Directed by Brady Corbet | Written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold | 214 min | ▲▲▲1/2

Brady Corbet’s work as an actor is familiar to me, it goes back a way, but as a writer-director the only picture of his I’ve watched was the Natalie Portman pop-star drama Vox Lux. This couldn’t be more different.

The Brutalist is a post-Holocaust, immigrant tale with an impressive scope and running time — three hours and 34 minutes (including a 15-minute intermission). It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that you don’t feel that length too badly. We get an occasional longueur, a scene or bit of dialogue that’s allowed to extend and breathe, but for a film this length it’s well paced. The Brutalist is told in two significantly different chapters, capped by an epilogue, so I’ll consider them one by one.

Part One is called “The Enigma of Arrival,” covering the years 1948 to ’52. László Tóth (Adrien Brody, solid) is a Hungarian Jewish refugee who arrives in the United States through Ellis Island. He gets on a bus to Philadelphia to go stay with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who’s running a furniture business. Attila is hiding his Jewishness and has changed his name, even marrying a shiksa, a gentile woman. László befriends a man, Gordon (the always reliable Isaach De Bankolé), and his son in a bread line, and crosses paths with a wealthy Protestant, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce). Van Buren discovers László’s past as a modernist architect in Europe and, impressed, commissions him to design and build a community centre and chapel on his property in the memory of his mother.

All this while László struggles to bring his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and orphaned niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe. We hear Erzsébet’s voice in letters in this first chapter, but we don’t see her — this segment, two or so hours, is very much a sausage party.

There’s a lot to like here. Corbet shot on VistaVision film, giving The Brutalist a welcome old-school grain and texture. This is an American indie historical drama — Corbet and DP Lol Crawley, are overly fond of that typical indie signifier, the hand-held camera, but also manage a lot of gorgeous landscapes and interiors — fantastic establishing shots of Manhattan bring us there with undeniable echoes of Ayn Rand. Fans of stylish wool coats will also find a lot to enjoy from the work of Costume Designer Kate Forbes, and the score by Daniel Blumberg delivers the right sense of occasion, including a passel of well-chosen but not necessarily well-known jazz-pop standards from the era.

Brody and Nivola make an appealing double-act for a good portion of this first chapter,  their affection more like brothers than cousins, though Nivola’s character sadly vanishes from the story never to return. You wonder if those scenes were shot, but cut. Brody brings an emotional truth with his character — he self-medicates with a host of drugs, suggesting the trauma of war is never far from his mind.

That’s what The Brutalist nails: The lasting impact of that conflict in the people who escaped with their lives. It’s also about the antisemitism arrayed against the Jews when they came to America — László bridles under the bigotry and outright racism of the community who he’s contributing to, as well as the casual contempt of his erstwhile patron, Van Buren. Pearce delivers just the right level of WASPy entitlement in his role.

This first chapter is the best part of the film, though it doesn’t escape some cliche in the writing. For instance, a scene where it revealed László might be a full-on addict is set at a Black jazz club, drawing a line between the music, culture, and the drugs, which is more than a little tiresome.

Chapter Two is entitled “The Hard Core of Beauty,” and covers a period between 1952 and 1966. It begins with the arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia, who are welcome characters to diversify this passion play, though as we progress the melodrama ratchets up to a nearly operatic tenor. Character notes are explained in voice-over rather than in scene, and people behave in a way that’s entirely unseeded. We’re treated to jaw-dropping moments of real cinematic beauty, like a scene where László and Van Buren are given a tour of a marble quarry in Italy, but that’s followed up with an argument in a car between László and Erzsébet that feels like it’s slipped right from daytime soap central. And why a key nugget of information is conveyed between them offscreen makes little sense given the scene it precipitates, the narrative shifting from something inspired by Once Upon A Time In America to Megalopolis.

Corbet doesn’t quite have a full grasp on the tone of his film through its sprawling running time, and the epilogue, set in Venice years later, makes explicit themes that were already plenty clear for any audience member paying attention, with added dodgy senior-citizen make-up.

Despite these missteps, the film’s broad foundation and effort to express something universal about what drives people to pursue a future in places where they don’t feel welcome offers something special. The Brutalist leaves an undeniable mark on the cinematic landscape and it’s easy to understand why it’s getting awards recognition.