The Brutalist reminds us that where there’s hype, there’s sometimes fire. by Dom Sinacola Having only premiered in New York, LA, and at a bevy of fashionable festivals, The Brutalist enters most US cinemas this week with plenty of accolades at the wings. These include the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique Award for Best Film and the Silver Lion for director Brady Corbet at the Venice International Film Festival, a portfolio of major critics’ associations wins and nominations, and, as of this past Sunday, three Golden Globe awards. The hype is solid—foundational, even. While it’s important to remember that award shows like the Golden Globes are little more than open markets on industry recognition (where the studios with the most payola see the most hardware), that recognition is still a promise. For what exactly? Oscars? A surprising box office turn-out for a three-and-a-half-hour historical epic meant to be experienced on 70 mm screens, towering and stentorian? The triumph of award-season bait transcending its own nature? Does any of this mean anything to you? Where there’s hype there’s sometimes fire. I've only seen it once, but for me The Brutalist still looms. I catch myself thinking about it often, wandering through it in my head, lost in its infrastructure and dwelling on the purely cinematic ecstasy of its form and length, on its volume and breadth, over and over. Made in VistaVision—a process that can blow up 35 mm film to a 70 mm theater experience by running the stock through the camera sideways—Corbet’s film thrives in a format as wide as its historic sweep. “I’ve had dreams about seeing it again,” I wrote a few weeks ago.  Big and imposing facades in "The Brutalist." Lol Crawley If that sounds hyperbolic to you, I think so too; I am part of the problem. Sometimes I’m embarrassed I wrote that. I’ve taken this time to check myself, talk myself down, and acknowledge that I am guilty of joining those who’ve already seen The Brutalist in making way too big of a deal about this movie—even though its size is much of its appeal. In their past two films together—The Childhood of a Leader, from 2015, and 2017’s Vox Lux—Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crowley have attempted to paint hyper-specific portraits on big and imposing facades of historic record. While Childhood is only a small glimpse of a life, about the young son (Tom Sweet) of an American diplomat (Liam Cunningham) whose tantrums during his father’s negotiating of the Treaty of Versailles foreshadow a grim future, Vox Lux narrates (by Willem Dafoe) the rise, self-destruction, and re-rise of a pop star (Raffey Cassidy, later Natalie Portman) who first vaults to fame after surviving a school shooting.  Both those films must contend with the risk that they are taking on more weight than they can carry—of the past, of tradition, of the unimaginable suffering of countless people, of production costs surmounting available independent film funding. But instead, through the brashness that only epic-minded filmmaking can afford, Corbet taps into the elemental currents that carry his subjects forward, pulling the audience in his wake.  With The Brutalist, Corbet and Crowley develop a momentum that sustains itself across more than 215 minutes in your life and 30 years in the film, beginning in 1947 and reaching through an epilogue set in 1980. Written by Corbet with his partner Mona Fastvold, the film follows chain-smoking Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who flees the Holocaust for New York and then Pennsylvania, where he falls under the patronage of industrialist mama’s boy Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce).  Left to right: Joe Alwyn, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Raffey Cassidy Lol Crawley László is given full artistic control (at least, so he thinks) over completing Harrison’s vision: a new community center and chapel, dedicated to his dearly departed Christian mother and built upon a hill overlooking the quaint Doylestown. With this license, László designs a bright-white, beatific block of modernity, as much a culmination of his life’s work as a kind of Christ the Redeemer for the little Pennsylvanian community. In turn, Harrison wields his empire’s excessive resources to reunite László with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who were separated by the camps and mired in bureaucracy while attempting to leave Europe. Though this is mostly László’s film, The Brutalist begins on the face of Zsófia as she’s harangued by Hungarian border guards. “What is your true home?” they demand. Zsófia responds mutely, silence the space she occupies through most of the film. And then we’re plunged into darkness.  This inky-black realm, creaking with the first pieces of Daniel Blumberg’s rapturous and ramshackle score, turns out to be the bowels of the ship bringing László to Ellis Island. Crowley’s camera follows László in one handheld take through throngs of passengers to the deck, where the sky opens up to a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, upside down, pointing like an ancient stalactite at the bottom of the screen. The blasting brass of this riff becomes the bleating refrain for this immigrant’s life. Like a reveille emptying from the darkness of the ship, the scene—with the contours of Adrien Brody’s face gaining in definition the more he scrambles toward the light, music accumulating like floating particles around him—is remarkably visceral. Though the actor will quietly disappear into Laszlo’s increasingly saggy skin, in the moment it’s like he’s just born.  And this is only five or so minutes into The Brutalist. Something like 210 minutes will follow. But despite the runtime—halved by a 15-minute intermission featuring a convenient countdown clock—the film feels compelled by grander forces. Even the opening credits move across the screen from left to right, whole lives passing us by, as we barrel down a rural highway towards Philadelphia, where László will briefly live with his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) and eventually come under the auspices, however indirectly, of the Van Buren family.  “Where is your true home?” As Laszlo’s life, and the film, tumble heedlessly forward, splayed across the, to quote myself, “swollest screens in town,” that question gains mythic proportions.  At least that’s what I remember.  The Brutalist opens at Cinema 21 and at the Hollywood Theatre, the later of which is screening a 70 mm print, Thurs Jan 9