Producers: Trevor Matthews, Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren and D.J. Guggenheim   Director: Brady Corbet   Screenplay: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold   Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Ariane Labed, Michael Epp, Jonathan Hyde, Peter Polycarpou, Maria Sand and Salvatore Sansone   Distributor: A24

Grade: A-

Actor Brady Corbet’s third film as a director can be accused of self-indulgence on the basis of running-time alone: “The Brutalist” is two hundred minutes long, not counting the fifteen-minute countdown intermission.  But the length is justified by its ambition, which, though arguably excessive, is also definitely impressive.

Essentially the film recounts the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who arrives at Ellis Island after surviving Buchenwald and a harrowing journey.  (The character is inspired in part by Marcel Breuer, but shares his name with the mentally disturbed man who attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972—a well as the assumed moniker comedian Don Novello gave to the crazed author of “The Lazlo Letters” in 1977—a fact that Corbet might intend to indicate something about him.)

The skewered view of the Statue of Liberty, artfully contrived by Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley, which greets him is a foreshadowing of the episodes to follow; they conjoin Tóth’s artistic obsessions with sharp observations on the painful immigrant experience, ingrained capitalist exploitation, stultifying American classism, and vicious anti-Semitism—big issues all, and rather unwieldy when packaged together, with addenda to boot.  Yet Corbet and his cohorts make the package compelling from beginning to end, in addition to being perpetually relevant.

In immigrating Tóth has had to leave behind his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a journalist who was sent to Dachau and is now trapped in a displaced persons camp under Soviet control.  She is able to inform him, however, that she’s safe with his orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).  She does not mention that she’s confined to a wheelchair after her internment, and Zsófia mute as a result of hers; and arranging their coming to America is riddled with hurdles.

László, whose background as a Bauhaus student and noted Hungarian architect means nothing in the New World, is taken in by his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who’d converted to Catholicism in marrying shiksa Audrey (Emma Laird).  They run a small furniture firm in Philadelphia, and employ him as a designer, even giving him a room in their apartment.  Attila is also instrumental in securing him a job redesigning a library in the Van Buren mansion outside the city in nearby Doylestown, a commission arranged as a surprise gift for their father by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) and his sister Maggie (Stacy Martin), the children of commanding Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to be completed while their father is away with his ill mother.

But things far apart for László.  Attila throws him out after Audrey falsely accuses him of accosting her.  And though he and Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), the single father he met at a shelter, begin work on the Van Buren commission, when Harrison returns to find his home in disarray he’s furious, tosses them out and refuses to pay for the work, noting in particular the destruction of a ceiling dome.  László and Gordon are reduced to doing crushing manual labor; they mitigate their pain with heroin.

Another change of fortune occurs after several years, though, when Harrison, an aesthete of sorts, seeks out László after the library in his mansion has been acclaimed by experts as a minimalist masterpiece and its creator as a genius.  Paying him his due, Harrison introduces him to his social circle as a sort of prized possession and offers him a larger commission, to design and build a grand community center on a peak near Doylestown.  As an additional incentive, he has his lawyer (Peter Polycarpou) use his influence to arrange the release of László’s wife and niece for admission to the United States.  They arrive in 1953, and László is shocked by their infirmities.  

But Harrison’s patronage is charged with the arrogance fed by wealth, privilege, and the superiority of class and race, and he seeks to impose his own views, and concerns about cost, on László’s monumental vision.  The situation is further enflamed by Harry Lee’s bitter, bigoted hostility and his unwanted attentions toward Zsófia.  The project is ultimately suspended in one of Harrison’s sudden rages and László reduced to taking a menial office job with a New York architectural firm.  Zsófia, who has been living with the Tóths, weds a Zionist, and they move to Israel.

