Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the course of long-running TV comedy Family Guy, cartoon patriarch Peter Griffin once revealed a terrible secret. Seemingly drowning, he finally confessed: “I did not care for The Godfather.” As the waters rose, his voice took on the weary huff of the disappointed critic. “It insists upon itself.”I don’t know if Peter has seen The Brutalist, but I can’t improve on that as a verdict on director Brady Corbet’s slab of an Oscar nominee. It is a movie of towering scale, gravity and technical accomplishment. It is also very keen you know this.The heart of the film is architect László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish émigré played with photorealistic brilliance by Adrien Brody. We first see him leaving Europe after the second world war, haunted but euphoric. He arrives in America onboard a listing ship. The Statue of Liberty looms upside down. Symbolism doesn’t scare this movie. So begins a story of new lives bound to the past. Tóth’s beloved wife Erzsébet is still stranded in Budapest. His accent too, unlike that of cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has also converted to Catholicism and owns a Philadelphia furniture business for which Tóth knocks up mid-century modern dining chairs.To address a rumour you may have heard: yes, The Brutalist is three hours 35 minutes, interval included. The running time says a lot about the movie, but is gracefully handled, at least at first. Spanning decades, the conjuring of time and place casts a real spell. The film looks good, and sometimes magnificent. (Corbet shot in VistaVision, a 1950s film stock he has been keen to discuss. Less so his use of AI, which has now brought controversy.)Scenes breathe, but feel precise. Nothing drags. A crucial junction comes with a job closer to actual architecture. We see now how gifted Tóth is. We also meet the man on whom he will rely to express that gift: industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).If immigration has shaped the story, other themes enter, not least the vexed relationship of artist and patron. Van Buren adopts Tóth as a trophy on learning of his fame in prewar Europe. But the architect has his own agenda, and does not lack bristle. In a small but striking aside, he speaks of the Holocaust not as Jewish tragedy but “humiliation”. Amid the general immensity, Tóth has nuance.The interval arrives not long after. Leave now, and you might still make dinner. In the second, lesser half of the film, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) belatedly joins her husband. After such anticipation, Corbet now isn’t sure what to do with her. While the first act had mis-steps too, the heady moments overrode them. But now the magic fails as the story sputters ahead of a large, dark plot point that, in common with the whole movie, I’ve liked less the more I’ve thought about it. Lustre tarnishes. Corbet wants you to admire his take of Ayn Rand, but not notice his borrowings from Paul Thomas Anderson. The flaws feel doubly glaring in a story about perfectionism — or, rather, its own perfection. For architecture, read moviemaking, with parallels more obvious through each funding crisis and creative masterstroke. By the end, you realise your own role is simply to applaud, cheer for an Oscar, and absolutely not ask if the tale The Brutalist tells really merits involving the Holocaust and other horrors. We are merely here to salute the film’s ambition, whatever that might be. ★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from January 24 and in US cinemas now
