Adrien Brody Towers as a brilliant architect in Wobbly Epic

The brutalist has received rave reviews since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. This praise is by no means undeserved, especially since Adrien Brody delivers an impeccable performance as a brilliant Hungarian architect – a genius artist – struggling to leave his mark on the American landscape in the years after World War II.

Perhaps more important is the revelation that 36-year-old director Brady Corbet is its most revered filmmaker Author. (Let’s say: Who is more celebrated, Philip Johnson or Quentin Tarantino?)

Corbet’s 3 hour and 35 minute epic, which includes an intermission, is a challenging, daring, ambitious take on 20th century history and is clearly built on a foundation that has nothing to do with franchises or superheroes. The film is an independent, rare, complete thing, expansive and raw. Don’t expect it The Brutalist II or a prequel, Monsieur Belle Epoque.

It is anyway Brutalist a masterpiece, as it is almost routinely described? Is it on par with Martin Scorsese’s 3 hour 26 minute format (and no intermission)? Flower Moon Killer? No not really. In fact, you might as well call Jesse Eisenberg’s compact, unassuming character A real pain a masterpiece, even if his film and Corbet’s are as different in scale as a castle and a tool shed.

But the interiors also need to be examined. Real pain is surprisingly and broadly dark, a buddy comedy that appears to revolve around the American Jewish legacy of the Holocaust – a central theme Brutalist to.

To Corbet’s credit, his castle – when you approach it – makes an impressive impression. To cross the moat and venture into its vast chambers, shadowed by a solemn purpose, is to feel a kind of awe, or at least the deepest respect, for whoever built and owns this fortress.

But at some point you get lost on the journey inside, as the dark rooms and passageways become more and more numerous. You might even think about finding an exit sign. Which, as you know, is a fruitless endeavor in a castle.

But enough of this analogy. The brutalistIn any case, the first half is flawless. Absolutely flawless.

László Tóth (Brody), an accomplished Hungarian architect trained in the uncompromising aesthetics of the German Bauhaus movement and now committed to an even stricter school that will become known as Brutalism, escapes the extermination camps (he is Jewish) and arrives arrives in America, where he is greeted by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture maker who owns a shop in Philadelphia.

Attila, who has the smiling politeness of a salesman without much talent, encourages László to design and oversee a quick, simple order. He is supposed to set up a reading room/library in the mansion of a wealthy businessman, Harrison Lee Van Buren.

The results are beautifully austere, flooded with sunlight but somehow cold and infuriating Van Buren, played with a masculine bluster by Guy Pearce, who sounds as if his idea of ​​the breakfast of champions was a bowl of ground glass drowned in whole milk.

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Van Buren has no interest in László’s imperious display of intellectual superiority and authority – until an article in Seek The magazine flatters him as a millionaire with a growing taste for modernity. Now he embraces László and commissions him to build a huge concrete community center that will simultaneously house a gymnasium and a church. What, no petting zoo?

This opening section is driven forward with great, lively energy and a clearly defined narrative that advances with the ease of a car on a freshly paved road (an image of confident American dynamism that runs throughout the film).

But it’s Brody, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama this year, who is truly exceptional. His performance may surpass his work in The pianist. His face is capable of both a tragic, suffering sensitivity and sublime artistic inspiration. He looks as if his mother had insisted that he play Franz Liszt’s heroically difficult piano sonatas since he was two years old. (In fact, with a long wig he could resemble Liszt.) As he did Pianist, He succeeds in depicting an entire era.

In the film’s most moving scenes, you’re tempted to cry with him – possibly for him – as he speaks tearfully about the principles of architecture and his passion for it.

After the break, however, the story becomes more complicated and confusing with the arrival of László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), an extremely insightful woman who can no longer walk due to her war injuries, and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). , who was virtually silenced by the trauma of her experiences.

They are both fascinating, novelistic characters full of fine detail and offer subtle, intelligent observations, but they distract from the central drama of László’s endless frustrations with his huge construction project and Van Buren, who is both anti-Semitic and sadistic.

If László had written the script, these women would have been seen as an ornament, a garland, and probably removed. Instead, their presence gives the narrative something more melodramatic and conventional, with fiery showdowns and a climax of moral retribution worthy of those of Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge.

If any, Brutalist should play more like Herman Melville’s power squad of Captain Ahab, sailor Ishmail and Moby-Dick. If you think about it, László’s model looks a lot like a large white whale that accidentally swallowed a church.

Instead, the film ends with a lovely epilogue (this film has everything, including a short “overture”!) that reveals the fascinating private meanings that László built into his design for Van Buren. But this feels more like a footnote than a proper coda. Why couldn’t the information be integrated into the framework of the film? It’s not that the script couldn’t squeeze in an additional scene or two. Or six. Or 16.

In any case, by the end the film has lost the feeling that in László we have encountered an outstanding artist whose work – and whose willpower – will surpass the atrocities and persecutions of both war-torn Europe and the United States in its imperial form. Or conversely, a true artist who is unfairly struck down by these forces.

The film contains a quote from Goethe – “No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” – which suggests that director Corbet is looking for a grand, decisive statement about the blind spots of republicanism, capitalism and a number of others is –Isms. But this statement never really crystallizes.

By now, the connection between the man and his vision, so clearly present in Brody’s performance, has been compromised, damaged, or perhaps even lost. Introduce There will be blood without oil, Oppenheimer without the bomb, or even tar without Mahler.

You’re more likely to come away and feel that The brutalist is an allegory about a brilliant director’s struggle to complete his visionary epic without Hollywood interfering and tearing the whole thing apart in its greedy fists. That means The brutalist in a league with Francis Ford Coppola’s flamboyance Megalopolis.

Where does all this leave us? With the thought that Corbet is actually a major new talent and that we can expect something truly mega from him in the future.

The brutalist is now showing in select cinemas.