Brady Corbet (2024)

The Brutalist is a film of two halves, in terms of quality and literally – I don’t remember when I last saw a new movie with an intermission.  Part 1 ends on a shot of a family photograph, which remains on the screen throughout that intermission; during its last few minutes, the noises of a busy railway station, where Part 2 will begin, are on the soundtrack – the effect is a bit like an orchestra tuning up.  There’s an ‘Overture’, including dramatic action as well as music, before Part 1 and an ‘Epilogue’ after Part 2.  The whole thing runs a total of 215 minutes (including the 15-minute interval).  The two parts have stylish, thought-provoking headings – ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, ‘The Hard Core of Beauty’.  Everything from the opening titles onwards is an arresting piece of design.  The Brutalist, which Brady Corbet wrote with his usual collaborator Mona Fastvold, who’s also his life partner, is scaled and presented as a magnum opus (albeit several of the features just mentioned echo Corbet’s smaller scale directing debut, The Childhood of a Leader (2015)).  Fifteen minutes into the film, I was feeling elated by its ambition and its excellence.  Over three hours later, I was still well disposed:  compared with other high-profile new films around – Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Emilia Pérez, The Room Next Door, Wicked – The Brutalist often seems to be a masterpiece.  It goes very wrong, though.

The Overture describes the arrival in America, soon after the end of World War II, of a Jewish immigrant from Hungary.  László Tóth (Adrien Brody) will be the film’s protagonist.  When he arrives on Ellis Island, László doesn’t know whether his loved ones back home – his wife Erzsébet and their orphaned niece Zsófia – have survived the War.  He visits a brothel in New York before catching a bus to Philadelphia.  He’s greeted there by his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), and with the good news that Erzsébet and Zsófia are still alive, though there’s no immediate prospect of their getting out of Europe.  ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ covers the years 1947 to 1952.  László is a qualified architect; while he’s looking to find a decent job, he lodges with and does bits of design work for Attila, who owns a furniture business.  Its name, ‘Miller & Sons’, is explained in a sharp, funny early exchange between the cousins:

László               Who is Miller?

Attila                 I am Miller.

László               You are Molnár.

Attila                 Not anymore.

László               No Miller, no sons.

Attila                 Folks here like a family business.

If László is surprised by the degree of Attila’s assimilation, his American wife Audrey (Emma Laird) reckons that her husband, who came to the US well before the War, ‘still doesn’t sound like any American I’ve ever met’.  Attila has echt-American contacts, though, including Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), son of Harrison Van Buren, a shipyard owner and steel magnate.  Van Buren Jr commissions Attila and László to renovate Van Buren Sr’s precious library as a surprise for his father, who’s currently away from home.  When Harrison (Guy Pearce) returns, accompanied by his aged, ailing mother, he’s incandescent to find the library transformed – Art Deco shelving units replaced by conceptual shelving, a stained-glass dome by a clear circular disc.  He fires Attila and László on the spot, and Harry Lee refuses to pay their fee for the work.  The debacle at the Van Buren residence signals the end of László and Attila’s relationship but isn’t its sole cause:  Audrey also falsely accuses László of making sexual advances to her.

The action moves forward three years.  László is now involved in building work, though of the most basic kind: we watch him shovelling gravel into a cement mixer.  He lives in charity housing alongside single father Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé) and his young son, whom László first met and befriended in a soup kitchen queue, soon after arriving in Philadelphia.  The two men also work together and it’s Gordon who tells László he has a surprise visitor at the building yard.  This is Harrison Van Buren, in a very different mood from the first time they met:  he’s delighted to have tracked László down and shows him a copy of Look magazine, open at a feature on ‘Harrison Lee Van Buren – The Forward-Thinking Man’.  The subject of the article is photographed in the library that László designed and which, Van Buren tells him, has been rapturously received in the architectural community.  László belatedly receives his fee for the library renovation.  The money is spent on heroin, to which László is now addicted, but that second encounter with Van Buren is the start of the film’s key relationship.

