Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist was the talk of the Lido on Sunday as the seven-years-in-the-making period epic finally received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival‘s historic Sala Grande cinema.
The audience inside the premiere erupted in applause as the credits began to roll on the film’s epic three-hour, 35-minute running time, giving Corbet and his cast a rousing, festival-best 13-minute standing ovation. Stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones looked teary at times by the effusive reaction to the movie.
The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a rave review, with chief critic David Rooney describing The Brutalist as “a monumental symphony of the immigrant experience” with a “devastating” performance by Brody as Tóth.
The Brutalist has all the thematic heft and intellectual rigor befitting its subject: The historical trauma and artistic vision that gave rise to the great works of mid-century American Brutalist architecture. But Colbert also gives his audience a break amid the film’s alternatively elegant and propulsive story. Mid-way through the lengthy runtime, there is a 10-minute intermission, allowing cinemagoers a bathroom break or a pause to reflect on the work’s evolving handling of its themes.
The Brutalist chronicles the journey of Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who emigrates to the United States in 1947 to experience the “American dream.” Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract with a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), that will change the course of the next 30 years of his life. Felicity Jones co-stars as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet, while Joe Alwyn plays the rich industrial’s mercurial son. Corbet and his wife, Norwegian filmmaker and actress Mona Fastvold, co-wrote the film.
“The Brutalist is closer to the churning ideas and dark view of power in the director’s debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader than his more polarizing disquisition on contemporary celebrity, Vox Lux,” THR‘s Rooney writes. “But it represents a vast leap in scope from both, contemplating such meaty themes as creativity and compromise, Jewish identity, architectural integrity, the immigrant experience, the arrogant insularity of privilege and the long reach of the past.”
Corbet and The Brutalist cast kept it classy and traditional on the red carpet, with the director donning a black tux, alongside Fastvold in a floor-length off-the-shoulder ensemble. Ivorian movie legend Isaach de Bankolé, who plays Tóth’s friend Gordon, spiced things up with a sharp black jacket bearing a large Angela Davis patch over sleek white slacks and two-toned sneakers. Raffey Cassidy, who plays Tóth’s niece Zsófia, got almost gothy with a tiered black shirt and transparent headscarf framing her face. Brody, who greeted fans along the barricade as they chanted “Adrien! Adrien!, arrived with girlfriend Georgina Chapman. The fashion designer was spotted filming her beau on his big afternoon, which extended into early evening by the time the screening had wrapped.
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist
Courtesy of Venice Film Festival
Several film world figures were spotted in the crowd taking in the premiere, including actresses like Oscar winner Julianne Moore (with manager Evelyn O’Neill in tow) and Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), as well as French filmmaker and artist JR (Faces Places).
An auteurist work to the core and a triumph of directorial determination, The Brutalist took more than seven years to make — with various false starts and financing challenges — and it was shot on 70mm film stock in the mid-century VistaVision format. The beautiful retro format reportedly required the filmmakers to transport 26 reels of film, weighing some 300 pounds, to Italy for the film’s world premiere.
At the press conference for the film early in the day, Corbet got emotional discussing his struggles to bring his vision to the screen.
“This was an incredibly difficult film to make,” he said. “I’m very emotional today because we’ve been working on it for seven years, and it felt urgent every day for the better part of a decade.”
Brookstreet Pictures’ Trevor Matthews and Nick Gordon produced with Brian Young, Kaplan Morrison’s Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren Prods.’ Andrew Lauren and D.J. Gugenheim.
The showing marked a major return for Corbet to his regular stomping grounds in Venice. The actor-turned-auteur delivered his first film here, The Childhood of a Leader, and it went on to win best debut film. He returned with the Natalie Portman and Jude Law-starrer Vox Lux. He also directed episodes of the Tom Holland-starrer The Crowded Room for Apple TV+.
Corbet thanked the Venice Film Festival for “supporting my films when no one else was,” saying Venice “really made my films possible.”
