NEW YORK — It is time, once again, for Hollywood to put on its makeup and give itself a round of applause. Viewership of the annual Academy Awards telecast is less than half of what it was 25 years ago, but the event is still a substantial mile marker, and a way for mainstream audiences to familiarize themselves with the previous year’s quality cinema offerings. (That doesn’t mean they’ll actually watch them, but at least they can say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that.”) And there is a nice mix of Jewish stories among this year’s nominees.

The most notable is “The Brutalist,” a massive concrete slab of a movie from director and co-writer Brady Corbet. The film, which has 10 nominations in total, stars Adrien Brody as a Hungarian-Jewish concentration camp survivor who comes to America to discover a new shade of antisemitism. Brody’s character, László Tóth, is a brilliant and uncompromising architect who, through a series of twists and turns, finds himself commissioned by a Pennsylvania industrialist with the intensely goyische name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (played with tremendous gusto by Guy Pearce.) The relationship between patron and artist takes on weighty symbolism over the course of the movie’s 215-minute run time. (Fear not, there is an intermission baked in; “The Brutalist” isn’t too brutal to the bladder.)

A leitmotif of “The Brutalist” is the existence of Israel. During an early sequence in which Tóth is first returning to his passion — forging, hammering and building — we hear a radio announcing the formation of the Jewish state. At several points in the narrative the idea of moving to Israel comes up, as it would for any displaced Jew and his family in the mid-20th century. Opinions vary on the notion — it means giving up on an American dream, but maybe it is the only logical endpoint. Sympathetic characters in the movie call emigrating to Israel “coming home,” a reverberating phrase from the film’s first scene when Toth’s niece is seen questioned by Soviet-aligned forces as a displaced person.

The movie is ambivalent in its messaging concerning Israel, which has brought great consternation to some viewers. Corbet, who is not Jewish, is a hero to many young cinephiles — his deployment of the VistaVision process, the first use of this anamorphic technique for a feature film since 1961, immediately wins him credibility points. But his refusal to have a character turn to the camera and say “Israel is a settler colonial project and must be denounced” has caused many who otherwise love the movie to gnash their teeth. What’s more, there have also been some who interpret the film’s final scene as being slyly anti-Zionist. Sadly, there’s no way for me to explain that further without spoiling the ending of the movie, so skip over the next paragraph if you’d prefer not to know.

“The Brutalist” opens with an overture sequence and concludes with an epilogue. The epilogue is set in the 1980s, with Tóth accepting an award for his life’s work in Venice. (Amusingly, the film stock switches to a rather dated video look.) Tóth is in a wheelchair, too old and feeble to speak. His Zionist niece speaks on his behalf, and reveals that her uncle’s first major work — the civic center commissioned by Van Buren that took decades to complete — was actually a commentary on the Bergen-Belsen camp where he and his wife were imprisoned. We learn that the agonies of the Holocaust were what inspired Tóth’s noble art. However (some say) this is an unreliable narrator. We’ve been watching this movie for hours now, and never did Tóth indicate that this was his plan all along. Some believe that the niece represents Israel exploiting the silenced voices of Holocaust victims for its own propaganda gains. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s also a bit of a stretch. Corbet himself has only stated that he likes elements of ambiguity in........

© The Times of Israel