"Go to America and I will follow you."
Toronto International Film Festival
Starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant escaping the Holocaust to a new country, his László Tóth soon becomes ensconced in the twentieth century's architectural design movement thanks to strong credentials as an innovative architect specializing in the brutalist movement, as the title would strongly suggest. Through his chosen trade and profession, László encapsulates the triumphs and ills of the American experience, from labour to business to ambition and exploitation, wrapped in an industrialist zeal.
Structured as two separate halves with a fifteen-minute intermission in between, a hardened but jovial Brody carries the film with his talented ensemble of co-stars, Felicity Jones as his disabled but determined wife abroad, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, and an aristocratic Guy Pearce, building his complex character around him. Its script, written by Corbet alongside his Norwegian filmmaker wife Mona Fastvold, packs two whole films' worth of historical drama as it uses the Jewish-American generational plight in rural Pennsylvania as a parable for the entirety of modern America as we see it now through how it came to be half a century earlier.
Much of The Brutalist is a towering cinematic achievement in its sprawling expression of the misery of how a brilliant but self-destuctive foreign genius full of stubborn perfectionism made his way in one of the most consequential periods of history during the thick of anti-semitism. It's a monumentally gripping but often disorienting experience with a dynamite first half and bitterly acerbic second half followed by an oblique epilogue. It begs to be seen and experienced in all of its complicated glory in the cinema.
The Brutalist screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations program. It screens exclusively on 70mm film at The Park Theatre.
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