The Brutalist is a big and bold story of the immigrant experience and the postwar American dream. It’s confounding yet always interesting — a heartening thing in these cinematically tough times.
By now, you’ve probably heard some of the critical hype around The Brutalist. You may have also heard about the unique way in which it was all shot — in VistaVision, a high-resolution 70mm widescreen film format created by Paramount Pictures in 1954 that was already fading out by the early 1960s. You probably saw it last when you watched White Christmas (1954) over the holidays.
That means the imagery in The Brutalist is sometimes so distractingly beautiful, it takes you out of the film entirely. There’s a close-up of lead actor Adrien Brody in the film that is so heartbreaking in the way lighting and color make him glow like a saint in a Renaissance painting that it should hang in a museum. Even more impressive is the fact that all of this was somehow achieved with a budget under $10 million.
Director Brady Corbet joins other analog-film-fanatic directors like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson in trying to preserve the astonishing image quality that used to be taken for granted by viewers of Hollywood movies. I appreciate that. I appreciate many of Corbet’s visual flourishes, such as the wonderful opening-credit sequences featuring the resolute lines of modern architecture underscoring and boxing off the names listed, all mapped over the dynamic images of a train racing over tracks.
The film announces its constructedness and intellectual bona fides through its two separate parts with heavily erudite names: “The Enigma of Arrival,” which is the title of a 1987 autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul dealing with the immigrant experience, and “The Hard Core of Beauty,” the title of a chapter in the book Thinking Architecture by celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, a fiercely independent minimalist.
And certainly, Corbet has a sensitive talent for showing the surprisingly delicate details of brutalist architecture. They’re represented in a way that could at least partially convert the most hardened anti-modernist who tends to argue that an uglier architectural form could only be dreamed up in hell.
But accompanying my appreciation for all this effortful commitment to taking cinematic art seriously is the more dominant emotion of bafflement. As so often happens, I seemed to be watching a film that no other critic described in their mostly glowing reviews, and I had to blaze a trail through its many dense thickets alone.
The Brutalist is an epic drama up for ten Oscars, and it’s not just being lauded by critics and industry insiders. It’s also doing pretty well at the box office, at least for a 215-minute film — including its fifteen-minute intermission — that’s as turgid and torturous as this one is. The narrative concerns the bleak lifetime experiences from 1947 to 1980 of Hungarian-Jewish, Bauhaus-trained architect László Tóth (Brody), who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp. He makes it to America full of hope, only to encounter such entrenched hatred of his Jewishness, it poses a constant threat to his ability to establish himself professionally and personally in this country.
Once he’s joined by his wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) — who are even more manifestly scarred than László is by their experiences in the camps — their initial joy in reuniting curdles. László’s seemingly secure haven under the patronage of wealthy and hot-tempered industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) seems to grow steadily more precarious and menacing.
I didn’t see any reviews discussing what seems to be the most significant theme in the film. That is, Corbet’s investigation of antisemitism that manifests itself not just in the usual ways in post-WWII America — denying Jewish immigrant Holocaust survivors jobs, places to live, and fundamental dignity in the form of freedom from casual shunning, insults, and widespread contempt. This film homes in on another phenomenon, that of pervasive psychosexual sickness affecting both American bigots and Jewish victims of bigotry.
Psychosexual sickness is also a theme that James Baldwin explored in terms of antiblack racism in his 1976 study of Hollywood films, The Devil Finds Work. He argues that in an obscure drama by John Huston called In This Our Life (1942), Bette Davis gives a brilliant performance that, Baldwin argues, indicates that she somehow fully understood the twisted eroticized hatred of black people by white Southerners, a phenomenon of which she was unlikely to have had any direct experience.
I have to provide a SPOILER ALERT here, because there’s no way to explain the development of this theme in The Brutalist without getting a bit graphic and also revealing the film’s most shocking scene. If you haven’t seen the film, and you mean to, definitely watch it before reading further.
