THE BRUTALIST ****

 The cinematic equivalent of those great door-stopper novels certain authors feel obliged to write from time to time, Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist" has a great deal to recommend it even if it does fall short of greatness, (a dip into melodrama slightly takes the edge off things near the end), and for a movie that runs for 3 hours and 35 minutes, (with a self-imposed 15 minute intermission), it fairly gallops along. Of course, it also leaves itself open to accusations of pretentiousness; this is a big movie with big ambitions, shot in 70 mm and in VistaVision.

It is the story of Laszlo Toth, (Adrien Brody in a career best performance), a Jewish Hungarian architect and a Holocaust survivor who, when the film opens, finds himself in America where he encounters the excessively rich Harrison Lee Van Buren, (Guy Pearce in another career best performance), who commissions him to design a building in memory of Van Buren's mother and basically that's it but if you think this might be just a long, boring film about buildings, think again. There is a depth and a depth of feeling to Corbet's film, (which he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold). rare in what we might describe as commercial cinema.

Toth has his demons and he carries them with him wherever he goes. He's an alcoholic and a drug-addict with a fierce temper and as it turns out those demons also make themselves manifest in the people around him and in particular in the man who might have been his savior. Pearce's Van Burren is a monster and it is his treatment of Toth that ultimately draws the film into the realms of melodrama. His wife, (Felicity Jones, very good), whom he left  behind in Europe, when she does finally arrive, (after the intermission), turns out to be a lot tougher than she looks and maybe not quite as simpatico to Toth as he would have hoped. In other words, life seems to have dealt him a bad deal.

For the most part Corbet treats all of this with the straightest of faces and a considerable amount of technical skill. This is an epic of the old-fashioned kind; long, sprawling and perhaps biting off more than it can chew. Toth is a 20th Century Job and his ills do tend to become wearying after awhile and somewhat circuitous. There were times when I thought, haven't we been here before; just give the guy a break. And yet it's never miserabilist; there's a streak of black humor running through the film and it does provide a sense of closure. In fact, this is just the kind of film the Oscar-givers love.