I write this one month before the Academy Awards, at which The Brutalist is a front-runner for Best Picture. Most leading critics seem to think it should win. Their praise has been rapturous, even euphoric, and it brims with a palpable sense of relief—relief at finally seeing a movie that deals with serious matters in a serious way. The Brutalist stars Adrian Brody as László Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald and makes his way to America, where, after suffering hardship and degradation, he is offered the chance to design a building that will be the capstone of his career.
Naturally there is a price to pay; this is not a happy movie. Nor is it a short one; it runs three hours and 20 minutes, not counting its 15-minute intermission. The scope is epic, the first act spanning 1947 to 1952, the second bringing us to 1960, with a coda leaping ahead to 1980. Epic also is its wide-screen VistaVision format, which gives it a panoramic breadth similar to that of CinemaScope. Only the budget was less than epic, a trim $9 million, which director and co-writer Brady Corbet achieved by shooting most of the film in Budapest.
When we first meet László, he is sickly and sporting a badly broken nose, sailing into New York harbor on a squalid ship crammed with refugees. The squalor does not end here but intensifies, degradation piling upon degradation. After an ineffectual visit to a brothel, he makes his way to Philadelphia and reunites with his cousin, who runs a furniture shop in whose back room László is invited to sleep. He learns his cousin has married a Catholic woman and for business reasons has converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Miller. Once a week László dines with the family; otherwise he eats in a soup kitchen. Although he makes furniture in his brother’s shop, he does not seem to earn much; we see him trying to pick pockets on a subway.
László gets his first break when he meets the son of Harrison Van Buren, a wealthy shipbuilder. As a surprise present for his father, who is away on a business trip, the son wants to present him with a fully completed and elegant private library in his mansion. But just as László is completing the work, Van Buren (played by Guy Pearce) returns unexpectedly and, furious at finding strangers meddling in his house, orders them off the property. The fiasco completes László’s estrangement from his cousin. When we next see him, he is injecting himself with heroin in the basement of a church that serves as a homeless shelter.
Things change when Van Buren belatedly discovers that he had given the bum’s rush to one of the preeminent architects of prewar Hungary, a pupil of the Bauhaus and a man whose buildings were featured in prestigious journals. Chagrined, he tracks down László, hands him a cash-filled envelope by way of compensation, and invites him to come back to his house. But when László arrives, he is more disheveled than ever, having spent the money on drugs and a rowdy night in a jazz club that ends with his nose rebroken. Nonetheless, Van Buren decides that he is just the man to build a cultural center in memory of his mother—complete with auditorium, library, gymnasium, and chapel. The first act of the movie ends on a high note, with the prospect that László will at last be reunited with his wife and niece, who have been languishing in a refugee camp in Europe.
The story darkens in the second. László is shocked when he finally sees his wife Erzsébet, now confined to a wheelchair from osteoporosis malnutrition. Pushing the wheelchair is Zsófia, their niece, a traumatized young woman who does not speak. Meanwhile, the building of the cultural center limps along as Van Buren allows a consulting architect to alter László’s plans behind his back. Tempers fray.
Events reach their climax in the great quarries of Carrara, Italy, where László and Van Buren have come to select marble for the altarpiece of their chapel. During a spontaneous party in the stonecutters’ atelier, László slips away to take heroin. He is in a stupor among the marble fragments, with his syringe and stash of drugs, when a drunken Van Buren comes upon him in a makeshift grotto and rapes him while verbally abusing him.
The next morning Van Buren pretends that nothing has happened, but once back in America, we see László has changed. He is cruel and belligerent, not only to his workers but to Erzsébet. But when she awakens one night, screaming in one of her periodic spasms of unbearable pain, he shares his heroin with her. They share confidences. We finally discover how he became an addict, how he first took the drug because of the pain of a nose broken from leaping off a train, perhaps to the gas chambers. And she learns what happened to him at Carrara. She travels by herself to a dinner party at Van Buren’s mansion and announces to the guests that their host raped her husband. He denies it, calls László an alcoholic and drug addict, and the mortified guests quietly leave after Van Buren’s son slams the crippled Erzsébet onto the marble floor and drags her to the front door. Later, Van Buren disappears into the night and a search party looks for him in the shell of his unfinished building. The search ends on an ambiguous note, with someone saying he’s found something.
