Movie Review
The Brutalist
Directed by Brady Corbet
BRADY CORBET’S The Brutalist is his three-and-a-half hour Vistavision biopic on a fictional Hungarian-born Jewish architect who emigrates to the United States for a fresh start on life — use the word “biopic” loosely because Laszlo Toth is nominally based on Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, only Breuer wasn’t a Holocaust survivor, didn’t scrabble too hard for his living, and didn’t fanatically insist on having every detail of his plans carried out exactly. Corbet needed spicier material to work on, hence the changes.
The film is about capitalism, antisemitism, racism (kind of), and the immigrant experience in America; it’s big in almost every sense of the word, down to the expansive 70 mm frame — an extraordinary achievement considering this was shot for a slim $9 million.
I suppose it’s perfectly permissible to pick and choose details from a real-life figure (in this case Breuer) to structure your fictional narrative; so many actual biopics have played fast and loose with historical fact, with varying results. I also suppose Corbet, co-writing with his partner fellow filmmaker Mona Fastvold, can be forgiven for recycling practically every cliché on immigrants, antisemitism, and artist-investor relations known to cinema — this is old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes storytelling, meant to evoke the ambiance of a previous age, not ride just ahead of fashionable trends.
I do have a problem with the fact that despite the title and all the critics citing the protagonist’s kind of architecture that there isn’t really a discussion of what Brutalism is, how it compares to the established style of the time, and why it’s so radical; no real discussion of why said architect’s designs are noteworthy except maybe at the end where we’re given a huge exposition dump at the 1980 Venice Biennale. And no real talk of fellow architects — Brutalism didn’t happen in a vacuum — but I suppose Corbet needs to keep his vision of a lone revolutionary intact.
Maybe the biggest problem I have with the film is inseparable from the nature of the movement it’s — championing? Exploring? Using as a prop? Brutalism emerged in the 1950s as a reaction against the neoclassicism and art deco movements in the 1930s and ’40s. The style makes it a point to use exposed raw materials (taking cue from the French phrase “beton brut” or “raw concrete”) and emphasizes functional and structural forms without any decorative designs.
The challenge to Brutalism is that with exposed building material and no decorations, it’s hard to hide flaws in design or execution — either you get everything right or your air pockets and sloppy joins and unnecessary corners are all there for everyone to see. Likewise with the film — Corbet plays into old tropes about the classic immigrant’s tale, throwing in the classic tortured relationship between an auteur — sorry, architect — and his sponsor, and if there’s anything lacking or clumsy in the telling of the tale the knots and gaps are all the more prominent.
Hence: the lack of specificity when it comes to the characters’ lives. Lazlo Toth (Adrien Brody), his osteoporotic wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), their niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) all survived the camps, but don’t really talk about their experience there. I get that there was trauma involved — Zsofia lost the power of speech because of this — but certainly there can be some way, no matter how indirect, to convey how they feel about what happened, maybe shushing each other when some verboten detail is unintentionally mentioned. Here you get the sense that their memories of the camps are hermetically sealed off, instead of something that simmers underneath, threatening to burst out at any moment. The past here is safely past — there’s no sense that it really haunts them, beyond Zsofia’s silence, and, perhaps, an extraordinarily erotic scene where Erzsebet whispers urgently in her unresponsive husband’s ear, practically begging for sex while she reaches into his pants to grip his phallus (don’t know about you but if Felicity Jones breathed into my ear like that I’d certainly respond — I guess Adrien Brody deserves an acting award after all).
Actually, I can’t quite buy Toth’s struggles. A Bauhaus graduate who has done major commissioned works can’t find a job in Philadelphia? There would have been a network of Bauhaus graduates all over the world — couldn’t he contact any of them? He ends up working in a furniture store, of all places, then shoveling coal — shades of Gary Cooper breaking rocks in a quarry.
Enter Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), your standard-issue wealthy capitalist. Van Buren is obscenely rich and claims to enjoy “intellectually stimulating” conversations but when confronted by real talent and innovation — as when his son Harry (Joe Alwyn) commissions Toth to renovate the Van Buren home library behind his father’s back — the industrialist yells that Toth ruined his private sanctuary and throws him out. It’s only years later after several news articles and complimentary photo spreads hold up Toth’s remodeling as an example of next-generation design that Van Buren reaches out to Toth and apologizes; wouldn’t do to keep the man ostracized when the press obviously admires his work.