In part two of the film, there’s a climactic male-on-male, patron-on-protégé rape that makes the film’s theme sickeningly plain. It’s followed up by a disorienting scene between László and Erzsébet in which she says that America is so thoroughly crazed and rotten, they should flee to Israel where they might have some hope of thriving. Later, it turns out that László, under the influence of the heroin to which he’s become addicted, has told Erzsébet about the rape he experienced at the hands of Harrison Van Buren.
But even before that point, there are scenes throughout the film stressing sexual dysfunction that are increasingly disturbing.
The first occurs immediately after László and a friend arrive in America, hugging and crying for joy at the sight of the Statue of Liberty. That the statue is shown upside down is an unsubtle indication of what American “freedom” is going to entail. The two friends, presumably on their way to rent cheap rooms for the night, encounter a line of prostitutes. One of them, seen from László’s point of view, undulates with what seems like a kind of eerie and mesmerizing sexual craving, but there’s no release in the unpleasant scene that follows. As director Corbet explains it, he’s dealing with László’s trauma in terms of his possibly permanent loss of the ability to function sexually or professionally:
This movie is about a character that is trying to reclaim his body of work and his body. . . . In the first 10 minutes we understand that [Tóth] is impotent following the war and even when he and his wife reconnect, it takes them a long time to physically reconnect.
In the brothel, as the prostitute tries to service László, she tells him, “You’re very ugly in the face” and returns to her knees. And meanwhile, László’s friend, busy with another prostitute, keeps crudely urging him on, “Just fuck her, just fuck her.”
Later on, after László is reunited with Erzsébet, a version of the same protracted sexual act plays out again between husband and wife, a relentless hand job, with even uglier implications. He tries to make some sort of confession of his sexual transgressions while they were apart, but she repeats “I know everything you’ve done” in a monologue about how her desire for him made her able to be with him constantly on some sort of dark spiritual plane. Her tone seems oddly threatening, and he weeps, muttering, “I don’t think I can stand anymore.”
Various women in Corbet’s film tend to be presented as almost absurdly sexualized and inclined to interact with László as if a hot, forbidden encounter is minutes away. László’s first sanctuary in America is with his highly assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife, Audrey (Emma Laird). Their initial introduction in the plain showroom of Atilla’s modest furniture store creates a startling contrast to overdressed, over-coiffed, over-made-up Audrey. She’s almost laughably minxy, dolled up in a deep rose-colored dress that matches her lipstick, and she seems to interact with László in a furtive yet fascinated way, staring too long and then looking away too self-consciously. Echoing the prostitute’s comment about his ugliness, Audrey automatically tells him that they could arrange to have László’s nose “fixed.”
Attila’s charity toward László is depressingly meager — he gives him a dark corner behind the showroom as a place to sleep. Atilla even plans to use his cousin’s professional skills to design a new line of furniture, augmenting the store’s main stock of hideous faux-colonial furniture that was a fixture in postwar American homes. “It is not too beautiful,” comments László in the understatement of the decade.
There are many early indications that this setup is going to be a disaster. Attila has already Americanized his name and converted from Judaism to Catholicism in keeping with his wife’s religion. László’s presence seems to bring out bizarre, sexually charged behavior in Attila as well. One raucous, drunken, red-lit, and far-too-intimate evening, Attila insists that the reluctant László dance with Audrey, urging him on with, “Look, she’s waiting for you, she’s waiting for you.”
But it all goes awry when Attila sets up a lucrative job with Harry (Joe Alwyn), the pampered and sinister son of Harrison Van Buren, the tycoon who will later become László’s patron. But when Harrison sees the results, he hates the modernist library László has designed and throws him out in a frighteningly out-of-control rage. And Attila, in a creepy midnight visit to László’s bedroom, not only blames him for this fiasco but accuses him of making a pass at Audrey.
It’s a forerunner of the far greater disaster that will result from László’s being hired back later by Harrison, who’s discovered an old glossy magazine showcasing László’s prewar architectural triumphs. Once he recognizes László’s fame as a forward-thinking modernist in prefascist Europe, all of Harrison’s arrogant ambition to become a cultural trailblazer in some capacity — as long as it doesn’t cost too much or inconvenience him unduly — comes to the fore. He demands the impossible, a hilltop community center on his property, in honor of his extremely religious Protestant mother, that will contain a library, an auditorium, a gymnasium, and a chapel.
