The Brutalist (2024)
dir. Brady Corbet
Rated: R
image: ©2024 A24
If Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood is a movie about the relentless and often cruel pursuit of progress and (more importantly) profit that drives the collective psyche of the United States of America – with Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview as the personification of US greed and pitilessness – then Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is about the view from the immigrant experience in those conditions.
Corbet’s film is a harrowing journey into trauma, dominance, subjugation, and, ultimately, the perseverance of the human spirit. It’s also a deeply felt exploration of the complexities of human behavior and motivation through characters with an emotional depth that closely (and satisfyingly) approximates the real thing.
At a colossal 215 minutes (including a brief overture and an intermission) Corbet’s command of a project this gargantuan in scale and complexity of character belies his 36 years; The Brutalist is only his third feature directorial effort. Together with his romantic and professional partner Mona Fastvold, the creative couple produced a screenplay that brings their characters to life in a way that few movies achieve.
Set during the direct aftermath of World War II through 1960, with a brief epilogue taking place two decades later, The Brutalist tells the story of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth. Corbet clues us in to the epic nature of his picture with a bombastic, frenetic opening sequence. The climax of the introduction culminates with László excitedly glimpsing the Statue of Liberty as he, and countless other war-traumatized refugees, arrive at Ellis Island for processing.
Accompanied by the soaring brass of Daniel Blumberg’s score, the camera pointedly frames Lady Liberty, the most iconic of our landmarks, upside down. That image might be a little on the nose for the story Corbet is telling – or maybe the reason I feel that way is because this striking image has been used relentlessly in the film’s marketing campaign – but it’s an apt one nevertheless. This land of promise and plenty turns out to be upside down from László’s expectations.
He begins to experience this immediately upon arrival, as his and the other refugees’ welcome at the immigration processing station is cold and emotionless, the polar opposite of László’s euphoric first view of his new home. It’s a spiritual sibling, though in truncated form, to the arrival in America of little Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II.
During the atrocities of the Holocaust, László was forcibly separated from both his wife and the orphaned niece for whom they cared. When he arrives in Pennsylvania via bus, he’s met by his cousin, Attila – who migrated to America years before the war – with wonderful news: his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia are alive in Europe. László had assumed they were killed at the Dachau concentration camp after he lost touch with them when he was sent to Buchenwald. Reuniting in America proves to be a bureaucratic nightmare, but László and Erzsébet exchange letters to stay connected.
László was an architect in his homeland, he studied at the prestigious German art school Bauhaus, but, since he is not licensed to practice in America, he works for Attila, designing pieces for his cousin’s small furniture store. He sleeps in a small supply room off of the store’s showroom. We see several scenes of awkward interactions between he, Attila, and Attila’s much younger, Catholic American wife, Audrey.
László thinks his fortunes are changing when Attila tells him that a wealthy client, Harry Lee Van Buren, wants to hire them to redesign his father’s private library and study. The old man loves to read, and Harry and his twin sister, Maggie, want to surprise him upon his return from a business trip with the brand-new, modern library. László designs a minimalist space, with beautiful shelving for the hundreds of books in Harrison Van Buren’s collection hidden behind huge, connected swinging doors.
The remodeling is going as planned – aside from an incident in which the glass dome that covers the room is accidentally dropped from the crane that is being used to remove it – until Harrison returns home early with his ailing mother. The incredibly affluent patriarch is enraged at what he finds upon his arrival. (The fact that Gordon – a man whom László befriended upon his arrival in America – is the first person Harrison sees as he drives up , and is, in Harrison’s words, a strange negro man wandering around the property, might have been all this rich, petty man needed to set him off.)
As a consequence to his rage, Harrison kicks the entire crew out of the house, and his pompous son Harry refuses to pay for the work that he commissioned or the materials already purchased. Attila blames László for the situation and, after also accusing his cousin of making a pass at Audrey, tells László that he’s no longer welcome as an employee or a resident of the furniture shop.
The movie treats Attila’s accusation of László’s advances toward Audrey as murky at best. We never see László do such a thing, and the way Audrey behaves toward her husband’s relative, especially during a scene where the three drunkenly dance together, give the impression that it’s Audrey who is interested in László. This is complicated by an earlier scene in which we see László frequenting a whore house not long after arriving in America. This all adds up to the sticky and often contradictory nature of human behavior. Sex in The Brutalist signifies domination and subjugation, the most vivid and horrific of which is depicted in a scene I’ll describe in greater detail in my spoiler section of the review.
Three years later, László sleeps in group charity housing, alongside Gordon and his young son, and both men work as day laborers loading coal, a product related to Daniel Plainview’s obsession in There Will Be Blood. The two men have also become addicted to heroin. Their heavy if infrequent drug use, especially László’s, is used in The Brutalist to represent trauma and the human response to it. Heroin is a stand-in for the horrific atrocities of the Holocaust that haunt the film from just beyond the edges of the frame.
Harrison tracks down László after learning of the latter’s esteemed pre-war European architectural reputation. (It helps that he’s received numerous compliments from his rich society friends on his starkly beautiful redesigned library.) Harrison pays László the $2000 owed for the work – which László and Gordon then promptly put in their arms – and eventually, after wining and dining the destitute László, commissions the architect to design and build a community center for Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia. It’s to be a tribute to Harrison’s late mother, and he wants it to consist of a library, theater, gym, and a chapel.
In a quick and biting observation on the true nature of philanthropy – in which the morbidly rich attempt to burnish their reputations of resource capture by putting their names on public institutions – László suggests adding a swimming pool. “I can’t swim,” is Harrison’s dismissive response to the idea. They might be “giving back” to the community, but, as rich people are accustomed to getting their own way in everything, whatever László designs will be to Harrison’s specific wants and desires.
