Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the course of long-running TV comedy Family Guy, cartoon patriarch Peter Griffin once revealed a terrible secret. Seemingly drowning, he finally confessed: \u201cI did not care for The Godfather.\u201d As the waters rose, his voice took on the weary huff of the disappointed critic. \u201cIt insists upon itself.\u201dI don\u2019t know if Peter has seen The Brutalist, but I can\u2019t improve on that as a verdict on director Brady Corbet\u2019s slab of an Oscar nominee. It is a movie of towering scale, gravity and technical accomplishment. It is also very keen you know this.The heart of the film is architect L\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th, a Hungarian-Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 played with photorealistic brilliance by Adrien Brody. We first see him leaving Europe after the second world war, haunted but euphoric. He arrives in America onboard a listing ship. The Statue of Liberty looms upside down. Symbolism doesn\u2019t scare this movie.\u00a0So begins a story of new lives bound to the past. T\u00f3th\u2019s beloved wife Erzs\u00e9bet is still stranded in Budapest. His accent too, unlike that of cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has also converted to Catholicism and owns a Philadelphia furniture business for which T\u00f3th knocks up mid-century modern dining chairs.To address a rumour you may have heard: yes, The Brutalist is three hours 35 minutes, interval included. The running time says a lot about the movie, but is gracefully handled, at least at first. Spanning decades, the conjuring of time and place casts a real spell. The film looks good, and sometimes magnificent. (Corbet shot in VistaVision, a 1950s film stock he has been keen to discuss. Less so his use of AI, which has now brought controversy.)Scenes breathe, but feel precise. Nothing drags. A crucial junction comes with a job closer to actual architecture. We see now how gifted T\u00f3th is. We also meet the man on whom he will rely to express that gift: industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).If immigration has shaped the story, other themes enter, not least the vexed relationship of artist and patron. Van Buren adopts T\u00f3th as a trophy on learning of his fame in prewar Europe. But the architect has his own agenda, and does not lack bristle. In a small but striking aside, he speaks of the Holocaust not as Jewish tragedy but \u201chumiliation\u201d. Amid the general immensity, T\u00f3th has nuance.The interval arrives not long after. Leave now, and you might still make dinner. In the second, lesser half of the film, Erzs\u00e9bet (Felicity Jones) belatedly joins her husband. After such anticipation, Corbet now isn\u2019t sure what to do with her. While the first act had mis-steps too, the heady moments overrode them. But now the magic fails as the story sputters ahead of a large, dark plot point that, in common with the whole movie, I\u2019ve liked less the more I\u2019ve thought about it.\u00a0Lustre tarnishes. Corbet wants you to admire his take of Ayn Rand, but not notice his borrowings from Paul Thomas Anderson. The flaws feel doubly glaring in a story about perfectionism \u2014 or, rather, its own perfection.\u00a0For architecture, read moviemaking, with parallels more obvious through each funding crisis and creative masterstroke. By the end, you realise your own role is simply to applaud, cheer for an Oscar, and absolutely not ask if the tale The Brutalist tells really merits involving the Holocaust and other horrors. We are merely here to salute the film\u2019s ambition, whatever that might be.\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606In UK cinemas from January 24 and in US cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the course of long-running TV comedy Family Guy, cartoon patriarch Peter Griffin once revealed a terrible secret. Seemingly drowning, he finally confessed: \u201cI did not care<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":177505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-177504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177506,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177504\/revisions\/177506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}