Adrien Brody plays a tormented architect creating his masterwork in The Brutalist.Credit:AP
The pitch meetings must have been dramas in themselves. In an industry that ranks familiarity as its favourite selling point how do you peddle a script so original that it defies comparison? According to Corbet,it wasn’t easy. At one stage,the knockbacks he faced had him believing that he didn’t have a hope. Nonetheless,he persevered.
The script – by Brady and his wife and regular collaborator,Mona Fastvold – does contain certain borrowings from reality,but you probably need to be an enthusiastic architecture buff to make the connections.
Its main character,Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody),was partly inspired by the modernist architects,Mies van der Rohe,Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer. As well as having the same first name as Moholy-Nagy,Toth is a Hungarian Jew like Breuer,with whom he shares a talent for furniture design,and his buildings,like van der Rohe’s,are bare of ornamentation used for its own sake.
But,unlike the Bauhaus architects,he’s a Holocaust survivor who arrives in the US in 1947,not knowing if his wife and orphaned niece are alive or not.
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist.
For a while,he works with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola),in his furniture business. Then a chance encounter with Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce),a Philadelphia business tycoon,gives him the opportunity to resume his career as an architect.
As well as arranging for his wife,Erzsebet (Felicity Jones),and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to join him,Van Buren commissions Toth to build an elaborate community centre on his estate. So begins a power game that will take years to resolve and eventually turn the pair into the bitterest of enemies.