Review: "The Brutalist" is a monument to America's broken promise
Thoughts on Brady Corbet's sweeping, provocative epic
NOTE: This review contains spoilers for The Brutalist, specifically its ending.
These days, I am inclined to love any movie carrying the kind of ambition Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist brings with it: three-and-a-half hours long, complete with a guaranteed Intermission built into the body of the film itself, its story spanning many years, filmed in a long-dormant format (VistaVision), with images that tower, envelop, and invite us to wander, to inhabit. The Brutalist is a film made in and of a moment – a story about America’s abusive bait-and-switch relationship with immigrants and immigration could hardly be more timely – and yet it clearly desires to stand tall for many decades to come, outlasting its creators much like the buildings protagonist László Tóth designs. The film is not a product, designed to satisfy a market need, but a monument, erected to be continually discovered and re-discovered. Whether or not one enjoys their time inside, one has to tip their cap to the faith and exertion required to build something so all-enveloping.
I enjoyed my walk-through quite a bit. The Brutalist is, first and foremost, strikingly beautiful, and an incredible theatrical experience. I was lucky enough to see it on IMAX, which is, short of seeing an actual film print, the ideal way to take in the film. The VistaVision process – most famously used on John Ford’s The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and later a format of choice for capturing special effects and even Japanese animation (such as the first Lupin the Third film, The Mystery of Mamo) – makes for big, sweeping images balancing immense clarity with real texture and depth of color. Cinematographer Lol Crawley’s compositions are exacting even as they give themselves room to breathe, the whole film serving as an object lesson for why 1.66:1 is my favorite filmic shape: a perfect balance of height and width, a canvas to concentrate on the verticality of the human form while also allowing for dynamic interplay of the horizontal and diagonal axis. Daniel Blumberg’s experimental score continually threatens to become big and anthemic, while never actually crossing the threshold – a fitting reflection of the immigrant journey the film traces. In a big, properly calibrated theater, the low string bass notes reverberate through one’s chest. The Brutalist is not a film for home viewing, at least not as a first impression; it demands one’s time and attention and continually rewards that effort with the kind of carefully-considered aesthetic grandeur that wasn’t always so rare to find in American movie theaters.
The Brutalist certainly carries some pretensions with its audiovisual ambition, but it also walks the walk when it comes to purposefully deploying cinematic grammar. I’m preparing a lecture for my Intro to Cinema Studies students about film narrative and structure, and one of the points I’ll make is the importance of opening images, and how good filmmakers use those first impressions to set the tone and preview their work’s central ideas. The Brutalist opens with a long, unbroken traveling shot following László (Adrien Brody) through the dark bowels of a crowded ship until he reaches the deck, light pours in, and he is overjoyed to see the Statue of Liberty before him. That simple description makes the film sound uncritically patriotic: Lady Liberty shining light upon a poor, tired immigrant, yearning to be free. This is why form matters; the sequence itself plays out in confused, claustrophobic shadow, the score driven by repetitive, plaintive percussion, an air of paranoia and desperation broken not by a triumphal, upright Lady Liberty, but the camera swinging up to see the Statue upside-down and ersatz, from an unfamiliar and ominous angle. The symbol of salvation is askew.
This is, as most great opening images are, the concept of the film in microcosm. The Brutalist is a parable about the schizophrenic relationship America has with immigration: the melting pot promise that undergirds so much of our collective mythology, contrasted with the reality of the way this nation chews up and spits out those that come to its shores believing what we preach. We rely on broken, desperate, and often brilliant people coming to us for the better life we promise, and the process of assimilation we then put them through – if we allow them in at all – can be one of abject abuse and erasure. Much of the film’s action revolves around László constructing a grand, avant-garde community center for a rich patron, Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), and in a film full of potent images, one of the most striking is the Cross of sunlight László creates at the building’s center: a tower with an empty ‘T’ through which the light of dawn, noon, or dusk angle to form a Cross on the chapel alter inside. László is, of course, Jewish, a Holocaust refugee made to include a Catholic church within his first American project in order to secure permits and financing from the local city council. The Cross, like America’s promise, is ephemeral and ethereal, a ‘present absence’ that emerges from a purposeful gap in the building’s structure. At first it feels to László like an imposition; the more we see it, the more it feels weaponized, a trap he has laid not to reflect Christ’s grace, but to reify the illusion that bedevils American immigrants.
I felt, for a bit, that the film became a touch too didactic down its home stretch, a little too verbalized and on-the-nose for a work whose power seemed to come from letting the viewer inhabit its spaces and think for themselves. Then the film’s final line of dialogue blew me back in my seat, its bluntness wholly necessary to reorient our perspective. The line is spoken by the character Zsófia, László’s niece who is mute for much of the film. The story has advanced many years past the present-day action, and she is memorializing her Uncle’s work at a career retrospective. She explains to us that the community center was, indeed, an artistic trap, a reconstruction of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps the Tóth family suffered inside, built as a sort of architectural Trojan Horse for the bourgeois Americans who would roam its halls. She concludes her speech, and the film itself, with these words, apparently once spoken to her by László:
"No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
I find it fascinating that both The Brutalist and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis came out in 2024.1 Different as they are – in tone, in form, in outlook – both are films about architecture, using the design and construction of buildings are stand-ins for larger discussions of art and humanity. Yet their central theses on how we should regard art, architecture, and life are diametrically opposed. Coppola’s film, as I wrote about extensively, posits that utopia lies not in the unity of the final structure, but in a unified drive towards experimentation and exploration on the way there. As Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina says (in the scene where a live human being walks up to the screen and asks him a question):
“[We] have the obligation to each other to ask questions of one another. What can we do? Is this society, is this way we're living, the only one that's available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them: that basically is a utopia.”
