A-Directed by Brady Corbet Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Before The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s greatest sequence of filmmaking comes at the end of his debut, The Childhood of a Leader. By the end, the rebellious kid has grown into the titular leader, a fascist facsimile greeted by a wild crowd on his way to who knows what atrocity. The spinning, disorienting camera is part of the crowd, pushing and jostling to get a look. It’s a shocking way to end an imperfect film, and Corbet carries that same style into the beginning of The Brutalist. This time, the camera is part of a crowd in the hold of a ship headed to Ellis Island, and where it landed in an ominous place for Childhood of a Leader, here it lands on the Statue of Liberty after emerging from the literal dark of the hold and the metaphorical dark of WWII Europe. Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is overjoyed to be here, and the film is too based on the way that Daniel Blumberg’s score is building, but that camera style implies something else. The Brutalist brings titanic cinematic might to bear from its first scene, self-consciously filmed in VistaVision to evoke the grand epic road shows of the Hollywood studio system heyday. It reeks of importance and achievement, and it delivers on what it promises through Corbet’s will and ambition and his collaboration with an immensely talented cast and crew.
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