Character Studies: László Tóth in The Brutalist

In the months leading up to the release of The Brutalist, I avoided learning anything about the movie. This was not an attempt to guard against spoilers: I simply had no desire to see it. I knew only that Adrien Brody was in it and that it was long. I figured it must be a biopic. Why else would a movie set in the recent past run over three hours? Why else would Brody be in it?

On a flight to Montreal, though, I read Alexandra Schwartz’s profile of its director, Brady Corbet, for The New Yorker. I’d seen Corbet’s first film, The Childhood of a Leader, a brooding portrait of a fascist dictator’s youth that I found a little impenetrable and disappointingly low on Robert Pattinson screen time. At the time of the profile, The Brutalist had just won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. It was considered a likely Best Picture nominee for the Oscars, a prediction that came to fruition two weeks ago. In the profile, Corbet is ambivalent about the attention; his other movies didn’t receive this amount of praise before being released. When describing his process, he takes a shot at the types of movies that tend to win awards: “You really have to dare to suck to transcend.” Now, with all the attention on The Brutalist, he seems nervous he’s created a reductive, accessible film—a film that doesn’t dare to transcend, that sucks because it is too scared to suck.