“So that’s four buildings,” says László ironically. He then sets out to unify them into one building in terms that override Harrison’s preoccupations and are entirely personal to himself as a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust. These terms only become clear in the film’s final sequence, when the artist belatedly triumphs over the abusive financier.
The film’s concern with artistic autonomy and who ultimately is going to control the work is meant to be reflexive of Brady Corbet’s triumph in getting the film financed and completed on his own terms. It’s made Corbet’s reputation, and he keeps giving interviews comparing his own suffering artistry with that of his protagonist.
This is a bit off-putting, but it’s also familiar territory. We’ve seen many filmmakers trying on the outsize shoes of the late Orson Welles, the director who’s long worn the thorny crown of the filmmaker-as-artist who dared to criticize American monstrousness and paid a heavy price for it.
Yet if you take a look back at Welles’s art — his first American films, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — they also have epic scope, yet they’re wonderfully dynamic and mercifully clear and were definitely made to be embraced by the general public, if only the studio system had let them alone. If Welles’s later American films aren’t as clear, it’s because they’re examples of a popular genre, the deliberately labyrinthian film noir Welles took on in The Lady From Shanghai (1947) and Touch of Evil (1958). Both are nevertheless tremendously exciting to watch.
The thing is, in describing what seem to be structuring themes in The Brutalist, I’ve made the film sound more coherent than it actually plays. It’s quite a mess. If people are responding to the rape scene with shock, regarding it as an unforeseen event that comes out of nowhere in part two, this is because Corbet hasn’t connected it intelligibly to earlier sequences. The film is too long and too filled with portentous pauses and too jam-packed with distracting elements of all sorts.
For example, how to explain the confounding presence of the “black best friend” in the film, one of those dreadful racist clichés of American cinema? His name is Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), he has a son, his wife is dead, and other than that he has virtually no character beyond his attachment to László Tóth. In scene after scene, he’s there — bunking down in the flophouse with László, dancing in the jazz club high on heroin with László, vaguely helping with construction chores on László’s increasingly ambitious projects, or just standing there by László’s side representing Loyalty and Service until László casts him off in a fit of fury rooted in self-loathing. We never see Gordon again, and there’s no indication that László misses him or repents his own act of betrayal.
At one point, László’s wife Erzsébet tells Gordon that László always says he couldn’t have done it without him, and it’s one of the many moments in the film that induce a blank, almost vertiginous feeling of “Huh?” What is Gordon to László? It’s never remotely clear, without the “black best friend” tradition providing some maddening context.
In the more rushed part two of the film, there are many surges past dramatic developments that are confusing and unsatisfying. Somehow during the years represented by the intermission, Zsófia, who was defined by her muteness that’s the result of her traumatic years in Dachau, has recovered her ability to speak. There is a truncated scene late in part one that indicated she was in some way raped or molested by Harrison’s drunken and resentful son Harry, thus compounding her trauma. So it’s disorienting to find her having recovered her powers of speech so completely, she’s making cogent arguments about why László and Erzsébet should join her and her husband in moving to Israel. Was she actually attacked by Harry? When did she recover her ability to speak?
The performances of Brody and Pearce, which are big and full of brio, do a lot to carry the viewer along. Though even their relationship is full of “Huh?” moments — after a meandering conversation at a party, Harrison tells László that he finds their discussions very intellectually stimulating, and László fervently agrees. Yet there doesn’t seem to have been anything intellectual about their long exchange. Surely László spent his early career in the wild intellectual scrum of interwar Europe. Is he just shining Harrison on? Don’t know. Can’t tell.
Though on the plus side, all this confusion can foster a lot of conversations among filmgoers about what the hell was going on in multiple sequences of The Brutalist. And that’s a heartening thing in these cinematically tough times.