By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/3/25 – Currently on screen at Tarantino’s Vista Theatre in Los Feliz and the AMC Century City is Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which won the director the Silver Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. Co-written with Mona Fastvold, the 3 1/2-hour-long film stars a virtuoso Adrien Brody who is accompanied by the swell ensemble cast of Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola, Stacy Martin, Joe Awyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, and Isaach De Bankolé. The Brutalist begins in 1947 when Làszlò Tòth, a Holocaust survivor, Jewish architect, arrives in Philadelphia. Born in Hungary before the war, he was an architect of the Bauhaus school, an architect of works that, in wartime terrain, remain resolutely standing despite the aversion of the Nazis to modernist architecture.
Corbet, 36, who started acting at age 11 and appeared in such indie films as Thirteen,Mysterious Skin and Melancholia, has directed two previous features – 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, about a boy turned authoritarian ruler, and 2018’s Vox Lox, about a pop star in post-Columbine America played by Natalie Portman, both co-written by Mona Fastvold. Cinematographer Lol Crawley, together with the formidable production design by Judy Becker have created in The Brutalist a 70mm tableau that functions as a palimpsest of memories and dreams, realities and archives in little-used VistaVision, which Alfred Hitchcock deployed in films like Vertigo and North by Northwest.
The overture in The Brutalist consists of an alarm, while disturbing sounds accompany a soft female voice-over of a letter, informing a man named László, that she, his wife, is still alive and that his niece Zsófia is with her. She writes that “Soviet boys like us,” which appears to be a good sign, and quotes Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe that they are free.” It could stand as a motto for much of what is to come in The Brutalist. A scene of chaos may make one think of the beginning of László Nemes’s Son of Saul but instead of the gates of hell, it is Lady Liberty, albeit in topsy-turvy rotation, that announces the arrival of once famous Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) on Ellis Island, the entryway to the land of the free.
Part One of László’s journey from 1947 to 1952, called “The Enigma of Arrival” (also the title of VS Naipaul’s autobiographical novel) leads him to Pennsylvania (introduced effectively by a tourist newsreel of the time). Brody’s performance is raw and tender and fragile and heartbreaking. His rawness is matched by Alessandro Nivola as László’s cousin Attila, who picks him up from the bus. The hug the two men share doesn’t feel like a movie hug. It is as though both actors for an instant had sudden access to a deep well of ancestral traumas and we believe at this moment that one man welcomes another, who was believed dead, but actually escaped from the Acheron. Ancient myth suffuses this embrace.
Attila owns a furniture store, called Miller & Sons. He himself is Miller and there are no sons, but “folks here like a family business.” Attila emigrated long before the war and has since converted to Catholicism to please his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). He lets his cousin sleep next to the showroom and you can feel the tension rising between the two, without any over-explanation as is so often the case in other movies that feel the need to spell out everything. It is purely the fantastic performances that give us a sense of the men’s rivalry in the past. The genius architect who studied with the Bauhaus greats in Dessau and the cousin who left home to start fresh in the new world clearly care for each other and despise each other in a variety of ways.
László on the breadline for a soup kitchen meets Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé) and his small son. The two men will be friends for decades. A job offer given to Attila and László from Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to remodel, as a surprise, the library at his father’s country estate, turns out to be life changing. Industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), at first furious about not having been informed, will become a dominating force in László’s life and career. The 1950s are fast approaching and big colorful ties, as though designed by Sonia Delaunay (costumes by Kate Forbes), suit the master of the castle. He is in control and enjoys it.
Attila and his wife perform a wild dance to the song “Buttons & Bows” in their living room. Attila, wearing his wife’s kitchen apron, urges László to dance with her. Tensions peak and motivations remain unclear, which makes the scene extra powerful. We in the audience are put in the position of children who, awoken by the noise, sneak downstairs to watch the adults perform a mysterious dance that is equally disturbing and fascinating. The half-understood is what creates many a memory to be unearthed decades later. “It’s so nice to have a man around the house” is Audrey’s favorite song, according to her husband, and when she tells László that he is not what she expected, he responds that “I’m not what I expected either.”
