The Brutalist (2024)
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The Brutalist is a 2024 movie directed by Brady Corbet and written by himself and Mona Fastvold. It follows the László Tóth, a Hungarian architect arriving to the United States, and his struggles throughout the following years with work, family, exploitation, oppression, and identity.
To get the obvious out of the way, The Brutalist is, visually and sonically, fantastic. Its three-and-a-half-hour runtime is made a spectacle by stylized, geometric titles, beautiful photography landscapes and subjects. From POV and shaky-cam sequences to wide shots of scenery, to close-ups of work, everything looks and flows perfectly.
Alongside its immersive sound design, the movie pulls you in with its score, sometimes light and dreamy, others heavy, looming and unnerving. This soundscape is punctuated by snippets of music and radio from its time, showcasing parallel historical events or pridefully advertising the wonders of Pennsylvania.
The acting is also top-notch. Adrien Brody (László) and Felicity Jones (Erzsébet) in particular drop incredibly charged, intimate performances with a big emotional range. The rest of the cast is equally great, if the movie gives them less to show off for. That out of the way, the plot of the movie revolves, as I understand it, around three axes: the craft of architecture itself, the politics of labour, and the identity of its protagonist and of those around him.
Creation
"Everything that is ugly, stupid, cruel, but most importantly, ugly… is your fault"
László is, as the movie lets us know very early on, a licensed architect of the Dessau school of Bauhaus (indeed, his character is supposedly inspired by those same architects and artists). One of the best uses the movie gives to its cinematography is, precisely, showing what that work entails.
Attila, his cousin, showcases his furniture in a small but beautifully lit showroom, light filtering through curtains and draping itself over wood and metal. Lászlo smokes, looking down through sparks as a Cesca style chair, table and cabinet set are welded. The pair are hired to design a library as a surprise for Harrison Lee Van Buren, a local wealthy patron and businessman. We see László visit the space, come up with concepts for the shelving, the old furniture be disassembled, the floor be swept, the new one be built, arranged and installed – snippets a lesser movie would’ve cut into a montage, or skipped with a dusk and a dawn from outside of the property.
This is naturally prolonged as the main project of the film comes alive: a community centre, commissioned to the protagonist in honour of his deceased mother. We see László draw, make the model for the building, survey, break ground. Pillars, walkways and rooms appear, we walk the narrow, tall spaces of the community centre as the score swells. It’s at these final minutes of the movie that we see the central feature of the building: a chapel, upon the ceiling of which is carved a cross, letting its outline cascade down a marble altar – the feature teased for the entire second part of the movie.
All the while, the camera holds nearly as much reverence for the space around the work as it does for the work itself. We are treated to beautiful wide shots of the Van Buren house, the cranes László and Gordon work around for a time, Italian quarries, the drafting room of an architecture firm, and the trains carrying building materials across the country.
Opportunity and exploitation
"This place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat. This whole country is rotten"
In The Brutalist, the love for the craft we explored in the first part works, first and foremost, as critique, commentary and inversion of the “American dream” trope, and it does so incredibly effectively.
László gets to the United States, complete with a "go to America and I will follow you" letter by Erzsébet, his wife, and a shot of the Statue of Liberty. He’s welcomed with open arms by his cousin Attila and his wife, Audrey, given a place to stay and work – the furniture studio "Miller & son", of which we later learn it’s actually Molnár and no sons – is offered medical care, practices tongue-twisters, designs furniture, and is subsequently offered the design and building of Harrison Van Buren’s library as a surprise, which he renders beautifully.
The fairy tale, however, ends here. Van Buren storms into the house, kicks out László and company with no payment for the project, and threatens them with legal action. This is the warning shot. In The Brutalist, work is donated by the powerful, kept under strict control, and taken away on a whim. Audrey, who had already proposed László get a new job and a proper place to live – him refusing to "work for someone" – accuses him of trying to get intimately involved with her, landing him on the street. He works shovelling coal, visits food kitchens, sleeps at a homeless shelter attended by nuns, and becomes addicted to heroin.
Just as suddenly, he is lifted out of his situation later by none other than Harrison Van Buren, whose library has since been praised in architectural media. He’s discovered Tóth’s other work and suddenly finds him "intellectually stimulating". Harrison invites him to dinner, leading to László meeting a lawyer who promises to expedite his family’s immigration process – a privilege he wouldn’t dream of otherwise – and to Van Buren himself announcing his plan to open the Van Buren institute.
His mother’s story, to which the foundation is dedicated, is told through a long-winded, sanctimonious anecdote involving his then-estranged grandparents, briefly interrupted by another guest offering László some much-needed work, which Van Buren quickly shuts down, denying him the opportunity long before announcing his own project.
The community centre itself suffers from management and supply chain troubles, including Tóth briefly battling for control with another architect, the project being temporarily cancelled entirely, and the protagonist offering his cut of the project to defend details like its height – which we later learn the significance and weight of. In another time skip, László spends months working at an architecture firm as a draftsman, before being asked back into the project and finishing it.