László runs up against this dictatorial style even more in the second part of the film, titled The Hard Core of Beauty, after he is successfully reunited with Erzsébet and Zsófia, thanks to Harrison’s connections to the White House. Even though László is Jewish, the chapel he is designing must be Christian.
The immigrant experience is foregrounded when one of Harrison’s guests at a dinner party insists on pronouncing Zsófia – who is left mute in the aftermath of her horrific experiences during the war – as the anglicized Sofia. “Zsófia. Zsófia. Zsófia,” László corrects for his young niece, who can’t speak for herself. Christianity itself, mostly through the iconography of the massive cross that László incorporates into the design of the community center, stands in for the US ideal of assimilation.
The performances on display in The Brutalist are all of the highest caliber. After his astounding portrayal of real-life Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman over two decades ago in The Pianist, Adrien Brody shines again as the traumatized and complex László. Guy Pearce delivers a heartless villain in Harrison Lee Van Buren, who smiles in your face even as he sticks the knife in your back.
Felicity Jones begs for our compassion as László’s wife Erzsébet, a refugee left in a wheelchair due to osteoporosis caused by the famine that gripped Europe after the war. (In case you’re wondering, the time-honored Hollywood practice of the leading lady being much younger than the male lead is alive and well, as evidenced by the 51-year-old Brody being matched with the 41-year-old Jones.)
Whatever you can say about how the US treated refugees of the Holocaust when they got here, at least our leaders saw fit at the time to pass the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Our so-called leaders of today see immigrants as nothing more than punching bags, unworthy of aid or being treated with basic human dignity. People like László, who are complex and often fighting their own demons, stream into the United States in an effort to build a better life for themselves. In The Brutalist, Brady Corbet delivers the complexity of human interaction with a nuanced set of characters who defy easy categorization.
Spoiler Section:
If you haven’t seen The Brutalist and don’t want any major plot points spoiled, please skip this section.
As I hinted at in the main review, there is a disturbing rape scene contained within The Brutalist that acts as a representation of domination of American immigrants and the antisemitism and dehumanization of Jewish refugees at the hands of their American rescuers. Harrison assaults László – all the while also insulting his race and his place in the social hierarchy – during a trip to Italy to source marble for the community center.
Corbet and Fastvold excel at telegraphing subtleties in their movie.
They show us Harrison’s son, Harry, possibly doing the same thing to Zsófia during a picnic before cutting away to the next scene. That behavior can be read as a subtle nod to the possibility that Harrison has subjugated his own son in the same way. The thing that made me draw this conclusion is the way that Harry flies into a rage when Erzsébet confronts Harrison, in front of his son during a dinner party, about raping László. Harry is apoplectic in a way that hints that perhaps his father has done the same thing to him. There’s also the barest hint of a sexual relationship between Harry and his twin sister early in the film – it surfaces and disappears over the course of mere seconds – that brought to mind how survivors of sexual molestation can sometimes inflict the same behavior on victims of their own. I might be completely wrong about this, but it’s a fascinating possibility to contemplate.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- As odd as it might seem as praise for a 3.5-hour-long epic movie, The Brutalist is really, at its heart, an extraordinary character study. Adding Lawrence of Arabia-levels of pomp and bombast only makes that study all the more fascinating to watch.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- With The Brutalist came another wave of anti-AI hand wringing and anger when it was revealed that AI software was used to slightly tweak some of the Hungarian dialog spoken by Brody and Jones. The intent was to make two non-Hungarian speakers sound more like natives. I am of the strong opinion that if this software were only, well, software, instead of AI, nobody would have had a problem. AI can be a useful tool, and it’s not going anywhere. Wake me when AI completes, from front to back, the entirety of an Oscar Best Picture nominee.
- Corbet has spoken at length about his decision to shoot his film with the the long-out-of-use VistaVision process and cameras. VistaVision was a major innovation, developed by Paramount engineers in 1954, and Corbet decided to use it because his film is set during VistaVision’s heyday. A little bird told me — OK, it was the pre-show that came before my screening of The Brutalist at Alamo Drafthouse — that none other than Paul Thomas Anderson’s next film will also feature VistaVision.
- As much as I loved The Brutalist’s ambitious scope, the overture that begins the film lasts all of maybe 30 seconds. If you’re going to give me an overture, give me a proper one, please.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this with my good friend Tim at the Cedars Alamo Drafthouse. There were exactly two other people in the screening room with us.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
I’ve come to the conclusion that Republicans are evil, but Democrats are useless. The former is determined to help Trump and his oligarch buddies destroy the US government so that they can hoover up as much wealth as possible. The latter are proving themselves — with a few exceptions — to be completely unable to meet the moment in the face of this existential threat to our nation. That’s mostly because they don’t believe in anything other than their own million-dollar fundraisers, influence, and power.
So, you might ask why I’m bothering with this section at all. Practically no one in power is willing or interested in helping us, after all.
But, I read an interesting account — I’m willing to admit it might be completely made up — about a member of the clergy protesting the Vietnam war in the 1970s by holding a candlelight vigil in front of the White House all by himself. A reporter asked the man if he really thought that one person holding a candle in front of the White House would change the country. He replied that he wasn’t so much trying to change the country, but that he was making sure that the country wouldn’t change him.
What is happening right now is not normal, and I’ll say so until Trump, MAGA Mike Johnson, and the rest drag me off to the reeducation camp.