Stephen Silver
One of the most acclaimed and praised movies of 2024 is about a Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who comes to the United States, settles in Philadelphia and ends up supervising a massive construction project in Doylestown, Bucks County.
The film is “The Brutalist,” directed by Brady Corbet, and it stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a fictional Bauhaus-trained architect from Hungary who arrives in the United States after the war. The epic film, with a 215-minute running time, was shot in a long-forgotten format called VistaVision.
The winner of three Golden Globes on Sunday, including Best Motion Picture — Drama, “The Brutalist” is one of many prominent Jewish-themed films competing for awards this year, along with “A Real Pain,” “September 5” and “Between the Temples.”
The film begins with László on the boat from Europe, where he sees the Statue of Liberty and arrives at Ellis Island, the way so many real-life Jewish immigrants did. Soon after, he lands in Philadelphia, where he is taken in by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who owns a furniture store in what’s described as Kensington.
After the cousins are hired to renovate a library belonging to rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), László is given a commission to design a community center in Doylestown, Bucks County, to be called the Van Buren Institute. Later, he’s joined by his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy).
We soon discover that while the traumas of the war continue to inflict pain, the trio’s life in America isn’t an entirely positive experience either. The cousin has married a non-Jewish woman and become a Catholic. In Doylestown, the family winds up in a very old-line Protestant milieu where many treat him with disdain, as László’s elaborate architectural plans meet resistance.
The Brutalist includes a radio broadcast of David Ben-Gurion delivering Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, and later on, some of the characters relocate to Israel. What exactly to make of the film’s depiction of Israel and Zionism has been much debated among critics and others, although it’s very much open to interpretation and the filmmakers have mostly stated as much when asked about it in interviews.
The film was shot mostly in Hungary and did not do any location work in Pennsylvania. But it does utilize some vintage Pennsylvania tourism advertisements.
“The film always had to be set in the Northeast because the mid-century designers were predominantly stationed there,” Corbet told the Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview in December. He added that several major 20th-century architects, including Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, were associated with Philly. The Van Buren character, Corbet told the Inquirer, is a “more perverse version” of Albert C. Barnes.
Corbet, the director, is not Jewish, although Brody, the leading man, had a Jewish father, and previously won an Oscar for the Holocaust film “The Pianist.”
The film’s composer, Daniel Blumberg, whose work on the film’s music has been widely praised, is also Jewish. Felicity Jones, the English actress who previously played Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the biopic “On the Basis of Sex,” is also not Jewish, although the film establishes that her character was a convert to Judaism.
The film had its local premiere at the Philadelphia Film Festival in October and the Bryn Mawr Film Institute hosted a one-off screening in December. After opening in late 2024 in New York and Los Angeles, “The Brutalist” will open in Philadelphia on Jan. 10. It’s showing in 35mm at the Film Society Center in Center City and will also show in the city at both Film Society Bourse and Landmark’s Ritz Five in Old City. The film is also set to be shown in the town where most of it is set, Doylestown, at the County Theater.
Stephen Silver is a Broomall-based freelance writer.
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