Director: Brady Corbet

Stars: Adrian Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Isaach de Bankolé, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird

The austere titles of ‘The Brutalist’ self-consciously announce this as a work of high seriousness and gravitas. Director Brady Corbet makes good on this promise though, with a sprawling, novelistic and allegorically rich study of the immigrant experience. Brody is László Toth, a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who makes his way to America from Budapest in the aftermath of WWII. Corbet illustrates László’s arrival with an image of the Statue of Liberty, photographed at a disorienting sideways angle, a potent visual foreshadowing what will unfold. After an encounter with an immigrant prostitute, László makes his way to Pennsylvania where he stays with his cousin Atilla (Nivola), a cannily assimilated furniture salesman and his WASP wife Audrey (Emma Laird). The cousins receive a commission from rich kid Harry Lee (Alwyn) to build a library for his father in his massive estate. László fashions a beautiful airy and light panelled room. But Harry’s father, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Pearce),  turns up unexpectedly, announces furiously that he hates it, insults László’s Black assistant Gordon (de Bankolé) and storms out. Laszlo is reduced to labouring, before Van Buren tracks him down, apologizes and commissions him for another, bigger project. When László’s wife, Erzsébet (Jones) arrives with their cousin Zsofia (Cassidy), László’s odd relationship with the Van Burens becomes even knottier. Filmed in suitably imposing VistaVision by Lol Crawley, this is a rich and nuanced examination of the limits of assimilation that also shines a light on the troubled relationship between creativity and commerce (with nods to Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’). The cast are all excellent with Guy Pearce hypnotically unpleasant as stentorian-voiced patriarch Van Buren.

David Willoughby

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