Some years later, Harrison contacts László with an offer to resume work on the building.  Despite misgivings he agrees and throws himself back into construction.  But when the two men travel to Carrara, Italy, to choose a block of marble for the center, they get drunk with László’s friend Orazio (Salvatore Sansone), and when László is defenseless Harrison assaults him in a show of dominance and contempt.  Yet László’s commitment to the project continues, despite his emotional unravelling.  So devoted is he to completing it as he wishes that he’ll not allow Harrison’s intrusions, changes proposed by the project managers and the quibbles of the local community to deter him; he even places his own salary on the line as a guarantee.  The intense stress leads to a meltdown in his relationship with Gordon and friction with Erzsébet, whom he unwisely tries to cure with the opioids he continues to take. 

When Erzsébet learns of Harrison’s abuse of her husband, an act of dark defilement committed against the pristine white of Carrara’s marble fields, she confronts the mogul in front of his family, even abandoning her chair to do so standing up.  While Harry reacts with fury, his father abruptly disappears into the monumental center László has built despite all the obstacles arrayed against him.

In an epilogue set at the first architecture section of the Venice Biennale in 1980, Zsófia offers a speech about her uncle, now an infirm man himself wheelchair-bound.  In it she explains why he was so intent on building the Brutalist-style community center for which he is being honored according to his very specific vision.  The secret lies in his own past.

This scenario, though intimate in terms of its characters, is a wide-ranging tapestry of issues that were critical in the American history of the second half of the twentieth century, and are still so today.  There is, to be sure, as much an intellectualized structuring to the screenplay as there is to Tóth’s building, but Corbet and Fastvold succeed in adding intense personal emotion to their plot’s scaffolding, and the cast embody it brilliantly.

It’s most notable in Brody’s overpowering turn as the obsessed architect, capturing his despair, hope and maniacal fixation in equal measure.  But he’s matched by Pearce, whose mixture of suave elitism and malignant egotism makes Van Buren a truly horrifying portrait of American hubris.  Jones is no less compelling as the defiant Erzsébet, stronger than her husband in spite of her osteoporosis, and Alwyn is the very personification of bigoted swagger.  Though none of the others have a similar opportunity to shine, all contribute to Corbet’s carefully plotted scenario under his tautly nuanced direction.

Technically the film is a visual marvel, with Judy Becker’s production design and Kate Forbes’s costumes evoking time and place superbly within the confines of a tightly managed budget.  Crawley, shooting in the near-obsolete VistaVision process, fashions outdoor tableaux of shimmering beauty and interiors that are rich and opulent.  And while David Jancso’s editing, in line with Corbet’s demands, hardly hurries things along, it deserves to be called lapidary in terms of its elegance and precision.  But the film is no less remarkable for its appeal to the ear: the sound design by Steve Single and Andy Neil is no less impressive, and Daniel Blumberg’s score, which draws one into the story with its insistently intoxicating strains.

“The Brutalist” is, of course, the second American epic about an architect to emerge this year, a young man’s expansive vision as compared to an equally ambitious one from a master veteran filmmaker.  But while Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” was an extravagant mess of half-baked ideas, Corbet’s film is a coherent statement of its themes—perhaps a bit too tidily constructed, in fact.  But a comparison to the alternative makes any design flaws pale into insignificance.                      

Producers: Natalie Portman, Sophie Mas, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Grant S. Johnson, Tyler W. Konney, Jessica Elbaum, Will Ferrell   Director: Todd Haynes   Screenplay: Samy Burch   Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffet, Lawrence Arancio, Joan Reilly and Charles Green  Distributor: Netflix

Grade: A-

The contemporary obsession with true crime podcasts and dramatizations is satirically skewered by Todd Fields in “May December.”  The script by Samy Burch is inspired by the case of Mary Kay Latourneau, the thirty-five year old Washington State teacher who pleaded guilty to the rape of a child for her sexual relationship with a twelve-year old student in her sixth-grade class. (She had two children with him and they married after her release from prison.)  The case became a national sensation in the late nineties.

But “May December” isn’t actually about Latourneau and her “victim” Vili Fualaau.  Instead it uses their relationship, and the publicity furor it caused, as a model to explore the inner realities of such cases and the fascination they carry.  When the film begins, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) are living as an ostensibly happy couple in Savannah, Georgia more than twenty years after the affair that drew public attention and condemnation.  (Here it commenced not at school, but in the storage room of a pet shop where both worked.)  Their oldest daughter Honor (Piper Curda) is already off at college, and her younger siblings Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung) are about to graduate from high school.

