MOVIE REVIEW: The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet 2024)

'My grandparents never talked about the Holocaust but, in some way, that was all they ever spoke about.' - Frieda Vizel

Is it possible for a film to dream our failed utopias for us? Should it even try? These are the questions that arose while I watched Brady Corbet’s 215 minute epic, The Brutalist. Ultimately, I believe these are the questions which the period drama must ask of itself if it is ever to reconcile itself with a present it is engaged in unavoidable conflict with.

The film is a fiction which one could easily mistake for history, and this is to its credit. It follows architect, student of the Bauhaus, jew, and Holocaust survivor, Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) as he arrives in America ahead of his wife (Erzsébet, Felicity Jones) and niece (Zsofia, Raffey Cassidy) (whom he was forcibly separated from). Over the course of the film, Toth and his Modernist work catches the eye of the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) who tasks him with the construction of a community centre in Pennsylvania. Costs mount, tensions (racial and financial) simmer, and drug addiction impedes progress. As the project collapses and Toth loses more and more of himself to his vices and to the work, the newly created State of Israel, and the questions it asks of the role of the jew abroad, looms on the horizon.

The Brutalist, is a film grappling with the emergence of a world, post-war, which is ultimately incompatible with the past. The characters are all figures who overlap this radical shift: Toth is a student of the Bauhaus School which ran from 1919 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Erzsébet was foreign affairs journalist in pre-war Hungary. Van Buren is a classic American industrialist of the old, Dale Carnegie mould, which changes drastically over the next generation (specifically, the 30 years he imagines he has left of his natural lifespan). They are all reacting to this in some way, although these too come into conflict. Van Buren wants Toth to build him a community centre (complete with an auditorium, gymnasium, library, and a chapel) in honour of his mother, although its impossible to ignore that this is moreso for himself and his own interest. The story of his mother, unspoken though hinted at, is the narrative which Van Buren uses to justify his self-made ‘great man’ image. The completion of this project would solidify that narrative for as long as it remains. Toth, however, is working for altogether different reasons. He is working on a project which is deeply personal in a way that might seem strange given the deeply impersonal appearance of brutalist architecture. The unfinished centre is a maze of obsession he builds to get lost within. He builds a monument to the world he knew, filters it through his experience in the Buchenwald concentration camp, places it in the new America, and retreats into its minute workings. Van Buren mistakes this for Toth desiring the personal glory that Van Buren believes is owed to him, calling him a leach and resenting his refusal to assimilate. Toth, however, is not, as the American characters subtly fear, trying to rebuild the old Europe experienced by the jews in America, nor is he building a totem towards himself, and I find his niece’s assessment that he was building a monument to his wife somewhat suspect. What Toth is trying to do is the very thing which brutalist architecture was developed to do, to create an aesthetic vision for modernity which is international and allows for the infinite subjective experience of it egalitarian user base. The centre is able to function as Van Buren’s triumph, Toth’s mental Dachau, the chapel of the congregation, and a grand metaphor for a woman reflecting on the life of her surrogate parents. It’s clear though that this is not something which the new world emerging out of the war is willing to keep. There are a number of middle-management types and money men in the way of Toth’s aesthetic vision in favour of penny-pinching and indifference to the work. Toth is able to continue because Van Buren is a dilettante and aesthete, his house his dotted with modernist art, he collects first editions of a tremendous number of books, he has filled a cellar with expensive wine he will never drink. Yet, it is clear that men like Toth and Van Buren are a dying breed, and will be supplanted by men like Van Buren’s son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), who is a new type of bourgeoise, one who does not feign interest in a culture beyond purchase power.

The other pressing matter of the future comes with the creation of the State of Israel, and how that changes the political-religious relationship between the jew and the rest of the world. It is an incredibly complex issue, with a history too labyrinthian to discuss here. Yet what compelled me the most about this question was the way in which the State of Israel is presented as a utopian for the jew, something which fulfils their spiritual mission, and something which legitimises them as a political force on the world stage, but is also presented as a gift disguised as an imperative from the white gentile world to the jew as a means of getting rid of them. “Look, we’ve given you your own place now take your Eastern European beggar selves away from us if you aren’t going to become like us.” It’s an unexpected conflict and one which is given a strange twist Zsofia casts doubts on Laszlo and Erzsébet’s jewishness when they reject her offer to join her and her husband in Israel. The zionist utopia is one which conflicts with the internationalist utopia that Laszlo and Erzsébet were brought up in. For them a jew is a jew no matter where in the world they are, it is their customs and traditions which make them jewish and they reject it being reduced to a kind of pitty nationalism given to them out of charity by people who despise them. Yet, even this argument collapses as it becomes clearer and clearer to Erzsébet that they will never be fully accepted into American society because of their Hungarian Jewish background and she decides to join Zsofia in the State of Israel. Yet, I can’t shake the feeling that, after the destruction of jewish Eastern Europe, these characters are bouncing from one false utopia to the next, the upside down Statue of Liberty, and the heroin overdose divinely ordained State of Israel.

I was struck watching, The Brutalist, by how distant the past of 1945-1958 now feels. We have moved into an epoch so far removed culturally, aesthetically, and politically from that moment that the dreams and the concerns of the people of that time allow us introspection on what did not come to pass. This story, for this writer having only seen it this afternoon, is fundamentally about the death of the ‘modern’ as it was understood in the first half of the 20th century and the creation of the world we live in now. It also exposes, in a manner which moved me deeply, the way in which the potential worlds that were embryonic in the aesthetics of modernity ultimately did not come to pass. As the neoliberal capitalist hegemony in our time gives way to the kind of low-brow philistine, loot and burn, nationalism that much of the western world is succumbing to, I think about Laszlo Toth building the community centre. A building which could be everything to everyone, a monument in the countryside that exists to be both natural and man made, one which praises man’s most divine aspirations and its most base, destructive tendencies.

I do think that Corbet achieves something with, The Brutalist. Whilst it maintains a stylistic similarity to his earlier film, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), it is a much more complete work, and I think he deserves praise for the development of his own baroque directorial aesthetic. It lags behind in the second half, and will overstay its welcome for many. It is a low bar to say that a film is refreshing when it actually engages with ideas, with form, and does so at a high quality, but that’s what we have here and I am happy to see it. Even in its failures, I found Brady Corbet’s, The Brutalist, to be a compelling look at art, culture, its interaction with the political, and how the ultimate rejection of the pre-war in the post-war era.

Ryan Sweeney