The case for The Brutalist ...Middle East

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Like Lady Liberty on the Hudson River in its opening scene, The Brutalist looms large. The third film from American writer/director Brady Corbet is, in our RT review’s words, an “epic in length, weight and ambition” — and at three hours and 35 minutes, it stands aloft on this year’s ballots, as striking and bold as any of the buildings designed by its architect protagonist.

A win in the Best Picture category on Oscars Sunday would make the film the longest winner since Ben-Hur in 1960 and the fourth longest in history, after William Wyler’s religious epic, Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind.

But bigger isn’t always better – and, in fact, a 206-minute runtime makes the film a harder sell. In a time when our attention spans are purported to have been cut by small screens, The Brutalist being this year’s Oscar frontrunner is a testament to the film’s sweep and gripping narrative momentum. To paraphrase how Guy Pearce’s vain industrialist describes his conversations with Adrien Brody’s László Tóth, it’s simply: “persuasive and intellectually stimulating”.

The story follows a Jewish architect from Budapest (Brody) working for a wealthy client (Pearce) after arriving in Pennsylvania having survived the Holocaust and being separated from his wife (Felicity Jones). If that sounds like it’s all about blueprints, concrete and cranes, fear not. This is a film with broad scope and rich thematic heft, with plenty to say about the tension between art and commerce, plus the myth of the American Dream.

As a result, the film positions itself in the cinematic traditions of Orson Welles, The Godfather trilogy, Fitzcarraldo and There Will Be Blood – but The Brutalist was made for a fraction of the cost. Reports of a mere $10 million budget heralded Corbet’s work as a staggering feat in terms both artistic and economic.

A world premiere at the Venice Film Festival was met with critical acclaim and a Best Director award for Corbet, and Oscar prospects have only grown since. While Emilia Pérez came to the fore and stuttered in scandal, and Anora’s ability to seduce voters with comedy and sex work was questioned, The Brutalist stood tall and became difficult to deny. In Corbet, you have a young director painting on a vast canvas with thrilling confidence, while Brody is on the imperious form that saw him steam to an Oscar win for The Pianist.

Of course, it hasn’t all been plain-sailing. In an interview with film industry publication Red Shark News last month, editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that Brody and Jones’s Hungarian accents had been occasionally augmented by AI software in sound editing, which led to some people questioning the film’s artistic integrity. However, when informed industry folk soon pointed out the prevalence of such tech tweakage in modern film-making, the story seemed like a storm in a teacup.

Quite how much that controversy will hinder The Brutalist at the Oscars remains to be seen, but its chances should be unexpectedly strengthened by Hollywood’s tendency to dole out prizes to life stories of real figures. Just like the Cate Blanchett-led TÁR of 2022, The Brutalist’s textured portraiture builds a lead character so convincingly that many are surprised to learn it’s all fictitious – to the point where our RT team felt the need to write a piece clarifying that the film is indeed not based on a true story.

That is not to say that Brady Corbet’s film is a cynically designed piece of Oscar-bait in the shape of a Marcel Breuer pseudo-biopic, though. Rather, it’s a leisurely paced independent film made with a novelistic sensibility and scenes of sexual abuse and heroin addiction. A lazy comparison could be drawn to last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, purely as a long, mid-century drama about one man’s project against the odds – but make no mistake, Christopher Nolan’s $100-million film was never an underdog. The Brutalist’s form, weight and origins would see it rank as one of the most subversive Best Picture winners of the century so far.

Released the very same week as the 2025 Presidential Inauguration, The Brutalist only grows more pertinent in how it depicts the US to be a long way from the land of opportunity it professes to be. In other words: there’s a reason Lady Liberty is upside down in that opening sequence.

And in the fraught rapport between Tóth and van Buren, Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s script delivers hard truths about how a relationship between artist and patron can be both mutually beneficial and exploitative. To say this in Hollywood, of all places, is brave – and leaves one wondering: if the Oscars are not there to celebrate such films to reckon with, what are they for?

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