Brady Corbet’s third (and best) film, a period drama about a Jewish architect who emigrates to the U.S. after World War II, aims high, wishing to be an epic in every sense of the term–and almost suceeds.
Adrien Brody, his finest work since The Pianist 22 years ago, plays Laszlo Toth, a fictional Hungarian architect who arrives in America in the 1940s at the bottom rung of the social and professional ladder and gets dirt in his nails clawing his way to success while his personal life disintegrates.
The architect desires a safe and prosperous life for his family far away from the horrors of the Holocaust, his passion for realizing bold, modern structures tends to win out, but he is plagued with all sorts of demons (booze, drugs, sex), and ultimately emerges as far from a morally heroic figure.
Corbet, only 36, aspires to make the kind of sprawling and sophisticated movie he grew up watching but hardly exists anymore.
Many of the visuals Corbet achieves with cinematographer Lol Crawley–a trumpeted arrival at Ellis Island, a light-drenched library, a mausoleum-like Italian marble quarry–are sumptuous.
His circumstances improve after he stunningly remodels a mansion’s book room for the son (Joe Alwyn) of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an Andrew Carnegie-esque millionaire. Laszlo’s project winds up in a magazine and he becomes the talk of the town.
Image-conscious Harrison then hires the Hungarian to build an expensive showstopper monument– in his novel brutalism style–to his late mother, and a community center.
The first half of Corbet’s film is precisely detailed.
Then, during Part Two, the movie shifts focus to more intimate and sordid character troubles. Laszlo’s wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) arrives, shell-shocked and wheelchair-bound, with her mute niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to discover their marriage has lost its spark.
Back on the building site, the architect’s personal-professional relationship with Harrison turns thorny and ventures in a shocking direction. Corbet’s climax of exposed secrets and ruined lives inside has shades of “The Great Gatsby.”
The last hour and 45 minutes flirt with soap opera and are less preferable than the first chapter.
It’s the bold tonal change-the sharp turn away from the typical rags-to-riches immigration tale–that differentiates the movie and holds our interest for most (if not all) of its excessive running time.