These films were, of course, made in isolation from one another; and yet, sitting in the same IMAX where I saw Megalopolis several months prior, I could not help hearing the final line of The Brutalist as a blunt repudiation of Coppola’s thesis. In a world where there is real evil, and where a nation as powerful and capable as America can carry itself with such destructive, damnable duality, what survives is not our dialogue with one another, but the tangible finality of what we do, or do not, leave behind. We do not last long, but the things we create might; and what we manage to build in the time that is given us – be it a literal structure or a political one – is what ultimately matters. It is a lie told to the suffering and the powerless that their toil is in and of itself meaningful.
In its directness, this spoken thesis encourages us to think of The Brutalist like one of László’s buildings. What does the structure of the thing itself communicate to us? What are we told in the ways it guides our vision? In this way, the film’s ending is a potent actualization of its ideas: most obviously for how it suddenly jumps out of the present-tense to see what became of László’s work in the larger sweep of history, but also in the moment directly preceding this time jump.
In the final scene of the present-day action, László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) publicly accuses Harrison of the rape we saw him commit against László earlier in the film. He is outraged, and Erzsébet is forcibly ejected from the premises, but she forcibly refuses to ‘excuse’ him, to recant or back down or in any way ease the discomfort he feels being confronted with his own actions. Harrison then disappears. Not in the sense that he goes away and hides, or becomes a hermit, but literally seems to evaporate from the premises. The film’s climax follows Harrison’s family and employees searching for him fruitlessly, first across his estate, and then through the imposing corridors and prison-like architecture of the community center László built him. Harrison is never found, and everyone who enters László’s building seems to get lost inside.
The scene verges on magical realism. It cannot be read literally, except in the sense that men like Harrison Van Buren do disappear. On the scale of history The Brutalist is about to orient us towards, these kinds of wealthy industrialists do fade away. They take, and they take, and they take some more, and they abuse those they take from, and then they cease to exist, not only in body but in spirit, the ephemera of their fame dwarfed by what is left behind by those who create and contribute, who give something of themselves in their attempts to understand the nature of their time upon this earth.
Just as the community center László builds is constructed to make those who walk its halls feel and internalize some semblance of the horror he and his family experienced in the Holocaust, The Brutalist employs structure to make its viewers understand the cruelty that underpins this country’s treatment of immigrants – and makes a case for their contributions outlasting our abuse. Like many long films with an Intermission, Corbet divides his film into two contrasting halves: In the first, we see the promise America offers and, in László’s opportunity with Harrison, its potential fulfillment; in the second, we see the reality of that promise, which is America leeching off and denigrating those it grants entrance. A rise, an intermission, a fall: this is not a new structure (Lawrence of Arabia divides itself on a similar line). What The Brutalist’s years-later epilogue does is to reverse that perception: To tell us László was in fact getting one over on Harrison the entire time, by using the man’s money to build a structure that was in its essence a repudiation of the kind of power and comfort Harrison and his family embody. And in so doing, László also built a reckoning with his and his peoples’ own suffering in the Holocaust (a suffering America did precious little to alleviate when it had the chance, as we now well know.) America is ultimately rendered small; the film’s characters emigrate a second time, for Israel, after the United States nearly destroys them. But they leave a mark behind, one that outlives the memory of those who abused them, and which extends beyond the borders of the nation-state that exploited them (the retrospective of László’s work is held, pointedly, in Italy).
In the scene where Harrison rapes László, he also hurls invective at the architect, who is a heroin addict; Harrison believes this makes László essentially sub-human. One of the quietest yet most provocative gestures the film makes is its refusal to resolve the heroin subplot. László uses it throughout the film, after being given some on the boat to America to treat the pain of an injury sustained escaping the camps, and administers some to Erzsébet when the pain of her osteoporosis becomes overwhelming; this results in an overdose that nearly kills her, but not in a rupture between husband and wife. Instead, this is the event that precipitates their decision to abandon America for Israel, and Erzsébet’s choice to verbally confront Harrison. While we may imagine László makes a subsequent effort to kick his addiction, this is pointedly not addressed; we leap to the future, after she has passed, as he is old and infirm. No one mentions the heroin usage; we are instead surveying his life’s work in architecture. To history, the drug use is as small as Harrison was; an unfortunate fact of László’s experience on these shores, immaterial to the structures he now leaves behind. Our condemnations, if we are petty enough to make them, are small too; they accomplish nothing.
The Brutalist, as a title, of course has multiple meanings. It immediately refers to László’s brutalist architecture, a real-world mid-20th-century style of modernist design. As the film goes along, it seems more viscerally applicable to Harrison, not only for the physical brutality of the rape he commits, but for the racism he casually spews and the economic exploitation he engages in (when a devastating train derailment upends construction of the community center, Harrison briefly considers consoling the families of the dead workers, before deciding not to admit fault and consult his lawyer first). I think there might be a third reading as well, embedded in the climax of the film’s first shot: that upside down Statue of Liberty, unfamiliar and menacing. If Lady Liberty herself is not a brutalist, then the myth for which she stands certainly is. What else can we call a promise that not only goes perpetually unfulfilled, but which entraps its victims in a cycle of exploitation? The brutality cuts both ways, after all, as America grows smaller, colder, and increasingly insular the further it retreats from that promise, and the more it closes itself to the world.
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The Brutalist didn’t come to Denver in time for me to consider it for my Top 10 Films of 2024 piece, but if I had seen it in time, it probably would have knocked Megalopolis off the list and landed somewhere in the main 10, though I’m not sure where.