Brady Corbet’s
The Brutalist was the talk of the Lido on Sunday as the seven-years-in-the-making period epic finally received its world premiere at the
Venice Film Festival‘s historic Sala Grande cinema.
The audience inside the premiere erupted in applause as the credits began to roll on the film’s epic three-hour, 35-minute running time, giving Corbet and his cast a rousing, festival-best 13-minute standing ovation. Stars
Adrien Brody and
Felicity Jones looked teary at times by the effusive reaction to the movie.
The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a rave review, with chief critic David Rooney describing
The Brutalist as “a monumental symphony of the immigrant experience” with a “devastating” performance by Brody as Tóth.
The Brutalist has all the thematic heft and intellectual rigor befitting its subject: The historical trauma and artistic vision that gave rise to the great works of mid-century American Brutalist architecture. But Corbet also gives his audience a break amid the film’s alternatively elegant and propulsive story. Mid-way through the lengthy runtime, there is a 10-minute intermission, allowing cinemagoers a bathroom break or a pause to reflect on the work’s evolving handling of its themes.
The Brutalist chronicles the journey of Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who emigrates to the United States in 1947 to experience the “American dream.” Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract with a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), that will change the course of the next 30 years of his life. Felicity Jones co-stars as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet, while Joe Alwyn plays the rich industrial’s mercurial son. Corbet and his wife, Norwegian filmmaker and actress Mona Fastvold, co-wrote the film.
“
The Brutalist is closer to the churning ideas and dark view of power in the director’s debut feature,
The Childhood of a Leader than his more polarizing disquisition on contemporary celebrity,
Vox Lux,”
THR‘s Rooney writes. “But it represents a vast leap in scope from both, contemplating such meaty themes as creativity and compromise, Jewish identity, architectural integrity, the immigrant experience, the arrogant insularity of privilege and the long reach of the past.”
