Photo: A24
The hero of The Brutalist, László Tóth, never existed. But the film’s first half is so rich and sure of itself, I was sure the Jewish Hungarian architect—who trained at the Bauhaus and, after surviving the Holocaust and immigrating to the US in 1947, became a leading figure among the brutalists—was a real person. I even insisted upon it to my seatmate at the intermission at the New York Film Festival. But, no.
There is a László Tóth in art history, though. Like the architect in Brady Corbet’s sprawling film, the real-life Tóth was also Hungarian and also obsessed with Carrara marble: He’s the guy who, after claiming he was the messiah, took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peter’s in 1973. I don’t want to suggest that Corbet is likewise suffering from a messiah complex, but in The Brutalist he definitely takes a few swings at various gods, living and dead, specifically Paul Thomas Anderson and Orson Welles. His sometimes brilliant but ultimately flawed film is stuffed with homages to both directors, and probably scores of others I was too drained to recognize. (The most visually stunning passage, set in Carrara, where the architect goes to find the perfect block of stone for an altar, was—for me—all about Fellini.)
The Brutalist, which Corbet also wrote, with Mona Fastvold, his romantic partner, is an impressive movie—especially considering that it was supposedly made for less than $10 million. And lot of it even works. From the first minutes, the director takes a cue from his title and drops us into a visual tumult. Tóth (Adrien Brody) wrestles his way off a dark, crowded ocean liner and peers up at the Statue of Liberty. Or down at her—she’s upside-down when we first glimpse her, then rotates sideways. Artistically and politically, The Brutalist intends to challenge.
The movie was shot in 70mm Vista Vision, so do try to see it on the largest screen you can find. It’s beautiful, with a gorgeous period production design by Judy Becker, ravishing photography by Lol Crowley, and a jazzy, suitably bombastic score by Daniel Blumberg.
Despite its almost four-hours-length—which Corbet leans into, using 1950s-style title cards to announce an overture and an intermission—the film flies along briskly as we follow Tóth from Manhattan to Philadelphia. There he gets a generous welcome from his cousin Attila, who came over decades earlier. After various ups and downs (mostly downs), Tóth meets the man who will become his patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The bulk of the movie is spent charting the tortured relationship between these two difficult men.
Along the way, it examines personal questions of addiction and self-sabotage, sexuality and fidelity, genius and pride, as well as a host of Big Topics: immigration and assimilation; antisemitism and the Holocaust; Zionism and the birth of Israel; commerce and art; capitalism, labor, and wealth. Plus American race relations—while they’re dealing with all of these other questions, Corbet and Fastvold also make Tóth a bit of a white savior.
The Brutalist is a big, bold movie, openly courting comparison to There Will Be Blood, The Master, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Citizen Kane. But after the intermission—at least for me—it all falls flat, disintegrating into melodrama as Tóth’s tale takes a series of implausible turns. Worse, the filmmaker wraps up the whole affair with a heavy-handed and mostly superfluous epilogue. We’ve spent almost four hours with Corbet’s tormented genius—he should trust us to come to our own conclusions about what it all means.
When the movie works, credit mostly must go to Brody, who hasn’t had a role like this since the last time he played a Holocaust survivor, in The Pianist, for which he won an Oscar. Brody is an unlikely movie star, with the frame of a praying mantis and a drawn, hawkish face, yet he radiates charisma. Tóth’s angry intensity drives the film; he’s a dark, demented man, stewing in his secrets.
Pearce is also terrific playing against type in a hybrid role: His bellowing, malaprop-spouting solipsist is part villain, part comic relief. Though Van Buren, who plucks Tóth from obscurity, shoveling coal in a Philly railyard, professes to want only to advance the arts, his ultimate desires are, of course, more brutal. Felicity Jones is less successful as Erzsébet, Tóth’s long-suffering wife. She has the thankless task of shepherding the plot through its tortuous second-half twists; her broad, generalized Eastern European accent doesn’t help any of it feel real.
SPOILER ALERT!
AND A DIGRESSION INTO ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY!
YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
The critics have mostly been laudatory, and Corbet won the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival. Perhaps the jury there was seduced by the film’s epilogue: Set at a biennale in the city, it features an overlong and totally needless slideshow of its most picturesque sites. Summarizing the passage in Tóth’s life the film isn’t interested in—his later career and celebrity—this postscript spells out the meaning of the fictional man’s work, which was apparently the central mystery of the film.
The Brutalist is ultimately a movie about architecture, specifically the birth of brutalism, which produced some of the most reviled buildings in history. (You won’t hear me run it down. Sure, some of the hulking concrete piles of the 1960s seem today, well, brutal; but I’m not sure there’s a more striking modern building than Paul Rudolf’s Art and Architecture building at Yale.) I’m going to guess that Corbet is no fan of the style.
And there is a real architect lurking behind the scenes: Marcel Breuer, who was, like Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian genius who studied at the Bauhaus and later designed metal tube furniture that reminded people of bicycles. But Breuer’s story differs from Tóth’s in a couple key respects. He assimilated in Germany in the early 1930s, when he married a gentile. And, more important, he escaped the Holocaust by coming to America later that decade to teach with Walter Gropius at Harvard. Breuer came to brutalism via Corbusier, who spread the gospel of béton brut, or raw concrete, admiring its earthy corporeality.
In Corbet’s version of this story, it was not a new appreciation for the beauty of modern materials that inspired brutalism, but the death camps of the Third Reich. But long before the epilogue, we’ve spent enough time looking at Tóth’s unfinished masterpiece, a community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to guess where he drew his model. The bleak, cruel-looking factory-fortress he designs for Van Buren is set on the crest of a hill and topped with a what look to be a pair of great smokestacks. But most of the building is a warren of airless spaces burrowed many stories down, into the dank, dark rock below.
No doubt, the horrors of the World Wars and particularly the Holocaust shaped the dark spirit of modernism; I just wish Corbet had told that story more crisply—and left the poor brutalists out of it. Few viewers will be annoyed (like me) on behalf of the architecture Corbet maligns. But many will object to its length. The Brutalist is a fascinating, provocative, and beautifully realized film with a terribly shaggy screenplay that takes it at least 90 minutes past being a masterpiece.
The real lesson to be drawn from Breuer, Rudolf, Corbusier, Van der Rohe, and Gropius: Less is more.