Throughout this three-hour odyssey, we see the extent of the rot that surrounds the act of giving work: immaturity, impulsivity, abuse, racism, insecurity, the humiliation inherent in having work held over your head. László himself incorporates part of this narcissistic, abusive system as he unravels through his work, trauma and addiction: we see him throw fits, chew out unprofessional workers, even fire his friend Gordon for trying to keep him in check, crying to Erzsébet how he “cannot bear it anymore”. The echo of Atilla’s unfairness and Van Buren’s past abuse toward László looms over these scenes
In the Van Burens, and in The Brutalist’s world at large – much like in ours – this status quo of oppressive control doesn’t stop at the act of providing work. Pornography and prostitution are featured in the movie, both enjoyed by Tóth himself. Darker still are the depictions of rape: Erzsébet mentions shielding her disabled niece, Zsófia, from "unwanted advances" in the opening letter; later, Harry is implied to rape her in his domicile; Harrison himself rapes a drugged László on their trip to Italy to pick the marble for the chapel, launching on an antisemitic rant as he visibly struggles.
The only semblance of justice the film offers for these horrible acts comes in the form of Erzsébet’s confrontation of Harrison. After she’s physically attacked and dragged out of the room by his son, Van Buren disappears, having rushed into his community centre, where he’s implied to commit suicide. Here is when the movie chooses to reveal of the cross on the ceiling of the chapel, panning up to find it inverted.
Oppression
"The people here, they do not want us here. Audrey, Attila's Catholic wife, does not want us here! She does not want us here! We are nothing. We are worse than nothing"
The third big theme The Brutalist deals with is identity and oppression. This is baked into the fabric of the film itself by virtue of the Tóth family being Hungarian immigrants and, as we learn in the epilogue, survivors of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Indeed, the construction itself of the Van Buren institute reflects these lived experiences, the narrow passages of the camps stretched dramatically in the vertical direction – another design decision that is teased multiple times before its reveal, and that comes out of László’s pocket, Van Buren’s team attempting to cut corners on his design.
Throughout the film we see the identity of immigrants continuously put into question: soviet soldiers doubt Zsófia’s origins, saying they to help to get her to her “true home”; Atilla anglicizes his surname to give the appearance of an American family business and converts to Catholicism; The Nazi conception of “anti-German” art is discussed; in Van Buren’s dinner party, László explains how he’s perceived as a threat, not just because of his Jewish heritage, but by virtue of being a foreigner; indeed, as the institute project progresses, he’s harassed by the local population, and the second architect is hired, in part, because he’s a Protestant; the very idea of the institute having a chapel is a compromise with the local government for it to provide funding.
Amid these events, we are exposed to the Van Burens’ racism, from Harry warning László that they are merely "tolerating" him and his family, to Harrison describing the endless wall of homeless people lining Penn Station or blaming the victimization of Jewish people on their character as he rapes László.
However, there is one element the movie focuses on that I haven’t been able to parse: Israel. We hear a radio snippet about United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273: later in the movie Zsófia announces she’s going to Jerusalem to the Tóths, saying "repatriation is our liberation", and they argue whether László and Erzsébet are somehow recognized as less Jewish by choosing to stay in America. Later in the movie, Erzsébet suffers a heroin overdose in an attempt to soothe her physical pain, during which she claims to have seen God, and been called to Jerusalem to be with Zsófia.
Weirder still, in the movie’s techno-music infused epilogue, we learn that László, having become a successful and recognized architect, did in fact relocate to Jerusalem. This speech, delivered by Zsófia as he looks on, confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak for himself, ends with the line "no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey." But which destination is that?
Simply put, I don’t understand what the movie is trying to say here, especially given the current context of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian population. Is the point to endorse the idea that Israel is a legitimate place of liberation for Jewish people, with no mention of its previous inhabitants or question about the way it comes to be?
Another – more charitable – interpretation is that this is simply a reflection of the experience of the architects that the character of László Tóth is inspired by, such as Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or László Moholy-Nagy. I’m not knowledgeable in the history of architecture, much less in this specific time; from what I’ve been able to gather, this arc of survival in the Holocaust, to work and fame in America, to life in Israel seems hardly common – in fact, no interviews or articles I’ve read seem to make a parallel to any single artist of combination of artist’s lives.
Furthermore, this is very reminiscent of the Thermian argument as Dan Olsen describes it in his YouTube channel, Folding Ideas. László Toth isn’t, in fact, a real human being. There is no particular reason why his story must go a certain way, much less if it doesn’t mirror a real person or trend. This was a conscious decision by real life artists, presumably Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold.
The inclusion of this point in the movie is intentional, and I simply don’t understand what it means. If it’s Zionism oddly injected into an otherwise very clear and, frankly, blunt movie, it feels inappropriate and clunky. If it’s something else, the movie gives me very little ground to assume what. I can only hope it’s a product of my ignorance, but it doesn’t seem like other – better – critics have had much better luck in parsing what it all means.
"There was a war on. And yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube's shoreline."
-ItemizedVoids.
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