Everything But the Bathroom Sink: “The Brutalist”

You can’t say that writer/director Brady Corbet lacks ambition. During the three hours and thirty-five minutes of screentime that make up The Brutalist, he shoehorns in such pressing topics as racial and ethnic bias, religious intolerance, drug addiction, sexual perversity, and what it feels like to be an artist in thrall to a wealthy businessman. I’d heard that The Brutalist is the story of a Holocaust survivor, and so it is. But for the Hungarian architect László Tóth, a proud product of Bauhaus training before Hitler came to power, America is not much of an improvement over Nazi Germany. In fact, the movie as a whole turns out to be an unrelieved diatribe against American life disguised as an immigrant saga.

Brutalism, as the film never gets around to explaining, is a school of design that became popular in the postwar years, one that features massive forms and heavy, raw materials like concrete. This is the style of the building project that dominates the film: Tóth’s design for an elaborate community center complete with library and chapel. The ideas are his (and a brief laudatory moment in the film’s epilogue finally makes clear to us how impressive they are). But the money comes from an impulsive and irascible tycoon who likes to be viewed (when it suits him) as a champion of modern art. He’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, and the name itself seems a ham-fisted way of reminding us that he’s American to the core. And, especially in a late-in-the-film scene where he’s truly—and unconvincingly—vicious to his protégé, he can be considered a brutalist too. 

The two main actors in this epic drama deserve praise. Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar back in 2002 for portraying a Polish Holocaust victim in The Pianist, is the ideal choice to play the long-suffering László. Tall and thin, with unkempt hair and a wild look in his eye, he seems about to cry even in moments when he’s genuinely happy. I was also impressed by Guy Pearce as the proud, mercurial rich man who holds László’s future in his hands. (I recall I first discovered Pearce, in a very different mood, as a drag queen in Australia’s 1994 hit, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.)  But in the key role of László’s wife, an invalid who is unable to reunite with her beloved spouse until the film is half over, the usually reliable Felicity Jones struck me as unconvincing. Her accent, for one thing, seems effortful. But she’s also been asked by the script to behave in ways that seem well outside the range of what’s possible for her. 

That’s my number-one problem with The Brutalist. The central characters in the film quite often behave not like human beings but like symbols I could cite many examples: moments of extreme love and extreme hate appear in the story not because they’re consistent with a character’s inner workings but because they make a point that the director (who’s also the writer) deems important. For instance, while I can understand László’s ardent natural sexuality coming to the fore at inappropriate times, what we see on screen always seems to be a message from Corbet to the viewer. 

My moviegoing companion— someone who shared my experience of this long, drawn-out, rather lugubrious story (thank heavens for that intermission!)—commented later that it was much more enjoyable to discuss the film afterwards than it was to sit through it. Yes, The Brutalist can’t be faulted for the strength of its ideas. But I couldn’t get past the clashing of all those symbols.