Why Watch The Brutalist?

Noted for the impressive list of awards it has garnered and for its cinematic daring, The Brutalist is the story of an architect. Which might make you wonder if you should bother watching it. I wondered: I’m neither a designer nor a builder, and even though someone highly recommended it, the prospect hardly seemed appealing. “Story of an architect,” however, hardly scratches the surface.

Opening in New York City in 1947 (Part I: The Enigma of Arrival), shifting to suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s (Part II: The Hard Core of Beauty), and ending in Venice in 1980 (Epilogue), the film follows the fictional László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a young Jewish architect from the Bauhaus school and a survivor of Buchenwald, as he strives to build a new life for himself and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). Both women are survivors too – of Dachau, where the former was left unable to walk, and the latter traumatized to the point that she has gone mute. 

In lesser hands, these might be grounds for marshaling familiar tropes. Not in writer-director Brady Corbet’s. True, the sadness of the Shoah suffuses and sometimes even saturates it; but this is decidedly not a film about the Holocaust, nor is it primarily about the immigrant experience. To Corbet, it is an occasion to plumb deeper existential questions. The result is a gripping psychological drama and a parable for our parlous times. 

What gives the story its tension is the relentless play of darkness and light, hatred and love, optimism and despair, lingering shadows and fleeting hopes. All these are constantly at war. So are the characters, whose disparate lives, colliding and tangling and then splintering apart, give the film its momentum. 

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. Copyright of Protagonist Pictures. Used with permission.

In specific, László and his family clash with their putative saviors: first, László’s immigrant cousin Attila and his Catholic wife Audrey, who gallantly take him into their modest home but soon sour on him; and second, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an embarrassingly ambitious industrialist with a grand country estate and an even grander ego. After “discovering” László’s genius, he becomes his benefactor, all the while treating him, even if subconsciously, as a feather in his own cap. 

Eventually, Harrison’s admiration for his passionate young protégé is poisoned by jealousy and evolves: first into mere toleration, and then into outright contempt – for László’s infuriating silences, his persistent stubbornness, his inability to shake his foreign accent (despite his social value as an exotic European dinner guest), and last but not least, for the fact that he is… a Jew. And even though the massive project Harrison awards him – a community center built to honor his own late mother – turns out to be the capstone of László’s legacy, it remains an albatross around the architect’s neck for the remainder of the film. 

The conflict between the two men and their families is not just personal – not even just a matter of businessman versus artist. There is that clichéd tug-of-war between the proverbial forward-looking experimenter and the realist who needs to balance the budget and satisfy the planning board. But there is more. There are fundamentally irreconcilable values rooted in competing worldviews that will never meet, let alone mesh. And these are reflected in ongoing battles: between authenticity and dilettantism, cultural integrity and commercialism, simplicity and ostentation, public service and opportunism – between the restless search for some elusive, noble truth and the lust for power and influence. 

Where such ends are pursued individually, each journey simply runs its course. In this constellation, they converge with brute force – especially because of the community center, the Van Buren Institute, as envisioned by László. He wants to erect a brutalist monument that mirrors elements of the concentration camps his family survived – one that will stand for future generations as a lasting admonitory reminder of fascism and its victims. Harrison and his earnest coterie of unimaginative small-town supporters are meanwhile flummoxed. After all, they point out, voicing the obvious, it’s a very unusual design. Very modern. And where, they want to know, are accommodations for a church?

In the end, an ensemble of connected buildings emerges from László’s drawing board – one that satisfies all parties. It is comprised of four wings: a library, theater, gymnasium, and chapel. That is only the first step, of course. All the other aspects a grand construction project entails must still be wrangled over – permits, engineering processes, materials, labor, and safety, not to mention the thorny questions of how much it will all cost, who will pay for it, and how. In the end, the project takes some two decades to complete.

It is not as if László is the moral winner in every fight that ensues, or – when he loses – an undeserving victim. To Corbet’s credit, the story he weaves is more complex and nuanced than that, if only because every character seems to be carrying his or her own terrible burden, playing on our sympathies, and preventing us from moving clear-cut heroes to one side of the chessboard and villains to the other. 

As is often the case in real life, many characters are surprisingly incurious as to the wounds others might bear. For instance, it never even occurs to Harrison’s son Harry that Zsófia’s “awkward” silence is not a refusal to speak, but an involuntary condition – a vestige of the terrors she endured as a child. Moreover (again, as in life), most of the characters insist on suffering separately and alone. No wonder that the weight they carry more often leads to angry eruptions and to bitterness than to understanding. 

