Certification. 18
Running Time. 3 hours 34 mins
Director. Brady Corbet
Cast. Joe Alwyn, Adrien Brody, Raffey Cassidy, Felicity Jones, Stacy Martin, Alessandro Nivola, Guy Pearce.
Rating. 56%
With ten nominations ahead of the 97th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 2 March 2025, Brady Corbet's The Brutalist clocks in at a weighty three hours and thirty-four minutes run time, including a much vaunted 15-minute mid-film intermission. This appears not to be an imposed production company demand, a cinema-dependent presentational flourish or an avant-garde director's indulgence - the intermission is literally part of the film, with a specific piece of music and a dedicated countdown clock. The intermission is an acknowledgement that films with a run time of in excess of 200 minutes may sometimes prove to be an ordeal (especially for the buttocks). Corbet's intent is for the intermission to be used exactly as it should be - where a story is more powerful, the audience is more receptive, and the narrative arc of the film is more cleanly delineated by this brief pause in proceedings. The director employs a novelistic approach, dividing The Brutalist into four titled chapters,
- 1.1 Overture
- 1.2 Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival
- 1.3 Part 2: Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty
- 1.4 Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale.
Like the director's first two films - The Childhood Of A Leader and Vox Lux - The Brutalist charts the rise of an enigmatic principal character. In this instance, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States. At first, we know little about László, except that he awaits the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and his niece, Zsófia (Raffaey Cassidy), who remain in Europe after World War II. But slowly, brick by brick, the pieces are precisely dropped into place, and we learn that Tóth was a celebrated architect of the Bauhaus movement before the war.
Adrien Brody is quite simply superb. In silence, he speaks volumes, with Tóth a haunting, traumatised figure saturated in pain and passion. Already a recipient of an Academy Award (for Best Actor in a Leading Role in Roman Polanski's The Pianist), I would not be surprised if he garnered a second statue in a month's time.
Throughout it all, the visuals are impressive as cinematographer Lol Crawley celebrates brilliance in utilitarian architecture. Combined with Daniel Blumberg's tumultuous score, there is no denying The Brutalist looks good and sounds good.
Over the course of 33 years on screen, the film unfurls into a measured sprawl, briefly considering such weighty themes as Jewish identity, immigration, privilege and the Jewish diasporic trauma in the wake of World War II. It hints at the blurred lines between inspiration and insanity, and ambition and egotism, but the main underlying themes, mercifully kept below the surface, are desperation and anguish. László and Erzsébet never discuss what they were subjected to, though it is apparent that their ordeals inform everything about their sometimes erratic behaviour.
Whilst The Brutalist may exert an iron grip on the audience up to the intermission, the second half of the film is hugely troublesome. Horribly disjointed, scene after scene fails. Some scenes are incredulous. Plot threads come and go. It is utter chaos. In one scene, a train carrying building materials spectacularly derails - perhaps, a metaphor for the film itself and a more phlegmatic reason for the inclusion of an intermission. To corrupt a footballing aphorism, The Brutalist is most certainly a film of two halves.
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