Family is complicated and László finds himself in a shelter run by a church, together with Gordon, and working on a construction site and shoveling coal. Another song of the time pierces through the repressed. “To Each His Own” we hear, melancholy, sweet, and melodic. “Jedem das Seine,” the German translation, was the motto inscribed at the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Corbet creates the palimpsest this way, avoids the pitfalls, and doesn’t take his audience for stupid. We figure out what we figure out, there is space for an abundance of connections. While Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest stayed in next-door proximity to the death camps to let the horrors unfold in each viewer’s mind, “The Brutalist” transports the impact across the seas in actions, decisions, and buildings made from concrete.
In a diner with bright cherry-red tables and seafoam-green walls, Van Buren Sr. presents his research on László’s past. Flattering German newspaper articles and photographs on his buildings and former career are shown to him and to us. Seeing in print his family name, Tóth, ruminates briefly on the survival of his concrete “brutalist” edifices in Hungary.
In honor of his deceased mother, Van Buren wants László to construct a building for him that is to contain a library, an auditorium, a gymnasium, and a chapel. László, who copes mainly through drugs (at first to ease the pain of a nose injury he suffered), through work, and silence, after a night out is picked up (a cat follows him down the street, a memorable detail that sticks in the mind), to join a reception at the Van Buren mansion. Here he meets Harry’s twin sister Maggie (Stacy Martin), Michael Hoffman, Van Buren’s attorney (who also represents the office of the Vice President of the United States), and his wife, who asks “What was it like during the war?” A question so shocking and big and out of place, in a scene that grows the more complicated, the deeper one thinks about it. Mrs. Hoffman herself converted to Judaism for her husband, as did Erzsébet, who still remains in Europe.
After a 25-minute intermission during which a wedding photo and an exact countdown are displayed, Part Two (1953 – 1960) begins with balloons and the arrival of Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). This section is called “The Hard Core of Beauty,” which is a wide-ranging concept, explored in an essay from 1991 by architect Peter Zumthor (the subject of a new film project by Wim Wenders), who links the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Italo Calvino, Giacomo Leopardi, John Cage, Peter Handke, Wallace Stevens, Edward Hopper and Martin Heidegger to probe the idea of “concentrated substance”, vagueness and precision, spaces and the imagination in architecture.
Dreams, fragments, trains, movement, steel, train tracks, Ayn Rand, the economic miracle, jazz, the UN, the State of Israel – we follow László, his family and his career until a trip to Carrara in Italy, to pick out marble with Van Buren leads to the film’s entombed heart of darkness, the belly of the mountain. Again, a song, “You Are My Destiny,” exposes the acts that follow. Ravaged, pillaged, plundered like the mountain – the figure of Tóth is more like the marble mountain that has been quarried for two thousand years. Tóth’s ordeal has not yet ended. What happens in Italy will set the stage for the film’s denouement. The convictions of Lázsló’s Oxford-educated, strong-willed wife will make known the unspeakable.
Ultimately, the film is obsessed with Lázsló’s grand project of designing and building a building honoring the recent death of the mother of Harrison Van Buren, an immoderately wealthy American businessman. Van Buren wanted a structure that would include a library, a cultural center, a gymnasium, a church, and a memorial. It was envisioned as an immense, unclassifiable construction, a Brutalist masterpiece, a place of modernity for a modern community. The project will absorb 30 years of Lázsló’s life, meticulously observed by camera master Brady Corbet, and it is the story of a man who, like the film’s author, seeks to create art out of the impossible.
Anti-Semitism, hatred against immigrants (who find themselves in the same place the haters and their ancestors found themselves only a relatively short while ago), unspoken prejudice, the whims of the rich and powerful, destructive and self-destructive behavior, methods of control, patronage, money, construction, concrete – all figure into the mix of this long epic film. An Epilogue at the 1980 Venice Biennale, celebrating a retrospective, surprisingly fills in some dates and facts we already felt in our bones. It is a fittingly magnificent way to end this grand movie, whose building material is light. Visually splendid, The Brutalist is describable in the words of its protagonist: “Beauty made of only what is necessary.” Or, from another character’s perspective, “the necessary beauty to tolerate what (or who) one would otherwise despise.”
