I can easily pretend that I am able to keep an open mind when going into every film I watch, but it's just as easy for me to admit that I didn't expect to enjoy The Brutalist. A serious movie, a seriously loooooong movie (it's 214 minutes, and includes an intermission), and a serious amount of Adrien Brody being all serious just doesn't thrill me. The Brutalist is REALLY good though.
Brody stars as László Tóth, a man who has to try and start his life over again after fleeing post-war Europe in the late 1940s. He wants to get everything back on track as quickly as possible, keen to reunite with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and the young niece she is raising (Zsófia, played by Raffey Cassidy). Things don't go well, initially, but the passage of time allows at least one man (the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce) to see László for the talented individual he is. Will that talent be enough to keep him safe and welcome though, or is László destined to be perceived through a filter of preconceptions and prejudices?
Working on a screenplay once again with Mona Fastvold, director Brady Corbet here helms his most impressive feature yet (even better than The Childhood Of A Leader). It's still going to be too slow and sedate for some people, but there's something important in every scene here, whether it's obvious or not, and Fastvold and Corbet justify the hefty runtime of the film with a density of thought-provoking material, as well as the ever-widening scope that viewers are presented with.
Nobody really puts a foot wrong when it comes to the acting side of things (although Jones is just a little bit weaker than the others, due to her performance feeling more like a full-on performance at times). Brody fully deserves the second leading actor Academy Award that this gave him, Pearce is as good as he's been in anything from the past decade, and Cassidy, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Joe Alwyn, Jonathan Hyde, and Stacy Martin all do well in smaller roles that could have seen them easily overshadowed.
There's also some beautiful cinematography by Lol Crawley and a superb score from Daniel Blumberg, as well as many other positives I could mention from the technical side of things.
It's the ideas that will stick with you for a long time though. We've seen this kind of thing before, but not necessarily being viewed from these new angles. The Brutalist looks at the upheaval and losses caused by war, and it serves as a reminder that a genocide reverberates far beyond the list of those murdered by their oppressors. People change who they are, deliberately or not, and artists and tradespeople end up seeing a lot, if not all, of their work consigned to some historical dustbin. We lose people in a war, physical bodies broken and destroyed, but we also lose many minds and souls. It's hard to come up with some kind of ultimate total cost, but it's inevitably always a lot more than it might appear to be on paper.
9/10
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