Brady Corbet, what happened back there?
On 'The Brutalist' or: we are SO not back
I had been planning to write something about how memory in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro tell us about how class and status sharpens or dulls our powers of observation. Or else about what me crying at The Traitors tells us about how bleak prospects are even for the firmly middle classes in post-austerity Britain. But instead, yesterday afternoon I went to a matinee screening of The Brutalist at the Barbican and I felt as though I had gone crazy.
Specifically, partway through the second section, I realised that for only the second time in my life, I wanted to leave the cinema partway through. (The other time was the writing/acting/directing attempt from the lead of How I Met Your Mother called Liberal Arts which featured Elisabeth Olsen playing an undergrad who takes improv classes that means she can teach the protagonist not to always start with ‘No’. I mainly refer to it as Liberal Farts.) The dawning knowledge of this — complete with me picturing the gif of Jerry Seinfeld putting his hands up in defeat and starting to shuffle out of his theatre seat — really surprised me because in that first act? Me and this movie were getting along pretty darn well!
So…what happened? I’m still piecing it together. I have now listened to the recent Big Picture podcast episode where Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins chat about it, but I have some of my own thoughts which I will put here. I might have to pivot to bullet points because I haven’t made my bed yet but need to get this out into the world before another week starts and I get asked about the film at work tomorrow morning.
Please: do not try to read this assessment of mine if you haven’t seen the film. I think a lot of people should see the film, and it’s not as long as you’re all making it out to be. I know a lot of you kids saw multiple Marvel films. We watched Titanic on BBC One at Christmas one year when I was a child. It’s not The Ring Cycle.
Let’s begin at the start. A girl, a teenager, interrogated in a room. Something about another lady claiming to be a relative. The guard says something about wanting to be sure to get her to her ‘real home.’ It is unclear at what point during the Holocaust this takes place, but the sinister threat to the word ‘home’ is evident.
And then, out of the bowels of darkness, salvation. O, America! Adrien Brody’s László Tóth, having survived a Nazi death camp, makes it up top on the boat where they are greeted by the Statue of Liberty, who finds herself inverted from the migrants’ perspective. László is one of the huddled masses at the registration hall, has a somewhat limp night at a brothel to the extent the proprietor assumes he’s gay and sets off for Pennsylvania by bus. In the city of brotherly love, he is taken in by his assimilated cousin, Attila, complete with a Catholic wife to make his furniture business feel assuredly American. In the first of a couple of Biblical/Torahic allusions, things get dicey for the exiled architect, when Attila’s wife alleges he made an unwanted pass at her. This put to mind the difficulty favoured son and literal visionary Joseph falls into when Potiphar’s wife unsuccessfully seduces him and, in revenge for her rejection, tells her powerful husband that he tried to rape her. I referenced ‘brotherly love’ rather than calling Philadelphia by name originally because it is Attila who pleads and insists his cousin dance with his wife Audrey. And Audrey, in turn, is embarrassed by her obvious desire for her new lodger and wants him gone.
Out on the streets, and waiting in a bread line, László finds a friend in Gordon, a black single father. Years pass. They go to a jazz joint and I wondered to myself ‘are they smoking dope?’ only for a spoon to come out in the bathroom stall between them to settle the question for sure. László watches dirty movies instead of going back to his bunk, steaming. He is so very far away from his wife and niece who survived Dachau, but remain in Europe.
A note about heroin. I can handle most things on screen, but shooting up really gets to me in a visceral way. I think because, and this is a hugely massive oversimplification, when you think about when people get hooked on or take cocaine, they want more life. More yammering, more dancing, more personality. When people describe what heroin feels like, often it’s just that it’s really nice. You feel sleepy and cosy and wrapped up in a duvet. We all know it’s a painkiller. It dulls the harshness of life. I hate watching people take heroin in film and on television, because it’s a sign someone Does Not Care About Their Life and I feel hyperconscious as the sibling of person(s) who have had track marks and the reminder that they had pains to dull so acutely that felt like their best option. This is so self-centred, but it’s both fear of the risky situations they have been in, and the weird quirk of birth order that means that I’ve ended up (so far) without such an inclination towards that kind of addiction.
