An epic postwar architectural drama
In his most recent role, The Brutalist, Adrien Brody is once again a tortured artist and Holocaust survivor, in what has been hailed as his best performance since The Pianist.
It’s been over two decades since the movie came out, but Adrien Brody’s young tortured face walking in the recreated WWII rubble of Poland in The Pianist is still etched in so many minds. At 29, his role in the Roman Polanski film based on the true story of Jewish Polish musician Władysław Szpilman made Brody the youngest person at the time to win an Academy Award for best actor.
Since then, Brody, whose father is Jewish and whose maternal grandmother was a Czech Jew who survived the Holocaust in hiding, though his mother was raised Catholic, has taken on many memorable Jewish roles. In his most recent role, The Brutalist, Brody is once again a tortured artist and Holocaust survivor, in what has already been hailed as his best performance since that 2002 role that catapulted him to fame.
The film follows the fictional story of a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, architect László Tóth, over 30 years.
Tóth’s tale is both brutal towards its protagonist and its viewers, or at least appears to be fairly unsparing in its graphic depictions. There isn’t much talk in The Brutalist about what Tóth went through in the camps, but there is the constant echoes of Holocaust trauma in its characters, a trauma that perhaps informs many of the architect’s actions.
We first meet our hero in 1947, alone, at the doorstep of his cousin, Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola. Once a celebrated architect, Tóth starts working in his cousin’s furniture store, designing his own pieces, which is where he meets Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Australian Academy Award-winner Guy Pearce, a wealthy industrialist whose whims and those of his spoiled son, Harry, played by Joe Alwyn, go on to deeply impact the rest of Tóth’s life for the coming years and decades.
The trailer reveals a lot about the film’s artistic sensibilities. We see Tóth walking through a crowd, his Hungarian accented voice saying, “Excuse me, sorry,” as people chatter and babies cry. We see the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, emotional reunions, the streets of New York and Philadelphia, beautiful American landscapes and construction sites. There’s a lot of joy and lots of feelings.
“Welcome to America,” a voice tells Tóth at the end of the trailer. It’s clear that this is a deeply American tale, one that is about what it means to be a Jew and an immigrant in America in those decades after the war.
Brody has spoken about how his mother’s story connected him to Tóth’s. Brody’s mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a photographer who, like his Brutalist character, was born in Budapest.
“She’s a wonderful photographer, but she’s also a Hungarian immigrant who fled Hungary in 1956 in the Hungarian Revolution. She was a refugee and emigrated to the United States, and much like László started again and lost their home and pursued a dream of being an artist,” Brody said of his mother.
“I understand a great deal about the repercussions of that on her life and her work as an artist, which I think is a wonderful parallel with László’s creations and how they evolved, and how post-war psychology influences your work in a creative manner and all other aspects of your life,” he added. “This fiction feels very real to me, and that’s so important for me, to embody a character and make him real, and for a film like this to not only represent the past, but remind us of the past and how so many things in our present we must learn from.”
It’s clear that a sense of duty informed his performance in what is shaping up to be one of the actor’s most outstanding roles.
Kveller
The Brutalist is showing as a Special Presentation for JIFF on December 1 in Sydney and December 8 in Melbourne. For tickets: jiff.com.au
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