The Brutalist Pairs Modern Architecture and Postwar Trauma

Lady Liberty turned on her head is the sort of image one might expect a surly teenager with artistic aspirations to produce after reading The Great Gatsby or Howard Zinn, and it is the first image that the viewer of Brady Corbet’s third feature, The Brutalist, sees once the VistaVision logotype, announcement of an overture, and a countdown have flitted across the screen. Such elaborate window dressing is clearly intended to convey the magnificence of classic cinema, but also America, which Hungarian refugee László Tóth first glimpses from the hull of a ship approaching Ellis Island. “Your face is ugly,” a prostitute tells him once he reaches dry land. “I know it is,” he replies in a goulash-thick Magyar accent, but we know that it is not, because Tóth is played by Adrien Brody, whose crooked nose and watercolor eyes define one of contemporary Hollywood’s most distinctive canvasses for expression.

Brody always looks at least a little sad, a trait that lends his tragic heroes instant pathos and gives other characters an edge when he plays against type. Whether he is an Anglophile punk stripper from the Bronx, a tax-evading art dealer, a billionaire in athleisure, Arthur Miller, Salvador Dalí, or a stop-motion field mouse, melancholy seasons the motivations of his roles into more precise emotions, establishing a link between grief and indignation, determination and disappointment, loneliness and regret, guilt and shame, fear and defeat. It should come as no surprise, then, that his finest performance—as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), for which he won an Academy Award—should portray a survivor of one of the most obscene tragedies ever to befall humankind.

Like Szpilman, Tóth is an Eastern European Jew, a victim of the Holocaust, and an artist—not a musician, but an architect. He is also a heroin addict—a habit he picks up after suffering a nasal fracture on the transatlantic passage—and an estranged family man plagued by ambiguous sexual malaise. These are a lot of characteristics to stuff inside a sprawling immigrant narrative, but the complexity rescues Corbet’s film from the sentimentality to which so many treatises on the American dream succumb. His story spans decades and continents but mostly elapses on the Pennsylvania estate of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist who employs Tóth to design and construct a mysterious edifice in honor of his own late mother that is only completed by the film’s epilogue, three hours in.

As Corbet’s script, which he wrote with his collaborator and wife, Mona Fastvold, plumbs the metaphorical richness of architecture as a means for self-invention, Tóth triumphs, stumbles, and fails in cyclical ascension to the top. His pinnacle is the 1980 Venice Biennale, where a major retrospective celebrates the expansive achievements of this now elderly and Israeli champion of brutalism. If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware. Corbet’s indulgence in symbolism is heavier-handed than a fistful of concrete and steel, and yet it works, primarily due to a strong ensemble, Lol Crowley’s expressionistic cinematography, and an uncompromisingly willful directorial vision, imperfect though it may be.

After the much delayed opening credits roll, Tóth takes a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his “shiksa” wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), own a furniture store, Miller & Sons (“No Miller, no sons,” Tóth cracks at the newly assimilated, Catholic persona of his relative and countryman, who “speaks like an American from television”). Showing Tóth to a makeshift bedroom in a storage closet, Attila makes clear that he has brought the “maestro” here to modernize his wares. And he does, showcasing in the storefront a Corbusian table and chair that look “like a tricycle” to Attila (“It’s a bike for kids,” he offers by way of explanation).

Meanwhile, Tóth meets Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), a Black widower, waiting in the breadline of a church only to get turned away; Tóth becomes a white savior immediately, promising to hold a place in line for Gordon and his son, William (Charlie Esoko and, later, Zephan Hanson Amissah), the next morning. The two men go into business together when Miller & Sons scores a premium client and Tóth hires Gordon as his foreman. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) wants to surprise his father with a renovation of the library at his Doylestown estate into something “proper”: “Maybe make him a ladder with little wheels on it?”

Tóth, it turns out, is a licensed architect who designed the city library in Budapest; his negotiation skills suddenly outpace those of his entrepreneurial cousin, quickly convincing the junior Van Buren to agree to a $1,200 budget, though Tóth “was ready to settle at $450.” By the time the job is complete, the library’s skylight has been accidentally shattered, the space has been transformed into an ethereal cathedral to reading (Tóth’s chair placed precisely at a 45-degree angle), an enraged elder Van Buren has chased the crew off his property, his son has refused to pay, and Attila has kicked Tóth to the curb, accusing him of sleeping with Audrey.

Months later, Tóth is bearded, smoking opium in the shower of the charity mission where he has joined Gordon and William in seeking shelter. The two men are working construction when Van Buren Sr., pulls up with an envelope of cash and a copy of Look magazine, in which the library is featured. The millionaire has done his homework, learning that Tóth studied at the Bauhaus, and digging up a dossier of his designs. “I did not realize these images were still available, much less of consequence,” Tóth modestly responds. The two men hit it off: “I found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating,” Van Buren rattles off with the fast-talking 1940s patter that Pearce mastered in L.A. Confidential (1997) and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce (2011).

