There have been complaints that László Tóth, the practising Jew at the centre of this Oscar-nominated movie, does not exist. These objections may be connected to the backdrop of director Brady Corbet’s movie, which is the Holocaust, a subject so brimful of real stories it feels exploitative to make one up.
The film fails something called the “authenticity test”, according to one writer on another paper. But this is to confuse fiction with inauthenticity. It as if people know what they want to feel with Holocaust-related material and anything that gets in the way of that rush of self-righteous empathy must be opposed.
This is, I suggest, a gentile condition. Give them simplistic fare such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. This film is more complex.
The title role is played by a mesmerising Adrien Brody. His Tóth is a Hungarian-Jewish architect (and there were a few, Erno Goldfinger among them) and Holocaust survivor whose life we track from the moment he arrives at Ellis Island. The off-kilter view of the Statue of Liberty as Tóth emerges blinking from the bowels of the ship that carried him is a stunning reminder of how American sanctuary must have felt to Jews and other refugees as they reached safety. It is also impossible not to see this opening scene as a rebuke to Trump’s anti-refugee policies, though of course the film was made long before he won the election.
This is, I suggest, a gentile condition. Give them simplistic fare such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. This film is more complex
This scene is the first time we hear Daniel Blumberg’s extraordinary Oscar-nominated score, which is dominated by a repeating brass rumble. It is as if the instruments are being stretched and shaped like chrome tubing wrought at Bauhaus where Tóth learnt his trade.
With his wife (a stoic Felicity Jones) still unable to join him, much of the film’s three and a half hours is dominated by the hardships of settling in a strange country. Halfway through, a photograph of Tóth’s wedding outside a Budapest synagogue announces an interval, itself an exciting event.
Tóth, played by the Oscar-nominated Brody, exudes a humanity that enriches all those who encounter him, including the austere Pennsylvania tycoon (an excellent Guy Pearce) who commissions an ambitious modernist memorial to his mother.
For all these fine performances, the remarkable star of this film is architecture itself. To my eye Tóth is more a modernist than a brutalist. But that gripe aside what the complainants fail to see beyond their simple need for another biopic is that this film is an argument for culture. It justifies every minute of its running time and deserves every accolade it gets.
★★★★★
