The most impressive film of 2024, up for 10 Oscars this weekend, is The Brutalist. It is an extraordinary achievement—nearly three-and-a-half hours and never less than gripping, beautifully rendered dialogue, stunning cinematography and music, all in support of a re-creation of post-World War II America, striking in its specificity and level of detail. It is an epic vision of America on a genuinely grand scale.
The problem is that it gets everything wrong and is, therefore, in the end, bad. The Brutalist is a failure, even an offensive one, but it’s also kind of magnificent as it goes along. I’ve rarely had a more ambiguous or complex reaction to a work of cinema, and I hope I can get The Brutalist right as I talk about it so that I don’t follow director and cowriter Brady Corbet down the path of misrepresenting my subject.
Corbet is unapologetically aiming for greatness with his gorgeously rendered portrait of a Holocaust survivor and his journey through a mid-century America that is simultaneously welcoming of his talents and viciously destructive to his soul. There are two ways to look at the story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). One is that Corbet is telling a singular tale about a singular fictional Jew who undergoes a singular set of experiences as he comes into contact with a difficult, complex, highly intelligent, and very rich American Gentile with the very suggestive name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (that’s the key general of the Confederacy and three presidents combined in just one moniker).
The other is that he is our guide to the America that emerged after World War II, and Corbet is using his journey through 15 years of American life to offer an innovative and profound view of what this country was really like at the moment it assumed leadership not only of the world but as the great patron of the arts and the artistic future after Europe’s destruction in the war.
If it’s just the story of Toth and Van Buren and their conflicts, and nothing larger, then Corbet is artistically justified in telling the tale as he does. But if this is a movie about America, anti-Semitism, and the depredations of capitalism, then it matters very much that the larger details are correctly and properly rendered. An indictment has to be based on facts and truth. In this regard, The Brutalist is spectacularly—and offensively—false.
First, though, for some praise. It’s astonishing how much minor detail Corbet gets right, even more so when you learn he was born in 1988 and began working on it when he was all of 32 years old. I was struck dumb by the depiction of the sight and sound of an Orthodox Jewish service on Yom Kippur; you might think this is something easy, but given that almost no one has ever depicted such a setting accurately, all credit is due (especially since Corbet is not Jewish). He even gets the name of the Upper West Side hotel where survivors like the movie’s protagonist Laszlo Toth, transported to the United States by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, were placed when they got off the boat—the Marseilles, which is also where Humphrey Bogart was born, by the way.
Even the look of a New York City advertising agency in the late 1950s is wondrous. The verisimilitude and easy authority Corbet displays through the meticulous surfaces and textures of mid-century American life in The Brutalist marks him as an exceptional talent with this, only his third film.
It doesn’t really matter when considering what we’re experiencing when we watch this picture, but it beggars belief that Corbet shot this epic in 33 days with 70-millimeter cameras at the staggeringly frugal cost of $10 million. When you think that Martin Scorsese made Killers of the Flower Moon (which is exactly the same length) at literally 20 times the cost of The Brutalist, you realize the level of waste and self-indulgence Big Hollywood tolerates in pursuit of what its executives foolishly deem to be art. The Brutalist is art. Killers of the Flower Moon is woke nonsense from a self-important octogenarian.
And the artistry doesn’t begin and end with Corbet. His wife, Mona Fastvold, coauthored the highly literate screenplay. Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, as Toth and Van Buren, give performances for the ages. And the cinematography by Lol Crawley and score by Daniel Blumberg are staggeringly fine.
The Brutalist is about how Toth is buffeted by forces larger and more destructive than he as he attempts to survive and thrive in an age determined to lay him low, destroy him, and humiliate him. We do not see what the Nazis do to him; we know only that his face has been wrecked after a wild escape from a transport train to a death camp and that the pain is only tolerable with doses of morphine—later, heroin. We know also that his wife and niece have survived as well but are trapped in their native Hungary behind the Iron Curtain. And we learn that he was a major architect in Berlin, a leading figure in the Bauhaus movement, before the Nazis took over.
He makes his way to Philadelphia and a cousin named Attila, who owns a furniture business. Attila has so desperately sought assimilation that he has changed his name, converted to Christianity, and married a beautiful non-Jewish girl who seems alternately repelled by Laszlo and attracted to him—the first of his encounters with Gentile America. Van Buren’s son comes by to ask Attila to reconstruct his father’s library as a birthday present, and Attila sets Laszlo to the task.
Disaster strikes; Van Buren has a tantrum when the surprise is sprung on him, refuses to pay for the work, and (together with the wayward wife’s deceitful claims) ruins Toth’s relationship with Attila. Toth moves into a Catholic shelter and does manual labor for three years until Van Buren shows up. His library has become the subject of admiring articles in architecture journals and Van Buren decides he wants to offer Toth a commission to design and construct a major building in his late mother’s honor.
The building is made of raw materials, and this is how we are to understand the title; Laszlo the modernist is part of the movement that believed architecture should represent the world as it truly is in its basic nature and even its ugliness. Readers may object to this somewhat caricatured description of brutalism, but here’s the thing: Whatever brutalism as an artistic movement was or is about, “beauty” didn’t enter into it, and deliberately so.
Corbet does not understand this; he has Laszlo slight his cousin’s furniture by complaining about its lack of beauty and speaks in aesthetic rather than workmanlike terms about his giant building project. That’s simply incorrect and seems to suggest he wanted Toth to be a “brutalist” in order to use the title as a complex pun. For the movie is not really about brutalism, but brutality—Van Buren’s viciousness and the monstrousness of the American financial and social elite he represents. He’s the real brutalist.
The project goes awry several times, and in the course of it, we see Van Buren’s generosity and cruelty, his determination and his fickleness, and what it’s like to be the artist at the mercy of an inconstant benefactor. Along the way, Laszlo’s wife and niece make it to America and dislike the life here. Throughout the movie, we see the creation of the state of Israel and hear it discussed; Laszlo’s niece and her husband decide they are going to move there because life in America is intolerable in its capitalist rapacity and soullessness.
“This may be the most Zionist movie ever made,” a producer friend and huge admirer of The Brutalist said to me, and indeed, it does make the case for the need for a Jewish homeland and place of refuge at a remarkable time. But this is the first and largest of Corbet’s wild mistakes and misrepresentations of America. I do not know of a single case of a Holocaust survivor who came to America who made aliyah to Israel because they found America unbearable. Until about 18 months ago, when anti-Semitism exploded outward onto our streets and college campuses, America was a dream come true for Jews and Jewish refugees, Holocaust survivors among them. Certainly, people moved to Israel to join in its grand project, but they were not fleeing America. Mid-century Jews did not need to flee America. There had never been a country as kind to Jews. Ever. And survivors, who had been through the worst of the worst, knew that too.
But the Toths, in Corbet’s bad fictional history, do need to leave America because America literally manhandles and literally rapes them.
The manhandling is done by Van Buren’s son, who ragefully drags Mrs. Toth out of her wheelchair (she is largely unable to walk due to osteoporosis created by wartime starvation) and through his mansion. The raping is done by Van Buren, who gets drunk in Italy with Laszlo, announces Laszlo is weak, hurls him to the ground down a silent alley, and mounts him.
So the message of The Brutalist is that America, seemingly welcoming and kind to those who had endured the world’s greatest evil, was simply wearing a benign face. It was (and maybe is) just as evil as Nazi Germany, although perhaps only on a case-by-case basis.
Corbet’s achievement is undeniable. So is the loathsomeness of his worldview. The Brutalist is an important movie because it makes the case that cinema is still worth arguing over. But it should lose the argument.
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