In László’s case, it also fuels a secret addiction to heroin, which he uses to anaesthetize himself against the pain of his past. Of course, an opiate is never enough. For this uncompromising idealist – a man driven by the old adage that the world will be saved by beauty – the only thing that can really provide a bulwark against hopelessness and still his hunger for meaning is an outlet for his creative art. He needs beauty to save himself. 

Meanwhile, the viewer is left pondering other quandaries. Who is truly crippled, and who truly whole? What about Erzsébet, whose osteoporosis (the result of wartime malnutrition) has left her wheelchair-bound, but who radiates moral clarity and bravery, even as she ends up squandering her university degree on the one writing job she can find in New York – a women’s column, where she is assigned pieces on things like the virtues of lipstick? Attila, a veritable poster boy for the American Dream, who has successfully assimilated (down to changing his name) but is now trapped in an unhappy marriage and saddled with a struggling furniture shop, where he seems (to quote John le Carré in another context) all but doomed to “permanent confinement in the open prisons of materialism”? Harry? Sure, he’s the entitled scion of a prosperous clan. But isn’t he also the hapless lackey of an impulsive, crude father whose every whim he has been schooled to anticipate and fulfill? And Orazio, the laborer at the quarry in Carrara, Italy, where László joins Harrison to help choose a marble slab for the centerpiece of the chapel? Orazio has spent his entire life in the same mountain eyrie, and yet he possesses more than most: a sense of purpose in his work, the camaraderie of the village dance hall, and joy in the simple pleasures of a morning espresso and a glass of red wine in the evening. In short: contentment with his lot. 

Preemptively heightening our awareness of such questions, Corbet opens the film with the Statue of Liberty, as viewed from the ocean liner carrying László into New York’s Upper Harbor, and a telling quotation from Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” It’s a thought that, by the end of this three-and-a-half-hour epic, is ringing in our ears.  

Given its impressive length, there is ample space to explore other motifs. Mobility is one – the way a car, train, ship, or plane can take us to new places fast, landing us in a completely new world, and maybe a new life – whereas the mind cannot travel as quickly as the body, and may remain stuck in another place for years. Sex is another: as a casual transaction, as a source of guilt, as an expression of marital closeness, and finally as rape – the violent desecration of another’s temple.  

It is this last instance, more than any other, that gives the film its sinister edge. And yet, even it does not seem gratuitous. Humans can be unspeakably cruel, and life’s hardest realities do not disappear simply by turning one’s back on them. At the same time, despite its starkness, the film is leavened with recurring moments of tenderness and sensitivity, even love – or at least, its possibility and promise.

Another haunting motif in the film is the cross that László works into the design of the community center. It is not actually a cross but a cutout in that shape – a symbol defined by negative space. And it appears (when sun passes over the oculus that creates it) on the altar at the center of the chapel. This description implies something edifying; but in reality, the hall is every bit as forbidding and gloomy as the ravine from which its marble was hewn. At first this seems only appropriate, since it is not László’s place of worship, and not his cross. He is, again, a Jew. And yet it cannot escape the viewer that in Christian iconography, the cross is not just a symbol of death, but prefigures resurrection – and that the most tortuous path of suffering may still end in redemption. This idea is borne out by László's own journey; whereas the unsavory Harrison ends up in outer darkness – and not just metaphorically. 

In the epilogue, a frail and aging László is honored at the First Venice Biennale of Architecture. At the opening festivities, Zsófia, now married and living in Israel, and once more able to speak, recounts her uncle’s trajectory from his boyhood on the Adriatic and his survival of the Third Reich to his new beginning in the United States and – after years of toiling in obscurity, undervalued and unappreciated – the flowering of his career. In conclusion, she quotes what she takes to be his philosophy of life:

“Don’t let anyone fool you, Zsófia,” he would say to me as a struggling young mother raising my daughter during our first years in Jerusalem. “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

Provocative in intent, such a statement doesn’t alter the fact that, separated from the road that leads to it, an end has no meaning. And László’s road has been one of struggle – in essence, to be true to himself and to his ideals. These struggles give the film, and life in general, shape and meaning. And yet, if there is no hope of getting to the goal one envisions as their crowning, what is their purpose? What is the point of soldiering through them?

In that sense, László’s advice to Zsófia points to the staying power of hope – to the resilience of the human spirit and the universal instinct to never give up, but to always resist. It is also a reminder of the apostle Paul’s words about faith anticipating “what is unseen” – and of the conviction that no matter how long we may have to settle for seeing through a glass darkly, it is not the end. It is that stubborn optimism that gives László his vitality. And it is that hope which makes this bleak masterpiece bearable.