The film might have ended there, but instead there is a puzzling epilogue. It takes us to the Venice Biennale in 1980, where László’s life work is honored with a triumphant exhibition. We see him frail and elderly, confined to a wheelchair pushed by niece Zsófia. No longer mute, she has become quite loquacious, and she gives an impassioned talk about the meaning of her uncle’s work. He is “a principled artist” whose buildings possess a “hard core of beauty.” At the crescendo, she proclaims what is clearly meant to be the movie’s tagline, “It is the destination, not the journey.” And so The Brutalist closes.
_____________
When a movie is welcomed so ecstatically, and when it is nominated for 10 major Oscars, there invariably come second thoughts. There is much fun to be had in taking down a winner, some of it malicious (Oscar contenders have been known to insinuate whispering campaigns against their rivals). Much has been made of the revelation that the Hungarian dialogue of Brody and other actors was corrected in post-production by AI to be more natural. But in an industry where AI can be used to transform the physical appearance of an aging actor and sweep decades away, as was done for Robert De Niro in The Irishman, this is weak tea indeed.
More serious criticism has come from the architectural world, which has pointed out that the movie plays fast and loose with the style of building from which it takes its name. Brutalism derives from the French term béton brut, referring to raw or “brute” concrete. It is an aggressively muscular style, charged with wartime memories of concrete bunkers and tough enough to stand up to the new challenges of the Cold War world. First expressed in Le Corbusier’s brawny, coarse-textured buildings of the early 1950s, the mode would not catch on in the United States for another decade. To have László design a Brutalist building in the late 1940s is a gross anachronism, although hardly a fatal one. We do not judge works of art by counting their errors of historic fact. The fact that papers signed by General de Gaulle would be meaningless in Vichy France hardly discredits Casablanca. We do not go to the cinema for our history lessons.
What do we go for? In a drama, it is to see interesting people come into conflict with each other, and in ways that bring out their distinctive character traits. It is curious that so few films have been made about architecture, because it offers inherent conflict. Writing a book or symphony is an internal process, conducted in solitude, and is therefore not “ocularly interesting,” as Hitchcock would put it. But the architect’s client provides ready-made conflict, and the more imperious or mercurial he is, and the more obstinate the architect, the more intense the drama. Pearce delivers on this score. He plays Van Buren well, if broadly; his idea of a decadent millionaire seems to be a sadistic Jay Gatsby.
But it is striking in a movie that is nominally about Brutalist architecture that he never utters the word, nor does anyone else. Corbet is clearly a talented visual artist, and some of his scenes are exquisite. When he shows us the marble quarries of Carrara, worked since Roman times and honeycombed with tunnels, we seem to see the cliff itself as one faceted jewel; and when we share with László his first glimpse of Van Buren’s completed library, we experience it as an exultant reverie of space and light. Strange, therefore, that Corbet does so little to make Brutalism visually interesting. Whether one loves or hates Brutalism, it does look good in model form, like a work of finely chiseled abstract sculpture; it is only when it is inflated to monumental scale that it becomes oppressive. Yet the large model with which László unveils his design at a public meeting is distressingly crude, more like a high-school shop project than a presentation model of an accomplished professional.
Movies have the power to show us what different kinds of human activity feel like, to let us vicariously experience their sensory world, and to make it seem irresistibly attractive. Over the years, viewers have walked out of theaters imagining themselves ballroom-dancing, cooking a legendary feast, or simply rowing a scull. But The Brutalist never makes us feel what it is like to be an architect, to plan or to sculpt form. We do see a bit of deft drawing, but from a left-handed draftsman (Brody is right handed). But we never come to feel that architecture is a noble or inspiring endeavor. One wonders just how much Corbet is actually interested in the subject.
