“The Brutalist” is a bursting-at-the-seams saga of bold men and their equally outsized visions. Set across several decades in the aftermath of World War II, it is a grave, serious, visually sumptuous movie that puts a great many ideas into play, starting with the tension between art and commerce. It largely focuses on one man in one place, but its concerns are more expansive and touch on everything from utopia to barbarism, desire, death, form, content, immigration, assimilation and the promise and perils of modernity. Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokeswinph, this one offers a slab.
The movie is built on a series of vivid contradictions, including those embodied by its protagonist, László Tóth (a haunting Adrien Brody). A Jewish-Hungarian architect and survivor of the Holocaust, he arrives on Ellis Island as a refugee and, in short order, travels to Philadelphia, where he finds complicated shelter amid the ghosts of America’s colonial past. There, László experiences the feverish exuberance of postwar America but also multiple, crushing defeats. He’s lonely and forlorn, becomes homeless and an addict. He’s also ambitious and finds towering success. László repeatedly suffers and rebounds; mostly, he endures.
maco4d slotDirected by Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist” is a period drama with the ambitions of a historical reckoning. For László, who arrives destitute in the States, history is a wasteland. Given the Nazi destruction of European Jewry (the formation of Israel becomes a winding story thread), it’s hard to know where else he would go; in America, he at least has family. Once in Philadelphia, he reunites with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who lives with his pretty Catholic wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), and runs a furniture business that carries his new name, Miller & Sons. “The folks here,” Attila explains, “like a family business.” They apparently don’t like Jews, because Attila also says he’s now Catholic.
Soon after László arrives — Attila puts him up in a small room off the showroom, like the hired help — he begins designing new furniture for Miller & Sons to replace its heavy, Colonial Revival-style pieces. His first piece, a cantilever chair with a frame made of tubular metal, looks like something that the Hungarian-born designer and architect Marcel Breuer would have designed. Breuer apparently said that he was inspired by a bicycle to make his first such chair, an association that Audrey echoes when she says László’s chair looks like a tricycle. She’s skeptical of László and his creations, maybe even suspicious.
Corbet, who wrote the script with Mona Fastvold, doesn’t explain Audrey’s attitude outright. He folds a great deal into “The Brutalist,” slipping ideas and meaning into reminiscences and privately whispered confessions, but he also lets his larger themes surface in actions and in hard, cold gazes. If Audrey never openly says why she doesn’t like László, she doesn’t have to. He’s family, so she’s polite. But he’s a stranger, a foreigner and a reminder of her husband’s heritage. When she looks at László, it’s as if she were examining a strange, somewhat distasteful creature. Soon after they first meet, she says that she knows a doctor who can fix his nose, which seems broken; she all but asks him to fix his identity.
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Ms. Gray’s 14-year-old son, Colt, is being charged as an adult for murder in the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history. He is accused of bringing an AR-15-style rifle to Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., earlier this month, killing four — two students and two math teachers — and injuring at least nine.
“I welcome the chance to open a new chapter,” Mr. Biden said in the Oval Office. “The U.A.E. is a nation of trailblazers always looking, always looking to the future, always making big bets, and that’s something our countries have in common and our people have in common.”
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