The Brutalist
The American Dream, writ large and small.
The Brutalist is divided into two parts, each one an echo of its counterpart: a carefully constructed piece of art with foundations and themes that run deep beneath its celluloid surface. The film looms, semi-symmetrical, an account of the rise and fall of a fictional architect laboring over a project that is at once a work of startling beauty and an unwanted monument to the supposed genius of the man who commissioned it. At repeated intervals, we watch as the camera speeds low above a sun-drenched road running from New York to Philadelphia, the future rising up to meet us in ways that seem promising at the outset but that will grow sourly complex the longer we spend on the road with the film.
Shortly after its intermission, as the film picks up its second half, architect Lásló Toth (Adrien Brody) is seated with his family at the dinner table of their benefactor, a fabulously wealthy industrialist named Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). As is the case with most scenes in the film, their time together is beautiful until it takes a sudden ugly turn. Van Buren accuses Toth of not properly assimilating into American society, making a dig about Toth’s accent sounding “like a shoeshine man.” He playfully flips a coin in Toth’s direction, and Toth—hurt, surprised, and caught off guard—is unable to catch the coin before it falls to the floor behind him. Van Buren laughs the moment off, saying, “I’m sorry, I got carried away. Please pass that back.” He’s so fabulously wealthy that nothing has any meaning for him, other than his own money; in Van Buren’s eyes, the only faux pas he’s committed is literally throwing his money away, though the amount is so small that he would never miss it. Toth is twice degraded in the sequence: first when the coin is thrown at him, next when he’s asked to scrounge for it on the floor to return it to its owner. It is a small moment, but a load-bearing one. It’s neither the first nor the last time Toth is made to feel unwelcome.
Lásló Toth is a Bauhaus-trained architect, a Hungarian Jew who’s survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States after the end of World War II. Toth never actually existed, but The Brutalist sketches a portrait so vivid that he might as well have been a real person. Brody embodies him with a spiky energy, from the way he sketches his blueprints to the way he lights his cigarettes. Upon coming to America, Toth must reckon with the pain of repeated rejection, sometimes only minutes after having been told he’s welcome. America may be a land of opportunity, but the price is so high that none of his existence could be considered truly free.
The paradox of American life, posits The Brutalist, is that people are free to do whatever they’d like, provided they have the capital up front. The rich feel an obligation to keep up appearances, and the poor have no means of exercising their freedom except by spending their own limited resources. The power imbalance brings works of art under the control of men who don’t appreciate them, and the artists are left to exercise their own creativity under increasingly unlivable constraints. The film frames this tension as a collision between an artist and his rich patron: one man under contract to deliver beautiful, concrete work, the other with the power to dictate what is and isn’t good by whim and the leverage of his own pocketbook.
The film manages to communicate all this without ever explicitly saying as much. Instead, we watch Toth as he physically moves through the world, and we are given the space to extrapolate his internal feelings from the actions he takes and the work he creates. Much is made of physical touch: hugs, kisses, a pat on the back, touches between lovers, the holding of faces, unwelcome invasions of space. Loving touches are treated as gestures between equals, both participants facing each other at the same height; whenever there’s a difference of affection, or a power imbalance, the image itself is skewed, the powerful looming physically over everyone else.
Above the powerful stand immense physical structures: the skyscrapers of New York City, a massive gantry crane at the dockyards in Philadelphia. Toth’s work is a testament to things that last: a library fitted with tall bookcases that pivot open and closed, a massive building on top of a hill that speaks both to Van Buren’s desire to be remembered and to Toth’s own private feelings. This theme remains unspoken throughout the film, snapping into place with an almost audible click only after Toth can no longer speak for himself. The world will continue to spin long after we’re gone, the film states, but the things we do in life will remain after us. We can choose to take, or we can choose to build.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
The Brustlist is in theaters nationwide now.