“The Brutalist” has been expected for a long time, since 2018 the Brady Corbet project had appeared something potentially truly intriguing, and spite of delays, changes and continuous re-cats, finally it has arrived, starting from February 6, in cinemas After being presented at the Venice Biennale last year and having obtained 10 Oscar nominations 2025. Adrien Brody is the protagonist of an ambitious, formally majestic film, with which to combine the classicism of Hollywood which was, to the will to give us a capable story to talk to us about America with a critical yet fascinated look.

“The Brutalist” – The plot

“The Brutalist” revolves around the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust, who reaches his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in New York, on that finished 1940s in which a new migratory wave begins in the United States. László was a very famous architect in pre -war Europe, one of the greatest exponents of the Bauhaus, but with Nazism everything was over. Now he hopes to bring his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) to America and find his way, but it’s not easy.

Foreigners are treated with hostility, he struggles to integrate, at least until his talent as an architect and designer is noticed by the eccentric billionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), which is determined to finance ambitious architectural projects in Pennsylvania which is More and more homeland of bricks and steel. But László in addition to having to deal with a great solitude, a drug addiction inherited from the war, must fight against the perplexity of those around him towards his new ideas, racism and trauma left in him by the war tragedy. That project, in which he pours his genius, that building wanted by Van Buren, will also become a showdown towards himself.

“The Brutalist” is a crazy race towards size, with a gigantic building to be built that we understand could mark the long -awaited ascent or its definitive ruin for the protagonist. In the Mostarcelo, “The Brutalist” soon becomes the best film seen so far in official competition at this Venice 2024, who has shown different films, but no acute, none at least in comparison with what Brady Corbet offered in This gigantic, visceral odyssey. The director overwhelms the viewer both from a visual point of view, with a 70mm Vistavision very shooting, and narrative.

The script written by Corbet with Mona Fastvold connects to masterpieces shot in that America full of hopes after the second world conflict by directors such as Stern, Seaton, Capra, Wyler, in short, the narrative on hopes, rebirth and rescue. But “The Brutalist” becomes so much a tribute to the grandeur of that cinematographic moment and that silent humanity, as a total deconstruction of the Rhetoric of American Dream, of the United States as a homeland of hope. Here of hope there is little, if not that of toxic and galloping individualism, of the absence of scruples that accompanies this America that prays and in the meantime it counts the money, which creates churches and highways, symbols of an absolutism of the capital that does not respect anything and nobody.

A Kolossal on individualism as a fundamental trait of American society

“The Brutalist” has a magnificent cast, but he is most of all: Adrien Brody. The late pianist confirms himself one of the most incredible interpreters of his generation, his lászló is everything and the opposite of everything, is miserable and witty, is naive and cunning, is triumphant and very fragile. In his desperate search for a recovery, Corbet outlines a mix of the various hungry for hope that American cinema has always elected to symbol of that mirage called American Dream. Very few films have managed to remove the patina of rhetoric, of triumphalism, from the description of that classic class, racist and ruthless, in which László seeks how he can not sink.

The dialogues are perfect for timing and meanings (both direct and indirect), then there is the incredible photograph of Lol Crawley who tends to remove depths from a film is intimate, claustrophobic, even in the gigantic metropolises or in large spaces. Architecture is the mirror of a contrast that “The brutalist” elevates to the great theme of the film. The clash concerns past and present, matter and light, just and wrong, strength and weakness. Guy Pearce giant with his Van Buren, behind which the many capitalists are high to divinity from America, with his spoiled and decadent progeny. He is the face of that deception, of the false American nobility made of oil and steel, bricks and burns.

Jones is sublime with its broken but indomitable Erzsébet, a twisted body in which the sense of guilt of the survivors is shaken, the destruction of family perfection. “The Brutalist” is an incredible, gigantic and mastodontic film for formal perfection and strength of the events contained in it, as it manages to make every authentic and credible character remain, he also knows how to give a tension surrounded by a bitter irony, with his own The protagonist who becomes a means of a deep bond with the vision of Stanley Kubrick’s story.

He also looked at the single as a means with which to express a constant in eternal cyclical repetition. With its ability to be classic yet revolutionary, the film Fiume by Brady Corbet (3 hours abundant in all) is a candidate for the absolute protagonist of this Venice 2024, of which it represents so far the maximum in terms of formal perfection and the ability to be engaging, as well as authorial and personal in form. Above all, this is a film that puts the experience of cinema in the center as a great event, an emotional show for images, with the ability to be more true of the truth using fiction. If he left the beach without an important recognition, it would be truly a crime.

VOTE: 9