Again Corbet hits all the requisite notes without really giving them a fresh spin; Pearce’s rich jerk is appropriately loud, Brody’s architect appropriately respectful, Alwyn’s Harry expectedly slimy (he refuses to pay for the remodeling — Harrison ends up paying Toth himself — later drops a few antisemitic remarks, and apparently has an eye for Zsofia). Brody’s Toth proves to be pigheaded and abrasive when the Van Burens try to cut a few corners by changing his design (You wonder why Harrison’s such a penny pincher when his estate is so opulent, and every other weekend seems to be throwing a party). Toth’s real-life model Beuer was more flexible and more diplomatic about arguing his case — but no, the drama has to be stark, with little nuance (throw in a little heroin addiction to give the otherwise martyrlike hero a visible flaw, and an African-American best friend named Gordon [Isaach de Bankole] for a visible virtue).
Again, the challenge with Brutalist architecture that echoes the challenge this film isn’t quite meeting: with an emphasis on function and structure there’s not a lot of ways your design can go, and the danger is a plainness that falls into banality, even boredom.
Then something startling does happen (skip the rest of this paragraph if you plan to see the film): seeking Carrera marble for the massive gym/theater/chapel Toth is building for Harrison, the two travel to the Carrera quarry to negotiate purchase. There’s a party thrown for the guests and Toth wanders off to shoot some heroin; a drunken Harrison finds him on the ground flying high; the industrialist lowers himself behind Toth and sexually assaults him, calling him “weak” and a “leech” to his ear. And I get that scene — I appreciate how Corbet had to go there, to make the industrialist rapacious in every sense of the word (adds to the unsettling nature of the assault that it echoes the earlier scene of Toth’s wife also whispering in his ear).
What I don’t quite get is the scene soon after, where a righteous Erzsebet walks up to the Van Buren estate and flings the man’s crime to his face in front of dinner guests — that hit me wrong, maybe because I can’t see what Erzsebet thought they might gain from it, maybe because neither of them discussed what happened or how they felt about it beforehand, beyond Erzsebet mentioning she knows everything, from what he had told her (they’d been shooting heroin previously). All that trouble, and she just possibly cost her husband his job? The leap from knowledge to consequent act (“He’s a rapist!” complete with accusing finger) smacks of the worst Filipino melodramas, where the scene is forced on us because it’s time to have a scene (after all we’re pushing to the three-hour mark), not because we’re prepared to the point that the scene feels inevitable.
Oh, there are good things to the film — Jones gives the single best (if underwritten) performance, Pearce is amusingly loud, Bankole quietly persuasive as the Noble Token Black Man Who Loyally Stays by Toth’s Side Till Unaccountably Dropped. Brody I thought gave a subtler performance in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (and the much underrated Hollywoodland) but does well enough here.
The music (by Daniel Blumberg) is percussive, somehow metallic, the widescreen cinematography (by Lol Crawley) appropriately monumental, more big than imaginative except for the opening sequence where the camera flips the Statue of Liberty upside-down — a nicely disorienting image suggesting how all the promises of America will be upended and subverted.
The remodeled library is nicely minimalist; the chair Toth conceives for his furniture store cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) is familiar if one has seen Breuer’s designs, but Corbet manages to convey a sense of how radical it might look in a store window to 1950 eyes. The Van Buren community center, aside from the design of the cross created by the sun crossing the sky (an idea I suspect was inspired by Breuer’s St. John’s Abbey Church in Collegeville, Minnesota) looks disappointingly blocky and plain — Breuer’s actual church seems to soar into the sky while Toth’s just squats there like a molehill atop a mountain (random question: what community center sits in the middle of nowhere miles from the nearest community?); I’d expect a little more from a supposed masterwork.
Corbet does seem to square things away when Zsofia — who has somehow regained her ability to speak — talks at a major retrospective of Toth’s career explaining the significance of that forbidding blockiness, giving us a final little tidbit suggesting the possibilities of art, and how it can help us transcend the miserable circumstances of our lives — now we understand Toth’s ferocious insistence throughout construction that the skylight should extend to a specified length, not a foot shorter. Not an especially clever twist, but satisfying enough.
