The Brutalist is not about brutalist architecture or the school that created it. Yes, the main character is an architect, and his work appears to be in that style, but for Brady Corbet, the director, and his co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold, brutalism is a metaphor for American postwar society.
The architect, László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, is a Hungarian Jew who survives Buchenwald and goes to the United States to find work, anxious for his wife and niece who are still in some danger in Europe. Brody is the movie’s dominating presence, playing a melancholy wreck of a man devoted to his singular artistic vision. It calls for the epic treatment, and the film’s impressive production design and three and a half hour running time seem to give us that, but there’s always a darkly satiric and ironic undertone. Why, for instance, name our main character after a guy who smashed up Michelangelo’s Pietà?
After a lengthy set of circumstances that recreate the density of a novel, László crosses paths with a wealthy patron: Harrison Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce. On the one side, there’s the raw temperamental artist, on the other, the American business tycoon. The contrast is pointedly comic. Everything Van Buren says is pretentious self-important twaddle, and Pearce plays him with such robotic earnestness that you have to laugh, since who could take this seriously? This satirical side of The Brutalist hasn’t gotten the attention it should.
The contrast between Tóth and Van Buren makes the film reverberate beyond our desire for narrative. Corbet and Fastvold are interested in the way a film depicts our experience. László’s own kind of craziness colors most of what we see. The trauma of the war has set his face against these rich WASPs who only tolerate him as a stimulant for their own useless aspirations. In the second part (there’s an intermission) László’s wife, played by Felicity Jones, shows up, and the emotional tone shifts into dream-like psychosexual drama. Crippled by starvation in the camps, she seems to know how to interact with these rich Americans better than László, but behind that she’s angrier. In part two, Van Buren stops seeming so funny. The power that he wields with his money is utterly disproportionate to any quality of his character. He is a far worse person than he could ever admit.
The Brutalist has a score by Daniel Blumberg that is used like one of those all-enveloping scores in the studio era, the rhythms calibrated to the editing. It’s not triumphal music; it’s dark and moody, at times almost sinister. There are also quite a few popular songs from the 1940s and ’50s which are part of the characters’ environment.
Many of the critics, even the ones who like the film, don’t seem to grasp Brady Corbet’s method. The film’s “epic saga” presentation doesn’t have the naive sincerity we expect from the form. In fact, it assumes a critical stance, and that’s one thing we’re not used to seeing in a production of this size. Consider the epilogue, celebrating the opposite of what Tóth was actually about, and ending with a jaunty piece of 1970s disco over the credits.
The Brutalist is an audacious and defiant discrediting of our romantic preconceptions about artists and heroes. It should be seen and believed in.
