.

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All movies in theaters now except Back In Action, which is streaming on Netflix.

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