The bona fide event movie - the one you queue for, implore others to go to see, and then pay to watch again - are now the rarest of breeds. In 2023, we had two, Oppenheimer and Barbie. This year, it's The Brutalist with 10 Oscar nominations and who knows how many wins on the night.
An operatic study of the personal and the political, creativity and capitalism, it tells the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to the United States to rebuild his life.
There, László is hired by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and is finally reunited with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) as he pursues the American Dream and work that will stand the test of time.
This film certainly will.
We could be here a lot longer than the 3.5-hour running time waxing lyrical about what writer-director Brady Corbet, his co-writer and partner Mona Fastvold, their cast, and crew have achieved here - on a budget of under $10 million.
Let that sink in.
For your money, what you'll get is a decades-spanning odyssey that frequently wrongfoots you with its intimacy, has plenty of mystery, and which, despite its duration, is pacier than many a film of half the length - and that's with a 15-minute interval in the middle.
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Brody who in 2003 at the age of 29 became the youngest man to win the Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist, arguably does his best work here as László, an enigma with both survivor horror and the wonder of a child in his eyes.
The superlatives don't end there, as the same can also be said of fellow Oscar nominees Jones and Pearce. She arrives in the film halfway through and is brilliant as the embodiment of all that's good in the world, while Pearce, an ominous presence from the get-go, delivers one of the great screen villains as Van Buren. And if you saw Pearce do malevolence in Lawless, you'll know that's saying something.
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With the bravura of Corbet's direction, the power of the performances, and the present-day weight of the plot, The Brutalist will have most viewers all-in for another 60 minutes at the three-hour mark.
The end, however, is closer than you'll expect and is also the film's one disappointment.
It's not how Corbet ties together the elements that's the issue; it's the speed with which he does so. Too abrupt and jarring, the conclusion gives the impression of a filmmaker running out of time, money, or both when the opposite is true. Indeed, Corbet has stressed that he has made the film he wanted to make and there'll be no director's cut version a few years down the line - this is it.
Perhaps you'll think the finale is perfect or perhaps it will be your only 'if only' as the credits roll. The one thing, the most important thing, that won't be up for debate, however, is that this is a landmark in modern film.
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