The gravel-shoveller is soon the star attraction among the guests at Van Buren’s grand Christmas party, where the host commissions László to design and build a complex, dedicated to the memory of Van Buren’s late mother, on land in the nearby borough of Doylestown:  the Margaret Lee Van Buren Community Center will comprise a library, a theatre, a gymnasium and a chapel.  László, with Gordon as his sidekick, has soon swapped charity housing for more comfortable accommodation on the site of the new development.  At the Christmas party dinner, László sits next to Van Buren’s lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), and his wife (Maria Sand).  The conversation turns to László’s own wife who, like Mrs Hoffman, converted to Judaism when she married.  It’s Hoffman who will pull strings to arrange Erzsébet and Zsófia’s passage to America.

There’s plenty of splendid stuff in the first half of The Brutalist, including the very start, as Brady Corbet cuts between Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), under interrogation by an unseen border officer somewhere in Europe, and László’s Atlantic crossing.  The two settings are linked by tenebrous visuals (Lol Crawley’s cinematography will be predominantly dark toned throughout), a claustrophobic atmosphere and a voiceover, in which Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) tells László of her joy that he’s alive and about her own and Zsófia’s situation.  (These words are the text of the letter Attila will receive in Philadelphia, ahead of László’s arrival there.)  At the same time, the introduction’s two halves are strikingly different.  The camera is ominously still during Zsófia’s interview, always on the move in the shipboard sequences until László emerges from the chaos, and darkness is replaced by momentarily bright light, when the ship reaches the Port of New York.  An upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty is both a consciously, conspicuously bravura image and a culminating piece of disorientation.

László’s progress through the ship, as if through a tunnel, visualises a larger idea – of Jewish refugees getting through Holocaust blackness into the daylight of sanctuary – but the episode also shows the protagonist propelled forward, almost involuntarily, as part of the crowd of passengers.  That sense of propulsion will be repeated in a series of shots whose point of view is that of a moving vehicle carrying László, usually on the road to his chief destination/destiny of Philadelphia.   He’s bleary-eyed on his first journey there; the mood changes instantly and excitingly as Attila welcomes him.  The early Philadelphia scenes convey, as well as widespread urban poverty, not just the foreignness of László’s new surroundings but also Attila’s materially more comfortable yet somehow alien life, hinted at in the miscellany of furniture and fittings on display in the Miller & Sons showroom.  (Attila and Audrey live above the shop; László’s bedroom there is a storage closet.)  Corbet’s evocation of the social and political background to László’s early years in America is refreshingly specific (especially if you happen to see The Brutalist, as I did, hot on the heels of A Complete Unknown, with its lazily predictable approach to historical context).  Corbet uses news archive about the coming-into-being of the State of Israel; a snatch of a radio news report on the US mid-term elections of 1950; clips from contemporary promotional material produced by the Pennsylvania Department of Commerce, to advertise the benefits of living and working in Philadelphia.  The narrative is consistently well supported by Daniel Blumberg’s imposing, melancholy score.

‘The Enigma of Arrival’ has a dual narrative arc – towards the realisation of László’s design talents and his reunion with his wife and niece.  By the end of Part 1, the Doylestown project is underway.  At the start of Part 2 (1953-60), László, the Hoffmans and Maggie Van Buren (Stacy Martin), who is Harry Lee’s twin sister, are gathered on a Philadelphia railway station platform as the train carrying Erzsébet and Zsófia pulls in.  László is immediately shocked to see his wife in a wheelchair:  she explains that she has osteoporosis (‘from the famine’) and tries to reassure him that her dependence on the wheelchair might not be permanent.  It’s soon clear, however, that Erzsébet’s physical condition isn’t the only problem in the Tóths’ marital relationship.  (An interesting coincidence that one of the marriage partners is played by Felicity Jones, whose breakthrough role in cinema came in Like Crazy (2011), the story of two young lovers’ lengthy enforced separation and struggle to make their relationship work once the separation ends.)  While Erzsébet can’t walk, Zsófia still doesn’t speak – she’s as mute as in the opening interrogation scene.  This won’t be permanent either:  Zsófia’s lack and eventual discovery of a voice turn out to be symbolically significant.  As such, they’re unfortunately symptomatic of the overall direction The Brutalist, Part 2 will take.

