Film review: The Brutalist takes an epic look at art, trauma, and the American Dream
Transfixing acting and big ideas as film tracks an architect-refugee trying to rebuild in the U.S.
Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in The Brutalist.
The Brutalist opens at the Park Theatre and elsewhere on January 10
THE BRUTALIST DOESN’T chronicle the Holocaust horrors that its characters have endured, but focuses instead on the way that trauma haunts them as they try to start new lives after the war.
Homeless shelters, soup kitchens, heroin addictions, dingy brothels: these are not usually a part of American immigrant stories we see on screen. And so the epic and darkly stunning The Brutalist recasts the American Dream as poison. It also works as a larger study of the way educated newcomers, and artists, have to compromise and give up parts of themselves to survive.
The Brutalist starts in chaos—with a man working his way out of a dark and crowded boathold. When architect and concentration-camp refugee László Tóth finally emerges into the light he sees the Statue of Liberty—looking up from his perspective in the boat, she’s upside down.
The opening’s mayhem sets a stark contrast to the architecture that fills so much of the rest of the film: the fictionalized Tóth’s buildings we see later are sleek, block forms that stand strong and reach skyward for light.
Adrian Brody finds a transfixing balance between quiet torment, artistic passion, and resignation as the Hungarian-Jewish Tóth—a Bauhaus-educated talent who left behind several groundbreaking public buildings in Budapest.
We follow him as he works his way off the streets of New York to Philadelphia, staying on an old cot in the back room of his cousin Attila’s furniture store and trying to sell curvy metal loungers to newlyweds in search of colonial-style dining sets. Though its ambitions are sweeping, The Brutalist digs at intimate doubts and loneliness. Tóth yearns silently for his wife who is still trapped in Eastern Europe, and we see him cringe at having to take charity from his Americanized cousin.
The new immigrant’s work in the furniture business leads to a fateful meeting with the Van Buren clan—a ridiculously wealthy family that wants a new library in its Doylestown mansion. Pretentious but charming patriarch Harrison (an era-perfect Guy Pearce) gradually grows fond of the architect’s Brutalist style—or, more specifically, the prestige it brings. And so begins a giant project to build a massive, modular community centre on a nearby hill, with Tóth designing. This is the way America was meant to work: the rich extending opportunity to newcomers in need. But nothing, of course, can be that simple—especially when it comes to money and art.
Tóth numbs his unknown traumas by shooting heroin at night—at one point he hints he broke his nose badly by jumping off a train in Europe. But it’s clear the pain will continue in the new land, whether it’s racist digs by his sometimes sadistic boss, or the arrival of Tóth’s Oxford-educated wife Erzsébet (a nuanced and enigmatic Felicity Jones), who carries her own wounds from the Holocaust.
The Brutalist, replete with footage of racing roadways and train tracks, keeps its momentum over three hours and 35 minutes (with an intermission). It reaches its stylistic zenith in a heady trip to a Carrara marble quarry—in search of a slab for the Christian altar Tóth has been forced to include in the Van Buren centre on the hill. With Van Buren in tow, the trip to the Italian mountains becomes a sort of fever dream—the marble, with its cutout portals, echoing the unadorned look of Tóth’s buildings, and the trip into its caves journeying into even darker realms of trauma.
Corbet shoots it all with the care of an architect designing a complex structure, quiet still shots of vaultlike brutalist spaces juxtaposing with closeups of faces and hands drafting, measuring, and sawing. Elsewhere, handheld camerawork captures the boozy blur of jazz clubs and parties. Sex becomes a recurring metaphor, for real-life impotence, repression, and exploitation. Sometimes Corbet even throws archival marketing films trumpeting the economic promise of Pennsylvania State into the ambitious mix.
At the centre of it all is Tóth, a genius who’s self-destructive and nearly breaking under the suffering he’s witnessed—but who is, like so many of these characters, a mix of contradictions and mysteries. He can be proud and strong-willed. He is an artist faced with the forces of capitalism, an outsider who has escaped fascists only to fall into the hands of striving capitalists who will never accept him.
When a client is surprised by one of his designs, he says sardonically, “I’m not what I expected either.” He is haunted—the film doesn’t even try to imagine the horrors he saw at death camps—but so is America.
The Brutalist ends up grappling with aesthetics and art, with failed socio-economic systems, with the lies America tells itself, and even with ideas of time and space. But it’s also about more intimate things, like the way each trauma fractures the human soul, or the way we’re driven to make a mark. Corbet has built a daring, monumentally-enough scaled edifice to contain all of that and more. 
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