'The Brutalist' celebrates the European minds who brought genius to America's bitter apple
Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce are all phenomenal.
Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a big threat in the Best Actor race and his name is Adrien Brody. Remember him? The guy who upset Daniel Day Lewis and Jack Nicholson on Oscar night. He took home the gold for his very celebrated performance as a famous Jewish radio station Pianist who goes to hell and back after his normal is blown up by World War II. Brady Corbet’s brilliant The Brutalist sees the actor somehow top that performance.
This time, Brody is a Hungarian Jew who is fresh off the ship from a World War II-torn Europe into America’s unwelcoming arms as Corbet’s movie opens up. A renowned architect who was separated from his family (Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy) during the Holocaust, he’s tougher than any nail used to build one of the structures first created in his mind. The kind of trait that a wealthy client like Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. takes advantage of early and often throughout Corbet’s three hour and 22 minute film.
Played with simmering menace by the under-appreciated Guy Pearce, Harrison is an American industrialist who wants a throne in the legendary sandbox but lacks a route to get there until he meets Brody’s Laszlo Toth. After recreating Van Buren’s study into a modern thinking man’s library, the noble yet vulnerable Laszlo is berated and ran off by Pearce’s egotistical hothead. Cooler minds prevail, which turns into a partnership that combines the sweet (his wife and niece eventually join him) with the bitter (being used and abused in multiple ways) for Toth and his family.
After all, the good old American Dream can end up tasting like a rotten apple to dreamers, especially for foreigners like Laszlo who got treated with such harsh ambivalence upon their arrival. From the absolute worst sector in their brain, American citizens treated Jewish human beings like spoiled goods, even though they both survived a brutal war. Contempt and a need to reject them filled the streets back in 1947. America was beset by a war that they won but lost at the same time, so their connections to any horrors from that time period were locked in a bottle of hate. Racists like Van Buren Sr. just twisted the treatment in a cruel manner.
Corbet’s film is a sincere love letter to the European minds who came to America with wide open dreamer minds. They brought their genius to our country and had their heritage and talent betrayed by evil American industrialists who merely wanted to refurbish a kitchen with a genuine talent in Toth. Speaking of Mrs. Toth, Jones plays this role to the tilt without overplaying key scenes.
Erzsebet Toth dials into the Van Buren hound signal minutes after getting off the train far from her own idea of hell. Jones’s noble soul sees the bent structure in her proud husband’s artistic spine, and spends the rest of the movie fighting for him and their family. Showing up an hour into the film, Jones (The Theory of Everything, Rogue One) easily slips into the skin of the women behind the man. When an actress has “it,” just about any role comes on like a fitted coat.
Pearce isn’t exactly underrated, but we don’t talk about how great he is and has been for quite some time. He knows how to portray a bad soul who looks like a sense of comfort. From Iron Man 3 to Lawless to The Brutalist, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The prophetic voice, though, continues to be his best asset.
Don’t be thrown by the unusually long runtime. Think of it as Corbet’s Once Upon a Time in America with a little bit of Avalon thrown in. Movies being long isn’t a problem; it’s all about how the filmmaker uses the minutes. Few, if any, are wasted here in an earnest attempt to place a powerful and different spotlight on the European Jewish and various foreign souls who fled a burning nation only to find out America’s shiny penny has more poison than love in their hearts.
Out of all the direction in films this year, Corbet’s gaze and poise is among the very strongest. Whatever he was going for, I’d wager he hit the bullseye. What he did do is pull another superb performance from one of Hollywood’s most underrated chameleons in Brody. Resilient, defiant, immovable, and vulnerable all connect to Laszlo, and Brody makes you feel all of it.
The vulnerability came from an opium habit that Toth acquired on the ship due to an injury. It’s an affliction he shares with a friend and longtime coworker, Gordon (Isaach de Bankole). The two men meet early on in Laszlo’s time in America outside a shelter, bonding over their shared plight and ability. They looked up at the Statue of Liberty and saw something luminous, an opportunity to be somebody.
Unfortunately, that opportunity and the people who represented it had far less care for people like Laszlo and Gordon. Brady Corbet shines a light on those courageous souls with The Brutalist, a title inspired by the bold display of raw concrete in an architectural structure.
Corbet’s film, like its central subject, is the epitome of bold. The Brutalist will expand to St. Louis theaters in January. Don’t miss it, because the Oscar season will be painted with it.