Disagreements between László and the other professionals (Michael Epp, Jonathan Hyde) involved by Van Buren in the Doylestown development make for less imaginative drama than in Part 1 but they’re an effective means of illustrating Lászlo’s temperamental nature and others’ prejudices against him.  It’s when Corbet starts to move into more blatant yet more pretentious censuring of the Van Burens as examples of entitled white America that The Brutalist starts to lose its rhythm and come undone.  From an early stage of Part 1, Corbet dwells on scenes and conversations.  The weight given to some of these is puzzling yet understandable.  You wonder how important such scenes can be in the overall scheme of the film; yet, as individual scenes, each one is compelling – thanks to the actors and the subtext – so that you’re grateful to have them.  A scene that will matter plenty in plot terms is Lászlo’s evening in Attila and Audrey’s apartment.  After dinner, the three continue to drink and dance together; Attila falls asleep; there’s a tense, erotically charged conversation between Lászlo and Audrey before he takes his leave, thanking her for dinner.   It’s what happens, and doesn’t happen, between Lászlo and Audrey while Attila is unconscious that her complaint to her husband about Lászlo coming on strong, and brings about the rift between him and Attila.  Deep into Part 2, Audrey’s actions will be angrily recalled by Lászlo as typical of antisemitic/anti-immigrant prejudice:  ‘The people here, they do not want us here’, he tells Erzsébet, ‘Audrey, Attila’s Catholic wife, does not want us here – we are nothing, worse than nothing!’  There’s a gulf between the satisfying complexity of the drunken dancing episode as it’s happening and Lászlo’s later, overwritten tirade about what it signified.

When Corbet starts to hurry things, the result is often clumsy melodrama.  At an outdoor party on the Van Buren estate, privileged, fatuous Harry Lee informs Lászlo that, though Zsófia is ‘very lovely to look at and as much as we all dream of having a little bird that keeps her trap shut’, her silence ‘comes off like a rude affectation’; and, when Lászlo protests, that ‘I didn’t say I wanted to slip my prick into her’.  (The same conversation ends with Harry Lee telling Lászlo that ‘We tolerate you’.)  Moments later, Corbet shows Harry Lee and Zsófia walking back from the woods, she unhappily adjusting her skirt.  Harrison Van Buren suddenly pulls the plug on the Doylestown project after a train derailment, which results in a major loss of materials and the expectation of hefty legal costs, including compensation to workers injured in the accident.  The action then jumps forward to 1958 and New York City, where Lászlo is working as a draughtsman in a firm of architects and Erzsébet has resumed a journalistic career of sorts (she has a supposedly infra dig job writing for a women’s magazine).  Corbet cuts to the couple dining in their apartment with Zsófia, now married to Binyamin (Benett Vilmányi).  Zsófia is pregnant with their child and very much able to speak.  She informs her aunt and uncle that she and Binyamin are going to live in Israel – that doing so ‘is our obligation … Our repatriation is our liberation’.  Erzsébet is already disappointed by this news when Lászlo chooses to inform her, over the same meal, that the Van Buren project is resuming (sans library element) and that he’s returning to Philadelphia.

Harry Lee’s crudely implied violation of Zsófia is starters to the main sexual assault course, which takes place in Italy, where Lászlo and Harrison Van Buren go to buy marble for Doylestown from mines in Carrara.  The evening before their return to America, Lászlo gets drunk and Van Buren anally rapes him.  This scene is probably The Brutalist’s low point.  The physical act on its own is a crass metaphor for immigrants in America getting screwed by their adopted country.  To make matters worse, Corbet has Van Buren tell his victim, as he prepares to carry out the assault, that:

‘It’s a shame seeing how your people treat themselves.  If you resent your persecution, why then do you make of yourself such an easy target?   If you act as a loafer living off handouts, a societal leech, how can you rightfully expect a different result?’

