The Empty Ambition of “The Brutalist”

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Most filmmakers, like most people, have interesting things to say about what they’ve experienced and observed. But the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn’t know firsthand: it’s, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth. As a result, it’s a severe test of an artist, demanding a rich foreground of imagination as well as a deep background of history and ideas.