Let’s be honest — a film about brutalist architecture does not sound terribly appealing. But Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist — which won him and his star, Adrien Brody, three Golden Globes this week for best drama, best director and best actor respectively — is an extraordinary creation.
The film also picked up plaudits in prestigious film festivals in Venice and Berlin, and will almost certainly be up for Oscar nominations. For once, embrace the critics, and run rather than walk to the nearest screening.
Brady Corbet spent seven years making this remarkable film, and it shows in every lovingly rendered detail. It is the story of a Hungarian Jewish architect, Laszlo Toth, who washes up in post-war America, a broken man. By degrees, we discover that before the Holocaust he had a successful architectural practice in Budapest. In America, however, he struggles to re-create that life.
Initially taken in by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has established a furniture company in downtown Philadelphia, Laszlo begins, slowly and painfully, to try to rebuild his life. We know from hints at the outset that he has suffered during the Holocaust, though we don’t find out until the end of the film exactly what did happen to him.
Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones play husband and wife in The Brutalist
And we also know that Laszlo has arrived in America without his beloved wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), or his niece – his late sister’s daughter, Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy). But Attila has gripping news: both are still alive, though stuck in Hungary.
It is rare in any American film for an individual’s Jewish identity to be properly and authentically shown. But The Brutalist’s audience can be in no doubt that Laszlo Toth is the genuine article, from the moment we see him in shul — one of a number of such references in the film — to the at first slightly puzzling voiceover from an American news programme, telling listeners about the establishment of the state of Israel. We also hear Hebrew and Yiddish in several scenes.
Adrien Brody, familiar to international audiences for his lead role in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist — he is also starring in a sequel, out later this year — delivers an extraordinary performance as Toth.
Alessandro Nivola and Adrian Brody in The Brutalist
Brody’s own mother, Sylvia Plachy, was Hungarian Jewish and escaped to America during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Brody has drawn on her experience as an outsider seeking to rebuild her life. Toth isn’t just an immigrant – he’s a Jewish immigrant trying to make sense of American society, and at the same time trying to persuade people of the clean lines — or ‘brutalism’ — of his architectural vision.
The actor has perfected a Hungarian accent to the extent where it is hard to tell where Adrian Brody ends and Laszlo Toth begins. Both Brody and Felicity Jones spent time learning Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language, and the investment has clearly paid off.
The Brutalist is an unfashionably long film – running to more than thee hours – and features an unusual interval. But it’s so worthwhile engaging with it, as Brady Corbet, who both wrote and directed, is determined to tell the story his way, without shortcuts.
The Brutalist
Just when you think Laszlo is never going to catch a break, he and his cousin get an unusual commission — to re-design and build a library for a Wasp-y millionaire, Harrison van Buren. The streamlined result is a thing of beauty, and ultimately leads to an incredible vanity project which van Buren (the veteran Australian Guy Pearce) engages Laszlo Toth to build.
Inevitably, however, things go tragically wrong. Though it is through a contact of van Buren’s, a Jewish lawyer called Michael Hoffman, that permits are finally organised for Erszebet and Zsofia to leave Hungary, there is a stinging line from van Buren’s even Waspier son Harry, directed at Toth, which for me summed up the immigrant experience. “We tolerate you,” Harry shouts at Laszlo, as they walk through the building site of the intended memorial to van Buren’s mother.
It came as a shock to discover after watching this stunning film that Laszlo Toth is entirely fictional. Corbet, who has been fascinated by the effect of post-war psychology on post-war architecture, met and interviewed the architectural scholar Jean-Louis Cohen at Princeton University, where he teaches.
Cohen is renowned for his work on Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry, so was the ideal person to answer Corbet’s question: could he tell him of a real-life architect who was successful in central Europe, but due to the Holocaust had to start all over again in America?
And Cohen could not come up with a name to fit these requirements. So Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, invented Laszlo and Erszebet because, as Corbet acknowledges: “The truth of the matter is that most eastern or central European Jewish architects who got stuck in Europe during the war did not make it out alive.” There are elements of real-life architects such as Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe in Laszlo Toth, but essentially, this compelling figure is a product of Corbet’s rich imagination.
Adrian Brody, Isaach DeBankole and Guy Pearce
One more thing to add to this beautiful film is the incredible score by the UK-based composer Daniel Blumberg. He not only echoes the spare, stark outlines of brutalist architecture but also helps to recreate the jazz influences of the 1950s in some key scenes.
Essentially, The Brutalist is the story of damaged people: Laszlo and Erszebet because of their experiences during the Holocaust, van Buren as the quintessential rapacious capitalist who still fails to bend everyone to his will.
I guarantee that audiences will fall in love with Laszlo Toth. As I say, run, don’t walk.
The Brutalist opens on 24 January. For an early opportunity, the UK Jewish Film Festival is holding a special preview screening at the Phoenix Cinema on Thursday 16 January at 6.30 pm. ukjewishfilm.org