‘The Hard Core of Beauty’ never recovers from this gross misjudgment.  Once the action returns to America, Corbet ratchets up the melodrama.  Traumatised by the incident in Carrara, László is an increasingly loose cannon on the building site.  He’s still addicted to heroin; Erzsébet is in agony from osteoporosis; her husband nearly kills her by administering heroin to ease her pain.  A bit later, Erzsébet has swapped her wheelchair for a walking frame and visits the Van Buren mansion where the family and their guests, a couple of Harrison’s business associates, are at dinner.  She brands Harrison a rapist, in the presence of his children and colleagues.  Harrison protests, Harry Lee drags Erzsébet out of the dining room but the damage is done.  The guests leave.  Harrison exits the room and the film.  Harry Lee and Maggie call out and search for their father in vain.

Although it goes without saying that none of Corbet’s cast is well served by what happens in ‘The Hard Core of Beauty’, what Adrien Brody has already achieved in the film is marvellous.  Brody’s Lászlo is the embodiment of a man in pain – that is, in physical discomfort and mental distress.  His broken nose is central to who Lászlo is.  It’s not just a Jewish nose but a broken Jewish nose.  He explains the injury to Attila and Audrey, without saying where exactly it happened:  ‘I jumped from a rail car.  A few moments later there was a loud cracking sound so I thought I had been shot in the head – but I had merely run into the branch of a tree. No one was running after’.  He adds that he takes something for the pain resulting from the injury, an early indication of his susceptibility to narcotics and alcohol.  Brody leavens soulful despair with a repertoire of more galvanic qualities:  he gives Lászlo a short fuse, quicksilver emotionality and, though the opportunities for this are fewer, wonderful humour.  He’s tremendous in the first meeting with Attila in Philadelphia, especially when he learns that Erzsébet and Zsófia have survived.  Lászlo has some English when he arrives in America but he speaks it cautiously in the presence of others.  One of Brody’s funniest moments comes as Lászlo, standing at his shaving mirror, gets his tongue round ‘Peter Piper picked a peck …’

The supporting performances are more variable.  As with The Room Next Door, in which his contribution yielded one of the few strong scenes, Alessandro Nivola’s appearance in The Brutalist is all too short.  It’s amazing how detailed and convincing a character he creates in the screen time that he has.  Felicity Jones also does fine work in her much larger role.  I especially liked her in Erzsébet’s first meeting with the Van Burens:  socially gracious, Jones cloaks Erzsébet’s irritation at being patronised so that her hosts don’t notice this, but we do.  It’s unfortunate that Gordon, near enough the only Black person in evidence, is an almost entirely subservient figure; Isaach de Bankolé, not surprisingly, can do very little with the role.  Joe Alwyn, apparently a bit more fleshy than usual, looks the part.  He ably captures Harry Lee’s essential indolence but you can hear in Alwyn’s line readings the actor’s disapproval of his character.  As Harrison Van Buren, Guy Pearce is a bigger problem.  It doesn’t help that, in his very first scene, he has to throw a wobbly:  when Van Buren yells at Lászlo and Attila, we seem to be listening to a naturally unshouty actor forcing sustained high volume.  After this, Pearce settles down into a conscientious performance though he never seems inside the man he’s playing – and the effect is sometimes a bit hammy.  Speaking to Erzsébet about her husband, Van Buren explains that:

‘As persons of unique privilege, I have always thought that it is our duty to nurture the defining talents of our epoch. I possess no such talent whatsoever!  Truth be told, I am terribly emulous of individuals like him.’

Van Buren is no doubt meant to come over as pompous and windy here but Pearce’s delivery is awkward even so – the orotund cant sounds like a foreign language to the speaker.  In the end, though, the writing of the role is more defective than Pearce’s playing of it.  Corbet and Fastvold lose interest in Van Buren as a human being:  he turns into a mouthpiece for moralising xenophobia.  Are we meant to infer, from his apparent mother complex and from what he does to Lászlo in Italy, that Van Buren is a closet homosexual?  Probably not because the rape is intended to be a metaphoric act.

