This week an Oscar-tipped film, The Brutalist, opens in Britain. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour-plus saga in which Adrien Brody plays the brilliant but tormented fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor struggling to make a life in the postwar US. He’s a singular, solitary, single-minded genius, always working alone, in the mould of Gary Cooper in the 1949 film of Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead and Adam Driver in last year’s Megalopolis. Tóth is, like them, forever fighting the misunderstanding and spite of mean-spirited adversaries. He would rather shovel coal (as Cooper’s Howard Roark drilled stone in a quarry) than...