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 of our 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 actor 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. He’s played Harry Houdini and Arthur Miller, and even played Jewish American journalist and historian Theodore White in the Chinese movie “Back to 1942.” He’s played Jewish industrialist Josh Aaronson in “Succession.” And in his most recent role, in the upcoming “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, directed by British actor turned filmmaker Brody Corbet (“Vox Lux,” “The Childhood of a Leader”) and co-written with his wife Mona Fastvold, follows the fictional story of a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, architect László Tóth, over 30 years. The movie is three and a half hours long (with a timed 15 minute intermission) and I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed this mostly spoiler-free humorous breakdown of this very not-humorous movie (which includes several moments of veiled and overt antisemitism in it, according to this breakdown).
As its title suggests, Tóth’s tale is both brutal towards its protagonist and its viewers, or at least appears to be fairly unsparing in its graphic depictions. It’s also a story that one reviewer has called a Yom Kippur viddui (confession) for America — and the movie itself does include an actual Yom Kippur synagogue service. 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 in Philadelphia, Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola (who recently played Jewish producer Bert Schneider in Apple TV+ “The Big Cigar”). 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 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 first trailer for the A24 film, which came out this Tuesday, does not give away much about the content of the film, but does give away a lot about its 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 constructions sites. There’s a lot of joy and lots of feelings here in this artistically edited trailer, one that promises an emotional ride. “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.
Unlike “The Pianist,” though, this movie doesn’t have a lot of Jewish creatives behind or in front of the cameras aside from Brody. Neither Corbet nor Fastvold are Jewish, and the movie itself does not seem to care strongly about authentic casting, perhaps feeling that putting an actor so known for his Jewish roles, like Brody, is enough. Most of the Jewish women in this film are played by British actresses, a strangely recurring Hollywood theme if we’re to follow many of Helen Mirren’s recent roles and the SNL movie “Saturday Night,” to name but a few examples. Toth’s wife, Erzsébet, who is stranded back in Europe in the beginning of the film, is played by Felicity Jones, who also played Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “The Basis of Sex.” His orphaned cousin, whose war trauma renders her mute, is played by Raffey Cassidy (“Tomorrowland”). The soundtrack of the film, however, does come from a Jewish musician, Daniel Blumberg, a member of the band Yuck, and the score has already gotten glowing reviews and seems to be a central part of the movie, even just from the glimpse of the short trailer.
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 Hungary, in the city of 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 at a press conference.
“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.
With its December 20 theater release still months away, “The Brutalist” has already won multiple awards at the Venice Film Festival, and has gotten a very striking 97% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 66 fairly glowing reviews. It’s clear that this very Jewish movie is establishing itself as one of the biggest films of this year.
