Having taken the Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Golden Globes, The Brutalist is now the one to beat for the Oscars. It’s pretty extraordinary for a film that doesn’t exactly set out to please: three and a half hours about a fictional architect of the still unfashionable Brutalist school, and themes about the perennial struggle between art and commerce against a backdrop of Holocaust trauma. What this epic does have – as well as the trailblazing success of the equally long and heavy Oppenheimer – is a towering performance from past Oscar-winner Adrien Brody and direction from rising auteur Brady Corbet, whose decision to film in the expansive widescreen VistaVision format makes his film an Undeniable Experience.
The Brutalist focuses on the career of fictional Hungarian architect László Toth (Brody), who arrives in America with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) after a war spent in the concentration camps. There, he is taken under the wing of industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who commissions him to create a vast Institute bearing the Van Buren name. A struggle for control between artist and capitalist ensues, with dramatic consequences that equal the scale of Toth’s proposed building.
Visually, this is a film that denies its relatively tiny budget, as ambitious and as grand as the creations of its central character. To achieve this, Corbet struggled through the Covid pandemic and several postponements, using a team capable o.
