The Brutalist (2024)
QFS No. 167 - The invitation for February 26, 2025
The Brutalist will be our longest QFS film selection, a full three minutes longer than Ben-Hur (1959, QFS No. 35). That’s right, this three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute nominee for Best Picture rivals last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, QFS No. 126) for length, coming at just nine minutes longer. I’m in for it! It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff! Who of you will ride with me off this cinematic cliff into the great glorious unknown?!
And by that I mean – watch The Brutalist this week and discuss it with us in a civilized manner.
The Brutalist (2024) Directed by Brady Corbet
Reactions and Analyses:
We’ve seen countless films detailing the horrors of the Holocaust and mass genocide of the Jewish people enacted by the Nazi regime in Germany in the early 20th Century. From true first-hand accounts to artistic recreations, the depths of human cruelty and the bravery of those who were able to survive or help others survive have been portrayed in every genre over the previous 70 years or so. In fact, a couple decades ago, Adrian Brody, star of The Brutalist, previously played Wladyslaw Szpilman, the true story of a survival and heavily influenced on director Roman Polanski’s own escape from Poland in The Pianist (2002) a couple decades ago.
Rarely, however, do films portray what happens afterwards, how someone attempts to live after surviving such horrors. The messy reintroduction into society having lost everything but his or her own intelligence and wits. One of our QFS discussion group members brought this up in our conversation, that The Brutalist chronicles what comes after. And while the film isn’t any one thing, we discovered, the aftermath of trauma is perhaps the most predominant thread of a big epic film that lacks a clear single theme.
The film begins at this point, at the what-happens-afterwards moment. In one of the more extraordinarily beautiful shots from a film filled with them, the camera finds Brody’s Laszlo Toth in the dark, awaken in second sequence of the film. The shot is handheld, messy, with lots of people in darkness and scattering of light between him and the camera as a woman in voice over dictates a letter written to Toth. We follow him through the ambiguous space – is this a prison camp? – through the chaos and uncertainty, until he bursts through a door and light floods in as the brassy fanfare from the score explodes, and Laszlo, giddy with joy, grasps a friend and they celebrate in Hungarian, looking up. It’s an electrifying way to start a film.
Above the new immigrants, as if from their perspective, looms the Statue of Liberty, sideways. It’s an angle rarely scene, evoking the arrival of the Italian immigrants to America in The Godfather Part II (1974). But this is different – the iconic symbol of freedom is askew. Perhaps the filmmaker Brady Corbet suggests that this new home will be a complicated, contradictory place. Freedom, yes, but also hardship.
Throughout the film, there is a sense that immigrants and those on the margins built America, but what thanks do they get? They are Jews and are tolerated – a line overtly stated by Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), the wealthy benefactor Harrison Lee Van Buren’s (Guy Pearce) son. Tolerated, but barely.
Laszlo and his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), hired by Harry to secretly rebuild his father’s library, are thrown out when Harrison comes home to find this modernist, minimalist room Laszlo created. Harrison shouts at them, berating that he’s out front with his his mother who is sick and comes home to find the construction mess outside and, gasp, a black man is on the grounds as part of the working crew. Harrison tosses the Hungarians out. But later, a fancy design magazine deemed the new library an artistic masterpiece forcing Harrison track down Laszlo to apologies. The wealthy American hires the immigrant Hungarian to build a massive monument and center in honor of his later mother. (A woman who wasn’t fond of Blacks apparently. If only could’ve known that a Jew is building a sanctuary in her honor.)
But even then, Harrison has to hire a second designer – Jim Simpson (Michael Epp), a Protestant to appease the community – as a check against Toth’s expensive artistry and to make sure that a Christian is involved. The “consultant” second guesses the Hungarian immigrant throughout and in response, Toth belittles Jim’s work designing shopping malls.
This is only one thread of the film, the experience of immigrants in post-war America, and interwoven with it are the power dynamics between art and money, between Toth and Harrison. Harrison, mercurial but seemingly supportive of Toth, funds his massive project that Toth designs. He even introduces Toth to his personal lawyer Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), a fellow Jew who helps Toth bring his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to immigrate to the US so they can be reunited.
Even there, power dynamics take lead – the powerful and connected can work the immigration system because they have access to lawyers and are valued for their creations. But the laborers who build these buildings will find no such help. Harrison trusts Toth, but also knows he can never be loved or as talented as immigrant artist. He says as much to Toth in what is probably one of the least graphic but most disturbing rape scenes. While at the stunning Carrara, a massive ancient marble excavation site in Italy, the two have been drinking and Toth has been using heroin to feed his addiction. They’ve wandered away from a party in the marble caves when Harrison rapes Toth in a wide shot, silhouetted, without seeing the expression of either and only hearing Harrision’s tauns. The scene serves as an overt metaphor of exploitation by the rich that wasn’t necessarily needed according to many in our group. The film clearly shows Harrison having power over Toth and the wealthy exploting the artist was crystal clear already. This extreme act drives it home in a way that was both over-the-top and perhaps unnecessary. Nevertheless, it's part of the story – Toth is raped by Harrison, just as the natural marble of Italian mountainside has raped by humans for centuries.
Toth is an imperfect protagonist, perhaps permanently scarred by surviving a genocide, quoted by Zsofia later in the film as having said, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” Apt, for someone who experienced what we assume he experienced, as we encounter him in this what-comes-after phase of his life. We find him addicted to pain killers and eventually heroin, with which he nearly kills Erzsebet by giving her too much to help her with the pain that has rendered her unable to walk easily.
In one of the many beguiling aspects of the film, here’s another one - is this entire tale told through the eyes of his mute niece Zsofia? The opening scene is her being interrogated by unseen officers, a character we don’t yet know and are unsure of anything beyond the questions being asked of her that she doesn’t answer. And in the end, a retrospective of Toth’s work in 1980 is being narrated by an older Zsofia now speaking fluently at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. There are several aspects of The Brutalist that feel frustrating, but perhaps the end is the most glaring. Throughout, I was curious why - why was this style of art and architecture developed? The answer is given to us in this Venice lecture, not visually or through the narrative of the film. Grown Zsofia explains that Toth and others from the Brutalist movement took the grim, brutal reality of the Holocaust, of the unfeeling grey walls of concentration camps, and repurposed it, filling spaces with life and hope as opposed to death and horror. He does to Harrison earlier on in the film, this somewhat thesis:
“Nothing is of its own explanation. Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? There was a war on. And yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube's shoreline.”
Would’ve been nice to have Toth actually, you know, display that artistry in the film. His eloquent explanation about the enduring nature of physical buildings aside, we are only told of the reasoning behind the Brutalist style in an overt scene expository concluding seminar. For a visually stunning film this is a decidedly un-visual conclusion.
The Brutalist is not any one thing. Epic in scope – perhaps worth watching for the score and Lol Crawley’s VistaVision cinematography alone – it seemingly is an immigrant tale. Or maybe it’s a story of art versus commerce. Or maybe it’s about the building of America on the backs of the downtrodden. Or maybe it’s about the creation of Israel, which pops up from time to time. Or maybe it’s all of those or none of those. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Films can be ambiguous, of course, and the filmmaker has made it clear in his public statements that he believes film should require you to think, to engage, to find meaning for yourself. And for that, The Brutalist definitely succeeds.
