Answer me one question,” demands Harrison Lee Van Buren, the malignant industrialist played by Guy Pearce, towards the middle of The Brutalist. “Why architecture?” He’s posing the question to László Tóth, the visionary immigrant architect at the film’s centre, played with wrought fallibility by Adrien Brody. “Nothing can be of its own explanation,” he responds. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”
In a year when the Academy Awards’ Best Picture nominees have made for rather mealy pickings, it’s hard to find the right way to talk about The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s 215-minute-long period epic. Sweeping in scope, emphatically stylish, and somehow produced on a budget of less than $10m, The Brutalist is the sort of film that compels superlatives. It demands to be taken seriously, at a time when precious few films do. It’s no surprise that it’s a serious contender at this year’s Oscars, in a host of major categories – Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor among them. (Brody’s performance, as the titular architect who migrates to the US to escape the horrors of the Holocaust, has been rightly heralded as a career high.) But it’s hardly a runaway favourite – and this too is unsurprising.
