This is the tale of immigrant architect Lazlo Toth (Adrien Brody) as he tries to start his life over in America after World War II. It’s implied that he is a holocaust survivor though never outright stated.
The movie is so long it has an intermission. It’s honestly too long with too little to say. Years flash by in an instant while at other times we spend an interminable amount of time just watching Lazlo look around. The filmmakers seem to think that just having characters exist near each other over years counts as character development, instead of actually actually having the characters interact with each other.
Felicity Jones plays Erzebet, Lazlo’s wife that he was separated from during the War and then reunited with in America. The chemistry between Jones and Brody is bizarre.
This movie falls into a lot of the recent Indie movie trends that really irk me – overly long, pompous and self-important, refuses to flesh out characters relationships and instead asks the audience to just many of them, and a rather unsatisfying third act. At least the plot isn’t ambiguous.
It also falls into a surprisingly ubiquitous trend of the recent prestige cinema – even though the main character isn’t always there for his wife, or even really a supportive husband, his building masterpiece was a tribute to his love for her. What? Why is this such a prevalent trend, stop modeling this as acceptable behavior. Instead of showing that these troubled geniuses REALLY love their partners and/or children through their work (or more annoyingly there’s a picture of them by their workstation as if that somehow makes up for abandoning them), how about they’re actually there for their family when they’re alive?