After splurging the overdue payment on drinks and drugs at a jazz club with Gordon, Tóth takes the black car Van Buren has sent for him back to the estate, where he meets the rest of the family, including Harry’s twin sister, Maggie Lee (Stacy Martin), and Van Buren’s Jewish lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), who promises to help Tóth’s wife, Erzsébeth (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy and, later, Ariane Labed), to secure visas to emigrate via the Displaced Persons Act. What luck! Before the party comes to an end, Van Buren leads his guests to the top of a hill, where he publicizes ground breaking of a “community center” on this very site, to be designed by none other than Tóth. Doylestown is not a “cultural” place, he admits; for this reason, “money is no object,” but the “specific and meaningful” purpose is to serve a Christian congregation in apparent need of an auditorium, gymnasium (with a swimming pool), library, and chapel all in one. “It’s ambitious,” Van Buren concedes. “My father would like that.” Impressed by the ability of Tóth’s creations to withstand a war (Harry says his scale models “look like a barracks”), Van Buren enlists the architect to join him on a protracted ego trip in the hope that its fruition will immortalize them both, as if to refute F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives.”

Approval of the $850,000 project concludes the initial half of the film, which is interrupted by a built-in, 15-minute intermission (again, with the countdown), and a second act. Tóth is reunited with his wife and niece, though Erzsébeth is in a wheelchair (famine-induced osteoporosis) and Zsófia is a mute but stunning young woman, no longer a small girl. As husband and wife attempt an awkward reconciliation, the Tóths and Van Burens grow uncomfortably close; a veteran journalist, Erzsébeth gets a newspaper job in New York, while Tóth is left to fight penny-pinching engineers and consultants over the height of the ceiling. A train transporting materials derails, sending laborers to the hospital and convincing Van Buren to cut his losses and send the crew home.

It isn’t until 1963 that Van Buren once again fetches Tóth, underemployed as a draftsman in an architecture firm. They both want to complete the community center, though a pregnant Zsófia and her husband, Binyamin (Benett Vilmanyí), try to convince their aunt and uncle to make aliyah with them instead. Thus begins the film’s most arresting sequence, in which Van Buren and Tóth travel to Italy in search of marble. Functional as he may be, Tóth is still an addict, and Van Buren reveals that his interest in the brutalist exceeds the normal bounds of patronage or financial investment. What happens next is too deliberately shocking to spoil with summary—suffice it to say that Corbet does what he can to dispute Susan Sontag’s claim in On Photography that, even “at the farthest reach of metaphor,” the “camera doesn’t rape.” Corbet and Fastvold are more adamant than Fitzgerald was in psychologizing the depravity of privilege and wealth, and though there is truth in the caricature, the lack of subtlety feels juvenile, unbecoming of the film’s enterprising scope.

The Van Burens’ villainy may be inseparable from their status, but under their influence, Tóth has changed: He fires Gordon, and after he dips into his stash to alleviate Erzsébeth’s chronic cramps, she tells him, “You’ve become a selfish old bastard before my eyes.” With their romance perversely rekindled, she overdoses, then shows up at the Van Buren estate without invitation to stand up for her wounded husband. “He’s a sick, senile old dog,” Van Buren barks back. “And when dogs get sick, they often bite the hand that feeds them until someone puts them down.” But Tóth, we glean from the epilogue, has survived everyone but Zsófia, who introduces him at the Biennale, insisting that her uncle’s “aim was not to define an epoch, but to transcend all time”; his buildings “indicate nothing, tell nothing, they just are.” This explication seems to contradict the fact that the Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Activity and Research, finished in 1973, directly references Buchenwald and Dachau, where Tóth and Erzsébeth were respectively imprisoned—a concentration camp in rural Pennsylvania the survivor’s last laugh.

But is it a joke? Corbet makes that hard to tell: The Brutalist is almost exaggeratedly humorless, and as with his previous film, Vox Lux (2018), it’s often unclear on which side of the screen what, if any, punch line is supposed to land. The stilted formality of the dialogue and melodramatic plot wink at noir, while the preoccupations with historical verisimilitude and a veneer of intellectual heft reach for grander heights. Brody has defended the personal inspiration of his accent—his maternal grandfather was a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat—though it tends to distract from the honesty of his performance, not unlike the pseudo-Portuguese lilts of Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver in Martin Scorsese’s devotional epic, Silence (2016).

Still, The Brutalist’s eccentricities result in a movie far more exciting than the vast majority of blockbusters at its scale, and it was produced—with a $6 million budget—at a fraction of the cost. Corbet may direct a great film someday soon, but this ain’t it, and as a filmmaker working outside of the studio system, he would be wise to mull over the rhetorical question Van Buren poses to Tóth at this one’s climax: “If you resent your persecution, why then do you make yourself such an easy target?”