The Empty Ambition of “The Brutalist”

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Most filmmakers, like most people, have interesting things to say about what they’ve experienced and observed. But the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn’t know firsthand: it’s, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth. As a result, it’s a severe test of an artist, demanding a rich foreground of imagination as well as a deep background of history and ideas. Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is such a film—one that proclaims its ambition by the events and themes that it takes on, boldly and thunderously, from the start. It begins in 1947, with the efforts of three members of a Hungarian Jewish family, who’ve survived the Holocaust, to reunite in America and restart their lives. Corbet displays a sharp sense of the framework required for a monumental narrative: “The Brutalist,” which runs three hours and thirty-five minutes, is itself an imposing structure that fills the entire span allotted to it. Yet even with its exceptional length and its ample time frame (reaching from 1947 to 1960 and leaping ahead to 1980), it seems not unfinished but incomplete. With its clean lines and precise assembly, it’s nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that’s still in search of its characters. (In order to discuss the film’s unusual conceits, I’ll be less chary than usual of spoilers.)

The movie’s protagonist, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a survivor of Buchenwald, first arrives in the United States alone. Upon reaching a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who had immigrated to Philadelphia years earlier, László learns that his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), is also alive, and is the de-facto guardian of his orphaned adolescent niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). But the women, who endured Dachau, are stuck in a displaced-persons camp in Hungary, under Soviet dominion, and the bureaucratic obstacles to a family reunion are formidable. Before the war, László was a renowned architect; Attila, who has a small interior-design and furniture firm, puts him up and hires him. A commission from the son of a wealthy businessman to transform a musty study into a stately library gives László—who’d studied in the Bauhaus—a chance to display his modernist virtuosity. The businessman himself, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), soon adopts László as something of an intellectual pet, housing him at the estate and commissioning from him the design and construction of a massive project—combination library, theatre, meeting hall, and chapel—that László calls his “second chance.” Meanwhile, Harrison’s lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), who is Jewish, lends a hand with the efforts to get Erzsébet and Zsófia into the country.

That bare description covers only the first half of the film, which is divided by a fifteen-minute, built-in intermission. What’s clear from the start is that “The Brutalist” is made solely of the cinematic equivalent of luxury components—elements of high historical value and social import—starting with the Holocaust, American xenophobia, and the trials of creative genius. Corbet and Mona Fastvold, his partner and co-writer, quickly add some other materials of similar weight. The movie features drug addiction (László is dependent on heroin to treat the pain of an injury that he suffered when escaping from captivity), physical disability (Erzsébet uses a wheelchair because of famine-induced osteoporosis), and postwar trauma (Zsófia has been rendered mute by her sufferings). The arrogance of wealth is personified by Harrison, who lures and abandons László capriciously and cruelly—and worse, commits an act of sexual violence against László that wraps up in one attack the rich man’s antisemitism, moralism about drugs, resentment of the artist’s independence, and desire to assert power with impunity. Harrison’s assault, accompanied by choice words to László about “your people,” is consistent with a broader climate of hostility: long before the rape, the architect had experienced bursts of antisemitic animosity from Harrison’s boorish son and Attila’s Catholic wife. Indeed, the capper among “The Brutalist” ’s hot-button subjects is Zionism, the lure of Israel as a homeland for the Tóth family, when, as Jews, they come to feel unwelcome in America.

These themes don’t emerge in step with the action; rather, they seem to be set up backward. “The Brutalist” is a domino movie in which the last tile is placed first and everything that precedes it is arranged in order to make sure that it comes out right. In a way, it does, with an intense dénouement and an epilogue that’s as moving as it is vague—and as philosophically engaging as it is practically narrow and contrived.

The result is a work of memorably dispensed invective and keenly targeted provocations. What Corbet films vigorously is conflict, and there’s some lively dialogue to match. The writing is at its best for Erzsébet, a character who demands greater attention than the movie gives her (and whom Jones brings to life with exceptional nuance). Erzsébet converted to Judaism, studied at Oxford, and worked as a journalist covering international affairs; she also loves László with a radical devotion, sympathizes deeply with his art, and puts herself at great physical and emotional risk to confront Harrison on his behalf. She’s a scholar and a wit, and László has a philosophical bent, yet Corbet avoids any dialogue between the married couple on subjects of regular personal or intellectual interest. For starters, she doesn’t talk politics and he doesn’t talk architecture, even if both subjects would be prominent in their lives and in the times. Major developments in their native Hungary—say, the country’s 1956 uprising—and civic life in America, from the Cold War and McCarthyism to Jim Crow and the civil-rights movement, go unremarked upon. So, too, do the buildings they see (either in Philadelphia or in their next stop, New York), and, for that matter, the books that they read, the movies they watch, the music they listen to, even the people they meet. Erzsébet and László are presented as brilliant and eloquent, and their brilliance emerges in plot-driving flashes, but they’re largely reduced to silence about the kinds of things that make people who they are. Survival of the concentration camps, too, is an ordeal affixed to the pair like an identifying sticker, devoid of any subjectivity and specificity, never to be discussed by them. Corbet’s characters have traits rather than minds, functions rather than lives; they’re assembled rather than perceived.

The film’s impersonality reflects its arm’s-length conception. Its rigid thematic frame—an arid realm of thinly evoked abstractions—carries over into its composition. Though it’s ballyhooed that “The Brutalist” is shot on 35-mm. film, in the classic, cumbersome, and now largely obsolete VistaVision widescreen format, the matériel is detrimental to its aesthetic. There’s very little sense of texture, of presence, of touch: the only images of any vitality are wide shots of landscapes and large groups of people. As for the individuals, they’re defined, not embodied. “The Brutalist” is a screenplay movie, in which stick figures held by marionette strings go through the motions of the situations and spout the lines that Corbet assigns to them—and are given a moment-to-moment simulacrum of human substance by a formidable cast of actors.

To sustain that illusion, Corbet also sticks with a conventional, unquestioned naturalism, a straightforward narrative continuity that proceeds as if on tracks and allows for none of the seeming digressions and spontaneity that would make its characters feel real. (In contrast, in “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s drama of Black teens in a brutal, segregated reform school in the nineteen-sixties, the main characters talk and think freely, whether about books or politics or their immediate experiences; Ross’s script shows his curiosity about their inner lives, and their own curiosity about the world around them.) Corbet’s awkward forcing of his characters into his conceptual framework leads to absurdities and vulgarities—not least in the depiction of László’s first and only Black acquaintance, a laborer named Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), as a heroin addict. (Their trip to a jazz club, with frenzied visual distortions and parodically discordant music, suggests an utter indifference to the art and its cultural milieu.)

Because of the backward construction of “The Brutalist,” what’s of greatest interest is its very ending, which involves an account of László’s eventually reinvigorated career. There, for the first time, the film links his stark, sharp-lined architecture to the coldly industrialized cruelty of the Holocaust. Even as this revelation casts a retrospective light on many of the movie’s plot points (such as László’s obsession with the details of his design for Harrison’s grand project), it merely gets tossed out, even tossed off. The ambiguities that result are fascinating and provocative, though Corbet never quite thinks them through: If László is creating, in effect, architectural poetry after Auschwitz, does this poetry redeem the cruelty and brutality of the concentration camps or reproduce it? Are his designs intended to be commemorative or sardonic, redemptive or oppressive? Is he likening his domineering, plutocratic patrons to his Nazi oppressors? Is “The Brutalist,” with its impersonality and its will to monumentality, meant to be of a piece with László’s architecture? If so, why is the film’s aesthetic so conventional? And if the artist’s ideas are the point, why does Corbet skim so lightly over them? ♦

Sourse: newyorker.com