Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Wretched Refuse: Review of The Brutalist
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
Brutalism: noun
- Architecture. a style of modernist architecture, originating in the 1950s, characterized by exposed structural materials and plain, massive, often steeply angular geometric forms, typically of unfinished concrete. (dictionary.com)
To gain insight into both the immigrant experience and psychological subtleties of Brady Corbet’s monumental epic film The Brutalist, an understanding of the film’s protagonist Laszlo Toth’s (Adrian Brody) obsessions with the brutalist architectural school are helpful. Brutalism is concerned with form and material—the essence of a structure—rather than with decorative facades. It, like so many schools of thought, a rejection of past ideas, values, and standards.
The beginning of The Brutalist starts with a dark screen. Toth is awakened and told to move and move quickly. In a chaotic rush, the camera attempts to follow him as he passes through patches of darkness and light, through throngs of people who are all trying to go to the same place. It is chaos. And then he emerges into the light onto the deck of a crowded ship we realize is an immigrant ship entering New York Harbor. He gazes up to see the Statue of Liberty, not in her upright glory but from his point-of-view, looking up from a crowded deck. She is upside down and skewed in the frame—a perfect metaphor for what will be his immigrant experience.
Laszlo travels to Philadelphia, where he is greeted by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who owns a furniture shop and his wife Audrey (Emma Laird), who is Catholic. Attila tells Laszlo his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) have survived the war. The family was separated when Laszlo was sent to Buchenwald because he was Jewish. Attila has renounced his culture and morphed into a true American. He offers Laszlo, who was a renowned architect trained in the Bauhaus School in the old country, work in his furniture shop.
Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) comes to the store and hires the cousins to renovate the library at his father Harrison Van Buren’s (Guy Pearce) mansion as a surprise. Laszlo produces an innovative design but when the elder Van Buren returns unexpectedly, he flies into a rage and fires the entire crew. His son refuses to pay them. Because Audrey is repulsed by him, Attila kicks Laszlo out of the house.
Three years later, while working as a laborer, Laszlo is sought out by Harrison after the architecture community raves about his library. He invites him to the mansion to a party thrown in his honor and there proclaims that he intends to build a community center in honor of his dead mother. He asks to design the project, and he agrees.
With the help of Van Buren’s attorney, Laszlo is able to bring Erzsebet and Zsofia from Europe where he discovers that because of war-related trauma, Erzsebet is confined to a wheelchair because of osteoporosis and Zsofia is unable to speak. As the Van Buren project progresses, Laszlo battles constantly with contractors seeking to change his design. At one point, Harry derides Laszlo and is lewd to Zsofia, and Laszlo begins to understand his status. After a railway accident destroying building materials, Harrison fires the crew and scraps the project.
Laszlo and Erzsebet move to New York City where he finds work as a draftsman and she writes. Harrison wants to revive the project and rehires Laszlo. They travel to the mines of Carrara, where, during a party, Harrison rapes a drunken Laszlo, calling him a leech and telling him his people are a drain on society. After they return to the States, Laszlo starts to lose it. He rages around the construction, even firing his close friend Gordon. After almost accidentally killing Erzsebet by giving her heroin to soothe her pain, the two move to Jersusalem.
Finally, years later, an aged Laszlo goes to a commemoration of his work. Zsofia relates how his design of the Van Buren Community Center was based on the concentration camps that imprisoned Laszlo and his family—which worked as a way of working through his trauma.
The irony of Laszlo’s masterwork is that while constructing a replica of his tortured past in order to reconcile himself to it, he succeeded only in finding himself imprisoned once more. He is unsuccessful in freeing himself from the hate and prejudice that brought him to American to begin with. The upside-down Statue of Liberty, the inversion of a welcome, is all too telling.
On the surface, The Brutalist is a classic tale of immigration, the story of a broken dreamer coming to American to start again. Laszlo Toth, an extraordinary talent, is given a chance by Harrison Van Buren, a benevolent benefactor. On the surface. The reality of the immigrant experience is one of isolation, fear, loathing, and contempt of the immigrant. It’s a tale we see far too often.
In Bray Corbet’s hand, Laszlo’s attempts to simultaneously fulfill his artistic vision while feeding his inner demons are thwarted by the social structures that originally created them. It’s as if he’s caught in a Chinese puzzle box. No matter how hard he tries to escape his past, the more tightly he is caught.
When she arrives in America, Erszebet is quick to see the condescending and patronizing attitudes of the Van Buren family and is immediately protective of her own autonomy. Laszlo, seduced by Harrison’s flattery, is not. He discovers equality and fairness are illusions and that he is nothing more than one of Harrison’s passing fancies.
The acting in this film is tremendous. Adrian Brody delivers a tour de force performance as Laszlo. Tortured by the past but brilliant and superbly confident of his art, Brody’s Laszlo is a agonizingly marvelous collection of contradictions and oppositions. Just as brilliant is Felicity Jones’ portrayal of the luminous and wickedly sharp Elszebet. Her razor-sharp intelligence leaps off the screen. Finally, Guy Pearce’s Harrison Van Buren is a perfect amalgam of narcissism, rage, entitlement, and obsession. He is Citizen Kane with all the money and none of the talent.
The Brutalist is a monumental, sweeping epic. From the mines of Carrara to the beautiful rolling hills of Pennsylvania to the bright lights of Venice, it is breathtaking. Its deeper, darker vistas of the monuments built to hate and redemption in the human heart are just as awe-inpiring.
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