Director: Brady Corbet
Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola
Running Time: 201 minutes
Synopsis: After the end of World War Two, renowned Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth (Adrian Brody) immigrates to the United States, leaving behind his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia. A nobody in his new country, Laszlo settles in Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) owns a furniture store. A period of struggle ensues, including a falling out with Attila, addiction to opium, and homelessness. Local tycoon Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) learns of Laszlo's pre-war achievements and retains him to design a monumental cultural centre in memory of Harrison's mother. But many difficulties await on the journey from vision to reality.
What Works Well: This is grandiose storytelling with magnanimous cinematography, patient scene-building, and evocative music. Through the travails of one man, director and co-writer Brady Corbet explores the scope and scale of the post-war immigrant experience, here with a focus on a fractured Jewish family. Adrien Brody exudes an exhausted combination of resignation and frustration, Laszlo Toth's prior professional record and the horrors of his wartime experiences counting for nothing in the new world. He is reduced to shoveling dirt and sleeping in a shelter while subjected to the dichotomy of discrimination and wary acceptance. The winding pathway back to self-respect and achievement passes through Van Buren as a complex counterpoint and establishment representative, a wealthy but short-fused and deeply flawed power broker with the potential to both make and break the newcomer.
What Does Not Work As Well: Despite the mammoth length, several key narrative milestones are skipped, leaving behind a sometimes frustrating fill-in-the-blanks structure. The script appears to intentionally zoom in on distractions (the sexual frustrations between the Toths, once reunited; endless admiration of an Italian marble quarry), while dangling then abandoning foundational plot threads (Harrison's grown children are prominent until they are not; Toth's architectural achievements are an exercise in talk a lot but show little).
Key Quote:
Laszlo: Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?
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