Into their lives comes Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a popular TV actress preparing to star in an “independent film” about their story.  She’s arranged to spend some time with the family to prepare for playing Gracie in a supposedly honest but empathetic way.  Gracie and Joe welcome her, and she’ll talk with them and their children, as well as others in their circle, like Gracie’s first husband Tom Atherton (D.W. Moffett); Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), her son by that first marriage; Gracie’s lawyer Morris Sperber (Lawrence Arancio); Sperber’s wife Lydia (Joan Reilly); and even Mr. Henderson (Charles Green), the proprietor of the now-infamous pet shop.

Haynes and Burch, a casting director turned feature screenwriter, don’t opt for an obvious comic tone in depicting the effect of the star’s visit on the family.  Instead they contrive a troubling, somber study, but one shot through with dark, edgy humor that sneaks up on you.  The result is funny, unsettling and poignant by turns, but still feeling all of a piece rather than a disjointed composite. Thus when Elizabeth arrives, it’s in the middle of a cookout Gracie and Joe are hosting.  It seems festive, but a box is delivered that tells of the continuing harassment of the couple, and though there are quite a few guests, Sperber will later acknowledge that their supporters in town are relatively few, and they remain, generally speaking, pariahs. 

And while Gracie and Joe put on a happy public front, their relationship is beset with difficulties.  She’s a domineering sort whose attention to detail reveals her controlling streak, and whose fragility beneath the surface is demonstrated when an order for one of the elegant cakes she bakes and sells is abruptly cancelled.  Joe, by contrast, is subdued and considerate; supporting the family as an x-ray technician, he has a hobby raising Monarch butterflies, an endangered species, and releasing them when they’re grown.  The implication is obvious.

As for Elizabeth, she exudes empathy for Gracie and Joe, but it’s her ambition to use the bio-project to win recognition as a serious actress that’s clearly paramount.  Her willingness to push boundaries is often unsettling—when she visits the pet store, she presses the uneasy owner to leave her alone in the storage room where Gracie and Joe made love (and imagines their passion), and when she addresses Mary’s drama class, she responds to a question about doing sex scenes with unbecoming openness.  But her determination to “get inside” the Gracie-Joe relationship becomes abundantly clear only when she finds herself alone with him in her hotel room.  Of course, the scene is revealing about Joe’s attitude as well. 

Gracie, of course, is not fooled, and the gamesmanship between the two women is riveting, particularly as played by actors of the quality of Moore and Portman.   The former’s reactions to the latter’s effusive exhibitions of interest in her are priceless, as are the latter’s suppressed disinterest in biographical details that won’t be part of her performance playbook; Haynes and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt outdo themselves in a couple of scenes—one in a restaurant, one in a shop where Mary in trying on graduation gowns—in which they employ mirrors to draw a knife-edge divide between the two.  And though Elizabeth might believe that she’s found a slam dunk in Georgie, a wild-eyed singer in a local band who offers to tell all, for a price, it turns out in the end that his belief that Gracie ruined his life is shakier than it seems.

But while Portman and Moore undoubtedly dominate the film, Melton’s turn as a man hobbled by undefinable longings and insecurity is no less impressive.  His quiet, diffident manner suggests that the child he was when he and Gracie first met is still there in his thirty-six year old body, and a rooftop conversation with Charlie reinforces the idea.  The supporting cast excels as well, all contributing to a situation that comes across as pervasively uncomfortable for everyone.                      

As is usual in Haynes’s films, “May December” is carefully wrought in technical terms, with Sam Lisenco’s production design and April Napier’s costumes unobtrusively right, as is Affonso Gonçalves’ smooth, unhurried editing.  By adapting Michel Legrand’s music for Joseph Losey’s “The Go-Between,” Marcelo Zarvos’ score emphasizes the roots of the film in the classical melodramas to which the writer-director paid homage in his remarkable “Far From Heaven” back in 2002.  If the new film doesn’t quite match that earlier one, it comes very close.