Best Actor Oscar winner Adrien Brody plays the role of László Toth, a visionary Hungarian-Jewish architect, in the epic period drama The Brutalist. Photos: Supplied.
It is a bold, ambitious, moreover complex project, and it took a confident American filmmaker and actor to make The Brutalist. Brady Corbet’s daring and unconventional architecture drama is a colossal achievement!
His wins and those of lead actor Adrien Brody at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards and BAFTAs were capped off at the 97th Academy Awards presentations in March, with Brody taking out Best Actor.
The Brutalist won three Golden Globe gongs this year: Best Motion Picture – Drama; Best Director – Motion Picture for Brady Corbet; and Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama for Adrien Brody.
It also won four British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards: Best Director (Corbet), Leading Actor (Brody), Best Cinematography for Lol Crawley and Original Score for Daniel Blumberg.
The film earned 10 nominations for the 97th Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Brody (his second Oscar nomination for Best Actor), Best Supporting Actress for Felicity Jones and Best Supporting Actor for Guy Pearce). On the night, Brody received his second Oscar for Best Actor. The first was for The Pianist in 2003. The Brutalist also won Oscars for Best cinematography for Lol Crawley (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) and Best Original Score went to Daniel Blumberg, who is well-known as the former frontman of indie rock band Yuck.
The Brutalist is an epic historical drama that chronicles the journey of László Tóth (portrayed brilliantly by Brody, The Pianist, Midnight in Paris), a visionary Hungarian-Jewish architect who flees post-war Europe in 1947. After surviving the Holocaust, Toth emigrates to the US with aspirations to rebuild his career and life alongside his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything, True Story).
Their fortunes take a pivotal turn when a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, L.A. Confidential, Memento), commissions László to design an ambitious modernist monument. This opportunity propels László into the upper echelons of American society, but also exposes him to profound personal and professional challenges, as he becomes increasingly aware that he is a Jewish outsider in this rural white Protestant society.
Spanning 33 years on screen, and running a little over three hours and 30 minutes, the film delves into the themes of ambition, identity and complexities of the ”American Dream”. The delivery offers a visually remarkable and expressively reverberating narrative.
The movie draws straight analagies between the immigrant experience and inventive expression and how commerce dictates so much of the latter.
Brody and Felicity Jones, who portrays Toth’s wife Erzsébet in The Brutalist.
Making The Brutalist was a highly personal work for Brady Corbet.
“I was told that this film was un-distributable, that no-one would come out and see it,” he said. “It was written as a sort of exorcism and response to a lot of what my wife and I had been through.”
He worked on developing the film for seven years with writer and partner Mona Fastvold. He even made an emotional speech at this year’s Golden Globes in January about creative freedom – for directors to have artistic control of their movies.
“I just wanted to leave everyone with something to think about: final-cut tiebreak goes to the director,” Corbet told the crowd. “It’s sort of a controversial statement. It shouldn’t be.”
Despite its historical setting, The Brutalist is a fictional story. What Corbet says and how he expresses its direct but smoothly complex message is masterful. There’s an argument for art that’s pure, how it can flourish and survive, especially beneath the pessimistic burdens of frugality and the conceit of sponsors.
It is also about America, and the conciliations its originators are often compelled to make when it comes to money demands with menace. It’s a far-reaching film that concurrently feels both classic and modern, including a fresh musical composition. It may be distressing, but the instinct is to stay put in this specific world.
Corbet was inspired by the Brutalist architectural movement of the 1950s, and set out to deliver a metaphor on how the immigrant experience can parallel artistic struggle.
“The film is about how the artistic experience and immigrant experience march in lockstep, which is to say that, in general, if someone moves into a suburban town in America and they don’t look like everybody else, because of the colour of their skin or because of their beliefs or traditions, everybody wants them to get … out.
“… Brutalist architecture is representative of something that people do not understand and that they want torn down and ripped away.”
Even Brody empathised: “There was a lot that I could relate to personally: my own mother and grandparents’ struggles of fleeing the hardships of war and immigrating to the United States in the ’50s, and the artistic yearnings to leave behind something of great significance with my work.”
The Brutalist, produced and directed by Brady Corbet, is streaming on various digital platforms.
