Adrien Brody made his name heard with his steller and dedicated performance in Roman Polanski’s 2002 war drama The Pianist but what the actor has done with his latest movie The Brutalist made critics realize that he is one of the greatest actors working in the industry who can pull off complex roles with astonishing credibility added to it.
Adrien Brody’s The Brutalist Gets 12-Minute Standing Ovation
At its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, The Brutalist gets a stunning 12-minute standing ovation while the spotlight shines on its lead star Adrien Brody who plays “a Hungarian Holocaust survivor struggling to revive his career as an architect in the U.S.”
While the movie is seemingly longer than the contemporary and popular studio-friendly duration, the three-and-a-half hour appears to not have any negative implications in regards to the length of the movie. The Brutalist director Brady Corbet who has Vox Lux to his credit rightfully defended the length, “Because this film does everything we are told that we are not allowed to do,” Corbet said (via The Guardian). “I think it’s quite silly to have a conversation about runtime because that’s like criticizing a book that has 700 pages instead of 100 pages. I’ve read great novellas and I’ve read longer masterpieces,” he added.
“Maybe the next film I make will be 45 minutes, and I should be allowed to do that; everyone should. The idea that we should fit into a box is silly. We should be past that, it’s 2024. As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree with him, so we should help it out.”
But to its merit, the movie was the result of sweat and tears, “This was an incredibly difficult film to make,” the director said at the festival. “I’m very emotional today because I’ve been working on it for seven years, and it felt urgent every day for the better part of a decade.”
What Critics Are Saying About The Brutalist?
The Brutalist follows Adrien Brody’s Hungarian architect László Tóth who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the US. However, the landscape of the States will taste his patience as he is in pursuit of the American Dream. So far, the reviews that came fresh out of the Venice Film Festival lifted the movie to a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 18 reviews.
Liam Hess from Vogue says that the movie “may bite off a little more than it can chew, but what a pleasure it is to see a filmmaker swing for the fences and — for the vast majority of the film’s running time — hit home run after home run.”
With a cheerful five out of five rating, Kevin Maher from Times (UK) hails the performances and the utmost aesthetics of of the movie altogether. “The performances are savagely good, with Pearce and Brody both on awards season form,” Maher wrote. “And it’s shot on rarely seen 70mm film stock, which means that it looks like something beautiful, haunting and strange, but always from the long-forgotten past,” he added.
Daily Telegraph (UK) critic Robbie Collin has graced the movie with the same rating, “As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama.”
Brody has “seldom been better, bringing tremendous gravitas but also a pain that gnaws at László’s prideful sense of self, one of purpose and destiny,” The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney wrote about the movie adding, “It’s a towering performance; seeing the architect treated like garbage is crushing.”
While all other reviews are fairly positive Screen International’s Jonathan Romney was seemingly not impressed by the movie. He said, “Longueurs and narrative inertia make it not quite the resounding statement it aspires to be. Despite a formidable cast headed by Adrien Brody and a mightily impressive Guy Pearce, this is likely to attract few pilgrims, even among the arthouse hardcore.”
The Brutalist also stars Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde, Isaach De Bankolé, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird and Peter Polycarpou.
The theatrical release date of The Brutalist is yet to be confirmed.
