Fleapit revisited:The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet's new film, The Brutalist, is ambitious. It tackles serious themes (antisemitism, xenophobia, the holocaust, drug addiction), it's long (three hours and thirty-five minutes - there was even an intermission, I don't think I've had an intermission at the cinema since Cry Freedom and that came out in 1987 - and wasn't even that long), it's brilliantly acted, and it's artfully filmed (even the titles look like something Alexander Rodchenko might have come up with).

It is, to all intents and purposes, both full on Oscar bait and an attempt to create the 'Great American Novel' in celluloid and if it doesn't quite pull it off, it does come very very close. Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is a Jewish Hungarian architect (who studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau) and Holocaust survivor who flees to America at the end of the war leaving his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) behind. Laszlo having been sent to a different concentration camp to them.

Initially, Laszlo moves in with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird) until he is wrongly accused of making a pass on her which sees him removed from their lives and their furniture business and joining his new friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankole) shovelling coal, working on the construction of a bowling alley, and indulging in recreational heroin abuse.

But when the arrogant and entitled Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) asks Laszlo to renovate the library of his rich industrialist father Harrison (Guy Pearce), Laszlo sees a second chance in life opening up in front of him. The problem is not just his heroin use or his conflicted relationship with Erzsebet but his stubbornness, his ego - he's an architect, and his quick temper.

When Harrison's attorney, Michael (Peter Polycarpou), pulls a few strings so that Erzsebet and Zsofia can come to America, it soon becomes apparent that they are both damaged, in their own specific ways, from their experience of the war and their time in Nazi concentration camps. Laszlo's damaged too but in far less obvious ways and even Harrison, who seems like a well meaning philanthropist who likes to surround himself with cultured people like Laszlo, has his own deep seated issues that will eventually come to the fore.

Harrison ultimately commissions Laszlo to build a huge community centre (theatre, gymnasium, library - or 'reading room', and chapel) on top of a hill in land Harrison owns at the edge of the state of Pennsylvania. Laszlo comes up with what at the time would have been seen as a brutal, concrete, monster and not everyone is best pleased. Harry is particularly unpleasant about the building, about Laszlo, and, most of all, about - and towards - Zsofia.

Harry's twin sister, Maggie (Stacy Martin), is more accommodating. Much to Laszlo's chargin, compromises are made, a train crash has Harrison pondering the wisdom of even carrying on with such a grand project, and a trip to Carrara in Tuscany to source marble leads to more trouble for both Laszlo and Harrison (but does provide a perfect excuse to shoehorn La Bionda's brilliant Italian disco classic One For You, One For Me in to the soundtrack).

At a time when nativist, racist, and downright fascist policies are being enacted in America by Donald Trump and Elon Musk it's interesting to look back at when that country really did shine out like a beacon of hope to those escaping persecution and death in their home countries. When America really was the land of the free and the home of the brave. The look on Laszlo's face when he first sees the Statue of Liberty is priceless.

But The Brutalist disabuses us of that notion very cleverly. The rose tinted spectacles we use to view the past are pulled off our faces and stamped into the ground by the same school bullies that are now in charge of the USA. There is antisemitism, there is cruelty against the poor, and there is rampant xenophobia in the post-war America this film is set in. Charles Lindbergh's vision of America is just as strong in many American minds as that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Plus ca change.

The Brutalist does a great job of showing a broad sweep of time and experience at a time when America, and the world, was - like now - changing forever. Where it, perhaps, fails - at least until very near the end - is in making us care much about any of the characters. Perhaps they're not human enough - not quite rounded enough - or perhaps they're all too human. Perhaps many of them have been brutalised by the horrors of war they have lived through. There's lots of brutalist architecture in The Brutalist, that won't disappoint, but I don't think that's really what the film is about. There's brutalism and then there's brutality. In this film both go hand in hand.