The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet’s swaggering 2015 debut feature about a fascist dictator in the making, wasn’t a masterpiece, but it held itself like one: declaratively, even cockily, ambitious in its thematic reach, formally grandiose in its execution. If you didn’t think it was a truly great film – if, like this critic, you found its brio verged on the pompous – it nonetheless promised one from the American actor turned director, then still a few years shy of 30. Vox Lux, his brilliant cracked-mirror portrait of the pop machine, enthralled many while deterring others, but in The Brutalist, here it finally and undeniably is: the big, brawny chef d’oeuvre that makes the case for Corbet joining the ranks of modern American majors.
That Corbet’s graduation in this respect is an epic-scale film about an artist doggedly pursuing his own legacy-sealing magnum opus – in this case, an architect designing a vast, imposingly severe mountain of concrete modernism, in the face of public scepticism and practical opposition – hasn’t escaped critical notice. On its festival debut in Venice, so many critics reached for the adjective “monumental” that A24 winkingly grouped their quotes together on a poster: uniform bricks of praise, if you will. And yes, at a muscularly sprawling, decades-spanning 215 minutes, elegantly bisected with a built-in interval, The Brutalist is a near-overwhelming feat of construction, inviting some degree of awe by sheer dint of heft.
But Corbet’s film isn’t just a daunting, shadow-casting cinematic obelisk. As with many a great architectural achievement, its beauty is in the delicacy and intricacy of its detailing: the folded complexities of its historical revisionism and political critique, its finely etched human portraiture, the textural verdigris of Lol Crawley’s dazzling VistaVision cinematography, its unexpected stabs of charred, mordant humour. And after the splintered, angular subversions of Vox Lux, the greatest surprise of The Brutalist is its elegantly assured classicism. Both large-scale and intimately centred, its story unfolds with the rolling sweep of a muscular mid-century Hollywood saga by George Stevens or Elia Kazan. I blinked in astonishment as the lights came up after the first half; scarcely an hour seemed to have gone by.
In a role once, now unimaginably, assigned to Joel Edgerton, Adrien Brody plays the hollowed, haunted Hungarian Jewish architect Laszlo Toth, once celebrated in his homeland before being reduced to anonymous poverty by the abuses of the Holocaust, and subsequent emigration to the United States. There’s a metatextual poignancy to casting Brody in the role of a man chasing past professional and artistic glories: many assumed he had long ago peaked with his Oscar-winning portrayal of another Holocaust survivor in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist. But there’s a crumbled, careworn stillness to his work here, a soulful breakage in his resigned body language and deep, wary gaze, that may well define his career. For his director, too, this colossal third feature could be the milestone for which he’s forever first known – though at only 36 years of age, Corbet may just be laying his auteur foundations.
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