The Brutalist (2024)

The film is divided into two chapters, plus the prologue and epilogue, with a 15-minute break between them, due to its length, and is a story that unfolds over several decades of the life of a Jewish architect named László Toth, who flees Hungary to move to the United States at the end of World War II, leaving his wife and niece in the Old Continent.

But all is not all that glitters is gold because, upon arriving in the “supposed” land of progress and opportunities, he suffers all kinds of hardships, until luck (and talent) accompany him and he ends up working for the despotic millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr., who realizes his talent and hires him to build a modern building for the time.

Without doing it in a direct way, the screenwriters intend to make a criticism of people with economic power and who try to take advantage of people, besides reflecting that any artistic expression can be misunderstood at a time and many years later be considered a cult work, and an example is that building built by László Toth.

With this interesting starting point, the great American filmmaker Brady Corbet (awarded in Venice for the direction of “The Brutalist”) gives us this great film, whose footage does not become long (maybe that break influences) although the footage could have been cut something in the final part, where everything works quite well as a perfect machine, both in the technical and artistic aspects, as in the interpretive, in the direction and the script.

Adrien Brody is magnificent as the protagonist, in a role very reminiscent of the one in “The Pianist”, for which he won the Oscar, in what is another performance by the American actor that will go down in history for its complexity and for expressing a lot without the need to exaggerate.

Alongside him, Guy Pearce, who plays the millionaire, stands out in a character that falls antipathetic, and Felicity Jones as Erzsébet Tóth, the wife of the protagonist, in a secondary character fundamental in the development of the story in the second half.