_____________
Architecture has as strong a claim on our attention as almost any other other facet of our public life; here are multimillion-dollar projects that create the physical world we live in. Ayn Rand chose it as the theme of her didactic novel The Fountainhead, because the architect combined three professions—the artist, the businessman, and the technician. And so when a movie has so lofty a subject and so portentous a tone as The Brutalist, you expect it to say something serious about that subject.
At one point, Van Buren asks László, “Why architecture?” A real-world veteran of the Bauhaus might answer that it was to solve social problems, such as the housing shortage or the need for affordable household goods. Another might speak of the need for beauty, or of his own drive to express himself. But László responds with a Zen conundrum: “Nothing can be of its own explanation—is there any better description of a cube than that of its construction?” It is not clear whether he is being deliberately evasive or, like many artists, can speak articulately only through the forms he makes.
In her speech during the coda, Zsófia compares László’s work to such natural objects as mountains and rocks: “They indicate nothing. They tell nothing. They simply are.” This is the formalist doctrine that guided High Modernism during the 1940s and 1950s, and which insisted that a work of art be free of all narrative content, moral agenda, or political message. Such was the doctrine formulated by Clement Greenberg, who was associate editor of this journal from 1945 to 1957.
But having said this, Zsófia then contradicts herself by revealing that László’s Van Buren Institute was secretly and privately based on the camp of Buchenwald, using “the same dimensions as his own place of imprisonment,” and on Dachau, where Erzsébet was confined. So much for buildings telling and indicating nothing.
This is asking a lot of the viewer, who throughout the film tries to sympathize with László (who does not make it easy) when he seems to be just another driven tormented artist with more trauma and sorrow in his past that anyone should bear. But then, in the final minute of the movie, to learn his way of coping with the trauma of his victimhood in a camp is to inflict the same trauma on the rest of the world, by making crypto-concentration-camp architecture? The movie leaves us with the unhappy thought that his most famous work was an act of vengeance, which might explain why Corbet gave the character the same name of the Hungarian geologist who attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer in 1972.
You have to sympathize with the critics who loved The Brutalist. This is not a good moment for Hollywood, and in the desert that is American cinema today, a weed can look like a flower. And it is admittedly successful as a period piece—realistically evoking the era’s clothing, popular music, and social mores, if not its language (people in the 1950s did not say “societal” or “significant other”).
But at bottom, in the order of its plot and themes, it is incoherent. It desperately wants to say something profound about modern America, the way great films like The Godfather and Chinatown did, telling stories about power, wealth and ambition, and their effect on struggling characters who, like all of us, stand on creaky trapdoors. But those movies did not need an afterthought of a coda to explain to their viewers what they had just seen. They made their point through form alone—through dialogue, plot, and image. They did not need to supply their own CliffsNotes. Like László’s cube, they were self-explanatory.
In the end, it is clear that architecture is only incidental to the theme of this movie. The real Brutalism here is not that of raw concrete and harsh blank walls but that of American society, of which Van Buren is only one manifestation. He repeatedly insults, humiliates, and abuses László—but so does America herself. To this, László’s response is to stamp onto his biggest American commission the image of a Nazi concentration camp—and specifically the one that American soldiers liberated. As gestures of ingratitude go, this one is particularly brutal. And it is perhaps not the kind of brutality that a living victim of the Holocaust would demonstrate, but rather more the kind of thing that would occur to a 37-year-old American like Brady Corbet with no guiding life experience and evidently little empathic understanding of what the world after the Nazis was like for those who miraculously survived their genocidal captivity and came to America with no choice but to try and make another life.
Photo from The Brutalist (2024), © A24. All rights reserved.
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
