From pianist to architect: Actor Adrien Brody revisits Holocaust survival in The Brutalist

SINGAPORE – Adrien Brody’s career has come full circle.

The American actor shot to fame in The Pianist (2002), playing real-life Holocaust survivor and Polish pianist-composer Wladyslaw Szpilman.

In The Brutalist, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Feb 20, he again portrays a Jewish survivor of Nazi persecution. This time, he is a fictional Hungarian architect named Laszlo Toth who flees to the United States after World War II.

Playing Szpilman when he was in his 20s gave Brody an “emotional understanding” of the loss that Laszlo carries as a refugee.

The Brutalist has already earned Brody the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama in January and, most recently, Best Actor in a Leading Role at the British Academy Film Awards on Feb 16.

He is nominated for Best Actor at the upcoming Academy Awards on March 2 – his first Oscar nomination since The Pianist.

Speaking to journalists at a virtual press conference in January, Brody, 51, spoke about the ways his two characters, played decades apart, are connected.

“The Brutalist begins with a man who’s reeling from the suffering of the era that is very clearly represented in The Pianist,” he says.

“Both are about the power of the human spirit to endure and the power of artistic pursuits to process hardship, and the way the pain influences the artists’ journey.

“But the two films have a vastly different story and storytelling style.”

The 3½-hour drama, which includes a 15-minute intermission at the midpoint, begins in the late 1940s and takes a time jump into the 1980s in the epilogue. Having survived the war, Laszlo trades fame and respect in Hungary for obscurity in the US. A proponent of the modern school of design often called Brutalism, he moves into the home of his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola).

Through his cousin, Laszlo meets tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who yearns to secure his legacy by having his name attached to a great work of architecture.

Laszlo agrees to work for Harrison because he has the power to cut the red tape that has trapped Laszlo’s wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) in Hungary.

At the Golden Globes, The Brutalist won three awards, including for Best Motion Picture – Drama. At the upcoming Oscars, it has 10 nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Director for Brady Corbet.

One of the film’s themes is that of refugees hoping to secure the American dream, only to have that dream turn sour after they are brutally exploited.

Brody’s grandparents and his mother, photographer Sylvia Plachy, became refugees during the 1950s Hungarian revolution and fled to the US.

While his mother’s experience as a refugee was much less harsh compared with Laszlo’s, Brody says growing up in Queens, New York, exposed him to the reality of the American dream.

“My mother and my grandparents lived with quite modest means, in an apartment. My parents were able to afford a small house. In Queens, I was surrounded by immigrants from all walks of life. I think the beauty of growing up in a city like New York is the diversity and the humanity – there is a great deal of struggle to eke out a fulfilling existence there,” he says.

In a separate online interview, The Brutalist’s American director and co-writer Corbet, 36, says there are plenty of films that celebrate the American dream, so he opted to do a harder-edged, more realistic take on the idea.

“If you look at the data, we have been selling the American dream to 99 per cent of the population, for whom the dream does not work, and that’s a fact,” he says.

Norwegian film-maker Mona Fastvold, Corbet’s partner both in life and in screenwriting, explains why the story introduces Erzsebet only midway through the movie.

“There’s an intimacy in that anticipation,” says the 38-year-old. “We wanted viewers to long for her, just as Laszlo does, after they hear her voice through a letter at the start of the movie.”