The Epilogue to The Brutalist takes place in Venice in 1980, the occasion of the first architecture Biennale, which celebrates László’s work.  He’s now grey, wheelchair-bound and, as far as we can tell, unable to speak.  Middle-aged Zsófia (Ariane Labed), accompanied from Israel by her own daughter, is László’s voice in Venice, paying public tribute to him and the now-deceased Erzsébet.  Zsófia’s speech is preceded by a montage of László’s buildings, from his early designs in Hungary through to ‘the Van Buren Institute outside of Philadelphia’.  Her speech also makes clear that László’s post-war brutalism was informed by his wartime experience – as a prisoner in Buchenwald.  In designing the Van Buren Institute, he:

‘… re-imagined the camp’s claustrophobic interior cells with precisely the same dimensions as his own place of imprisonment, save for one electrifying exception; when visitors looked 20 meters upwards, the dramatic heights of the glass above them invited free thought; freedom of identity. He further re-imagined Buchenwald and his wife’s venue of imprisonment in Dachau on the same grounds, connected by a myriad of corridors …’

Corbet gets plenty of information into this short postscript – it’s the film’s first mention of either Buchenwald or Dachau – but leaves a good deal unexplained in the story.  What became of Harrison Van Buren?  How come – in view of what had happened between them (and especially if Van Buren committed suicide in light of Erzsébet’s revelations to his family) – László stayed on board with the Van Buren project?  And László’s rise to international pre-eminence as an architect seems to have been meteoric. The Van Buren Institute was, as Zsófia tells the Venice audience, ‘his first American masterpiece’ and not completed until 1973.  His physical condition in 1980 strongly suggests that László’s working life is already over.

When he and László are first commissioned to redesign Harrison’s library, Attila tells Harry Lee that in Hungary his cousin designed a ‘whole city library’.  Partly because László’s career prospects at this stage are so forlorn, Attila’s remark conjures up a sense of all the Jewish professional lives savagely interrupted, if not completely destroyed, by the Nazis.  The remark thus seems to be part of The Brutalist‘s  implication that László is a representative figure but as the film goes on, he becomes less an exemplar of a particular area of creative endeavour and more a typical victim of establishment America’s exploitation.  We learn, from one of László’s early conversations with Van Buren, that he studied at the Bauhaus. Some of those actually associated with the post-war brutalist movement in architecture were indeed Bauhaus-trained but the place surely wasn’t seen as the seedbed of brutalism (as distinct from functionalism).  And while Corbet is entitled to posit that his hero’s aesthetic is informed by his Holocaust experiences, László is, in that respect too, untypical of designers of American brutalist buildings.

It’s striking that The Brutalist’s shooting script includes several uses of the words ‘functionalism’ and ‘modernism’ (or forms of those words) whereas ‘Brutalist’ appears only as the screenplay’s title.  Corbet and Mona Fastvold play with ideas around brutalism – and brutality – for dramatic effect.  By the end of the film, you even wonder if the title character is László Tóth at all.  Is it, rather, Harrison Van Buren who eventually brutalises László?  The script gives László, through Zsófia, the very last word:  ‘”Don’t let anyone fool you, Zsófia”, he would say to me as a struggling young mother during our first years in Jerusalem, “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”’   Yet you’re more likely to come out of the film with Erzsébet’s parting shot to the Van Buren family ringing in your head:  ‘This place is rotten … this whole country is rotten’.

If that is the moral of Corbet’s story, it’s both disappointing and problematic.   Disappointing because it’s familiar – and also because it leads you to see what you had thought were strengths in The Brutalist as no more than means to the end of skewering the American Dream.  Although Corbet constructs an absorbing picture of post-war Philadelphia, you come to realise it’s in the film as the city of the founding fathers, the US Constitution, and so on.  When László, Audrey and Attila dance together, Dinah Shore’s version of ‘Buttons and Bows’ is on the record player:  it seems a good and amusing choice, the song’s perky rhythm at odds with the trio’s tipsy movement.  Because of what subsequently happens to László, you can’t help assuming Corbet chose ‘Buttons and Bows’ because of the ‘irony’ of its opening lines, ‘East is east and west is west/And the wrong one I have chose …’  That’s where the problematic aspect comes in.  White American mistreatment of minorities has been and no doubt will continue to be fertile territory for film-makers.  Rightly so, but there’s a huge difficulty in suggesting that a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps made a bad choice crossing the Atlantic.  That’s what Brady Corbet seems to do in this impressive but frustrating film.

24 January 2025