BRIAN VINER reviews The Brutalist: Tipped for an Oscar, this movie is full of grandeur and great acting
The Brutalist (18, 214mins)
Verdict: Impressive but flawed
There is no swerving the irony that The Brutalist, a sweeping drama about the American immigrant experience, lands in cinemas in the very week that the 47th President of the United States starts the process of booting loads of them out.
Mind you, almost five months have passed since the world premiere, at the Venice Film Festival, and the movie has been gathering awards ever since.
Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his lead performance as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, released from the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career.
Brody is an odds-on favourite to add an Oscar. Meanwhile, all kinds of lavish adjectives have been flung at writer-director Brady Corbet (also anointed with a Globe), and his co-writer Mona Fastvold, who is also his partner. Never mind their pillow-talk, imagine their pillar-talk.
Their movie, with its twin themes of assimilation and architecture, has been described as ‘immense’, ‘monumental’, ‘dizzying’. And now I can add ‘euphoric’, but only because that’s how I felt on the arrival of the 15-minute intermission. The Brutalist is very long.
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Adrien Brody (left) and Felicity Jones (right) in The Brutalist
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Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his lead performance as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, released from the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career
It feels almost curmudgeonly not to polish up more superlatives but I can only speak as I find. There are many impressive things about this film, not least the acting, but for me it too often loses its narrative grip in the second act, veering off on tangents that feel unnecessary, distracting and self-indulgent.
Also, petty as it might be, I don’t believe that in the mid 20th-century, even educated Hungarians could conceivably arrive in America with an almost perfect grasp of English grammar.
They do have heavy accents (which in Brody’s case was reportedly made more realistic by part-cloning it, using Artificial Intelligence to fuse his efforts with the actual Hungarian accent of the film’s editor David Jancso). But what’s the point of making the vowels sound convincingly foreign when the sentence construction is so improbably immaculate?
Ostensibly, construction is what The Brutalist is largely about. Laszlo Toth (Brody) is a Bauhaus-trained architect whom we first meet amid the tumult of middle-Europe’s liberation from the Nazis. But before long he is arriving in New York Harbour where he gets a skew-whiff sighting of the Statue of Liberty, heavily symbolic of experiences to come as the American Dream turns out to be, if not illusory, decidedly compromised.
To begin with, though, it is full of heady promise. There is a very moving scene when Toth meets up with his already-assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and the pair hug as if daring fate ever to pull them apart again.
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Guy Pearce stars as the volatile millionaire industrialist and socialite called Harrison Lee Van Buren
Attila owns a furniture store in Philadelphia called Miller & Sons. He has anglicised his name and invented offspring because, he says, Americans love a family business. That’s the sort of thing that European Jews have to do to fit in, but the intense, passionate Toth never really does; he never entirely escapes the scourge of anti-Semitism which, in a way that only eventually becomes clear, even shapes the style and philosophy of his brutalist architecture.
Atilla gives him a job, but after a commission goes wrong the cousins fall out.
Toth, increasingly reliant on alcohol and heroin, is forced to work on building sites until he falls under the patronage of a volatile millionaire industrialist and socialite called Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).
Once Van Buren hires him to design a mighty community centre named after his beloved late mother, Toth’s American Dream seems complete, despite the sly enmity of his patron’s entitled and supercilious son Harry (Joe Alwyn).
Along with dozens of tons of concrete, he pours his heart and soul into the project. Yet it is built, metaphorically, on shifting sands. Toth might be difficult, stubborn and obstreperous, but the Van Burens are not worthy of his heart and cannot buy his soul.
All this unfolds absorbingly, but the narrative takes an unwelcome lurch sideways following that blessedly welcome intermission when, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act and some string-pulling by Van Buren, Toth’s osteoporosis-stricken wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), an elective mute, join him in America.
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Alessandro Nivola, left, with Adrien Brody. The pair hug as if daring fate ever to pull them apart again
Erzsebet’s arrival introduces a jolting psychosexual dimension to the drama which it simply doesn’t need. And later, be warned, there is a rape scene all the more shocking for being entirely unexpected.
As an exercise in story-telling, The Brutalist has genuine grandeur and ambition. It is beautifully shot and scored, and in several ways stands comparison with the great coming-to-America movies such as The Godfather: Part Two (1974), except that it replaces guns with girders.
Brody is excellent, so too Pearce. But the film does not soar like I kept hoping it would.
It whisks us well beyond the mezzanine level of expectation, but never to the roof.
Also showing
When haunted house horror meets serial killer thriller
Presence (15, 85 mins)
Steven Soderbergh is writing a book about the art of directing, using Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as the ultimate example of concise but powerful visual story-telling.
His own new film Presence makes a jolly good fist of it, too. In less than an hour and a half, Soderbergh crafts a slick supernatural thriller that exerts an immediate grip and never lets go.
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Lucy Liu stars in Steven Soderbergh's Presence, in less than an hour and a half, Soderbergh crafts a slick supernatural thriller that exerts an immediate grip and never lets go
With a hand-held camera Soderbergh tells the story from the point of view of whatever spirit is haunting a suburban house.
Newly moved in are pushy mum Rebecca (Lucy Liu), married to the much softer Chris (Chris Sullivan).
Their teenage children are brattish Tyler (Eddy Maday) and troubled Chloe (Callina Liang), who is traumatised by the recent deaths of two schoolmates.
Soderbergh leads us towards a conventional haunted house story but cleverly shapes it into a serial-killer thriller, exploring themes of teenage sex and peer pressure. It’s a skilled piece of film-making.
Flight Risk (15, 91mins)
Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk is only a little longer, but makes the mistake of trying to cram in way too much narrative.

Flight Risk stars Michelle Dockery (pictured), striving admirably to erase all traces of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary

In the film Dockery is a US marshal who must escort a vital witness (Topher Grace) in a case against a mob boss, by air from Alaska to Seattle
A US marshal (Michelle Dockery, striving admirably to erase all traces of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary) must escort a vital witness (Topher Grace) in a case against a mob boss, by air from Alaska to Seattle.
Unfortunately, the pilot (a gurning Mark Wahlberg) turns out to be a hitman, hired by the bad guys.
That ought to be enough story, but there’s some silliness about corrupt law officers that tests one’s resolve to see the film through to its predictable conclusion.
Back In Action
(12, 114 mins)
The title of the Netflix film Back In Action might refer to Cameron Diaz, who stars with Jamie Foxx. She’s been off the silver screen for more than a decade.
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The title of the Netflix film Back In Action might refer to Cameron Diaz (left), who stars with Jamie Foxx (right). She’s been off the silver screen for more than a decade
She’s welcome to take another ten years out unless she makes better choices than this feeble, desperately formulaic secret-agent ‘thriller’, which name-checks MI6, the Triads and the KGB within the first couple of minutes, and gets steadily worse.
Amazingly, Glenn Close and Andrew Scott agreed to take part, too.
All films in cinemas now except Back In Action, streaming on Netflix.