VENICE, Italy—It can be easy to overreact at a Film Festival. There’s a reason they’re so appealing—being surrounded by thousands of people who truly love cinema for days on end is a special experience. It’s also a time for the most revered stars, writers, and filmmakers to debut their latest movies. It seems like every day something is being pronounced as the best of someone’s career—the greatest film, the most extraordinary performance. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of it all.
A film I was not hyped for whatsoever was The Brutalist, a 215-minute (that’s three-and-a-half hours) epic directed by Brady Corbet, which just debuted at the Venice Film Festival. I was left cold by his first film, The Childhood of A Leader, and fell on the very negative side of his divisive Vox Lux. So when I sat down for Corbet’s latest, I can’t say I was vibrating with anticipation. But all those minutes later, I left the cinema with one thought: I’ve just seen a masterpiece.
The Brutalist is epic in scale and timeline, taking place over 30 years, but it manages to feel remarkably intimate. The film follows Jewish immigrant László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who flees post-war Hungary in 1947 for the promise of the American dream. His wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) is still in Europe with her niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). While he waits to be reunited, he struggles in poverty for years, shoveling coal to get enough money to stay in a shelter. László is a gifted and celebrated architect in Europe, a fact that seems to mean very little in post-war America.
