20 Dec ‘The Brutalist’ Stars Adrien Brody as an Architect Seeking Refuge
Source Credit: Content and images from Artnet News. Read the original article - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/brutalist-adrien-brody-architect-2578758
Architects, with all their power and ambition to shape our world, have been ripe material for the silver screen ever since Gary Cooper played one in 1949’s The Fountainhead. The tradition continues: the powerful 2003 film My Architect: A Son’s Journey (2003) was Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary about his father Louis Kahn. In Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious flop, Megalopolis (2024), Adam Driver plays a visionary builder frustrated by bureaucratic resistance. German filmmaker Wim Wenders is at work on a 3D filmic profile of Peter Zumthor, whom he has called “the architect’s architect.”
Now, the Silver Lion for best director at the 2024 Venice Film Festival has gone to another such feature, The Brutalist, by writer-director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux, The Childhood of a Leader). He made the epic film, which clocks in at just over three and a half hours, over some seven years; it earned a 12-minute ovation at its Venice debut, where it was acquired by A24 for distribution. Though the story plays out in Philadelphia and rural Pennsylvania, the film was shot principally in Budapest, entirely on celluloid film, for less than $10 million dollars.
Courtesy of A24.
Adrien Brody plays Bauhaus-trained László Toth, who has survived the Holocaust as a Hungarian Jew after running a thriving architecture practice. In creating the character, Corbet drew on the lives of figures such as Kahn, Mies van der Rohe, and, most of all, Marcel Breuer, whose masterpieces include the former Whitney Museum of American Art building in New York. (It’s not Brody’s first time playing creative people savaged by World War II: he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Actor for his rendition of Polish composer and Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist.)
In the opening scene, Toth’s boat has arrived in New York Harbor: as he struggles through darkness below decks to a gray winter day above, the Statue of Liberty comes into view—first seen sideways and then upside-down, as a clear and ominous metaphor for what is to come. If Toth expected an entirely warm welcome in America, he soon learns better.
Adrien Brody and Alessandro Nivola in The Brutalist (2024). Photo: Lol Crawley. Courtesy of A24.
We soon learn that the war and its aftermath have for a decade separated Toth from his British-educated journalist wife Erzsébet, played by Felicity Jones, and their niece Zsófia, portrayed by Raffey Cassidy. Brody (himself the son of a Hungarian refugee) and Jones learned Hungarian for their roles.
A dirt-poor Toth at first joins with his assimilated cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who runs a modest Philadelphia design store and studio. Attila brings Toth on to a job commissioned by Pennsylvania swell Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), who orders a library remodel as a surprise gift for his father at his country estate. When the father hates the result and refuses to pay, Attila wrongly blames Toth and casts him out; he ends up shoveling coal on a construction site alongside his trusty helper, Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé).
Before long, Toth hears from that very father, uber-wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren, a power-obsessed industrialist played with acuity by Guy Pearce. Upon learning the identity of the man he stiffed on the library job, he seeks him out, pays up, and invites Toth to a black-tie dinner at his vast Pennsylvania estate. He’s the kind of magnate who, even when suffering a wicked hangover, wears an impeccable outfit, his silk robe and tie making him look like he’s on his way to the opera. With dramatic flourish, Van Buren changes Toth’s life when he commissions him to design an institute, devoted to the memory of his mother, that will serve as a community center.
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist (2024). Photo: Lol Crawley. Courtesy of A24.
The struggles over the building of that institute dominate the remainder of the picture, which packs in some stunning plot twists. Penny-pinchers want to hold Toth back. Waspy locals doubt whether the Jew is a fitting architect for their town. Toth’s relationship with the Lee family turns out to be, shall we say, a rocky one; a startling sequence set in the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, symbolizes what Corbet terms the “rapaciousness” of Van Buren and the capitalist system he represents. As a metaphor for the lasting mark left by the trauma of war, the lower levels of the institute Toth designs resemble the bunkers of a concentration camp.
But, despite agony, conflict, and violence along the way, the institute ultimately stands, and the immigrant goes on to a storied career: the film’s coda puts an aged Toth at the first Venice Architecture Biennial, in 1980. Focused on postmodernism, its theme was “The Presence of the Past,” all too fitting for Toth, whose life remains scarred by the trauma of the war.
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist (2024). Photo: Lol Crawley, courtesy of A24.
The visually arresting film was shot in VistaVision, which was created by Paramount Pictures in 1954 and used by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo and North by Northwest but which mostly went out of use in American filmmaking with the rise of CinemaScope and 70mm formats.
“For architecture, it’s great because you can be physically close to the structure you’re filming and experience all the details—you can see the minerality of the concrete and at the same time capture the entire building inside your frame,” Corbet explained in press materials.
Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold were fascinated with the way the architectural styles of immigrants such as Le Corbusier and Breuer were “strange objects… loved and loathed in equal measure,” said Corbet, an ambivalence that is played out in spades in the relationship between Toth, his family, and his adopted nation. A heated debate over the very identity of America is playing out in our own day, partly over issues of immigration. Corbet’s riveting film reminds us that it’s hardly a new debate—and that it’s not only the buildings that are brutal.
Source Credit: Content and images from Artnet News. Read the original article - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/brutalist-adrien-brody-architect-2578758