Anyway. It is very understandable Gordon and László have found ways to take the edge off. This is all good, in terms of filmmaking. They are about to embark on a hugely ambitious project funded by a disgustingly influential WASP gentleman. Guy Pearce plays Harrison Lee Van Buren. At this point I didn’t pay too much attention to the fact he never remarries after the ‘amicable’ divorce from his first wife, in part because she didn’t get on too well with his dear, dear mother. At the party where László learns his fate — that he is to be architect to Van Buren’s community centre project — it becomes clear that there may well be a path to his being reunited with Erzsébet and Zsófia.
Zsófia is mute, and the girl we see at the start of the film. She is also, it is strongly implied, assaulted by the wealthy industrialist’s son, played by Joe Alwyn. She is mute until at some point a few years further down the line, when the family have moved to New York and her uncle has taken on work as a cog in some Manhattan practice’s firm. Zsófia and her husband (did he have to be called Binyamin? it felt a little on the nose given Benjamin Netanyahu spent many formative years in a Philly suburb) are making Aliyah — which is, to say, they have decided to move to the Jewish nation state. László and Erzsébet are dismayed and so was I, though I understood the reasons. The sad fact of contemporary Zionism is that it is the response to men like the Nazi guards telling Zsófia that ‘home’ cannot be Hungary. But to look at Adrien Brody’s is to look at a quintessentially European face; the disinheritance of Jewish people from lands they tangibly shaped and contributed to over millennia is a grave loss, but if you had to be liberated from a death camp, why would you want to go back? And, while the United States was built on settler colonialism, it attempts to be a pluralistic nation, rather than an ethno-state: László and Gordon rubbing shoulders together on the bread line. It is sad to acknowledge that even the melting pot was insufficiently welcoming to refugees like the Tóths.
Just as it feels as though Zsófia is mute except to articulate her Zionism (and to be really clear, I think it’s a little churlish, and potentially unserious, to be surprised that a film which focuses on Holocaust survivors will also include characters who believe firmly in the promise and safety Israel might provide), so too does Erzsébet seemingly regain mobility in her osteoporotic legs in order to tell Harrison about himself at his own dinner table. I didn’t like that female disability was so obviously ‘solved’ off-screen to progress the plot, not once, but twice.
The film majorly lost its way for me so soon after its apex. We meet the custodian of a marble quarry, a long-time collaborator of Tóth’s who comes down from the mountain to greet László and Harrison for a site visit. He is long-haired, grey-haired, and an unapologetic Italian anarchist who punched Mussolini with his bare hands. And then, after a night of revelry, Harrison assaults László.
The Brutalist had been explained to me before seeing it as a film about artistry and the compromises therein. And suddenly, there I was, watching commerce rape industry at the side of a mountain where labour performed by the class conscious is used to produce work for the undeserving wealthy. All the cinematography in the world can’t unclunk that. Ignoring the creativity metaphor, László Tóth is a Moses in reverse: he comes down from the mountain having touched slabs that are to be imbued with religious significance (a modernist altarpiece back in Pennsylvania) and finds himself in the wilderness. The physical intrusion into his personhood makes him crueller and more distant from his fellow man: he is short with a junior construction worker who goofs around on site; he tries to fire long-suffering and beautifully costumed Gordon; he has turned himself away from the synagogue and his wife. Still, the great work continues.
And then, post-overdose, the unconvincing Felicity Jones is given an even worse bit of Sassy Wife Scenery than Emily Blunt as Kitty in Oppenheimer. Earlier on, when Erzsébet mentions having been to Oxford to study English literature, it is clear that the assembled guests at the dinner party are supposed to be surprised. The problem is that you look at Felicity Jones and think: a likely place for her to be. Unlike Brody, who could be read as French, Italian, Hungarian or a number of nationalities in between, with Jones you would struggle to believe she was from Aberdeen, much less Budapest. That’s not a crime — Lupita Nyong’o is so unmistakeably Kenyan to me it was occasionally odd to see her on a plantation in Twelve Years a Slave but the performance is deeply affecting — but why, oh why, oh WHY would they make Erzsébet arrive on the property like a parody of the Inspector in An Inspector Calls to shout “you are an evil rapist!” I simply don’t get it. And I actually liked that they had really great sex after László feeds his wife heroin to soothe the unbearable physical pain she wakes to one night. I felt that was honest, somehow. Unstable; a salve for two people who have somehow managed to find life after the worst crimes imaginable.
The disconnect between the twin siblings does provide some further character insight, yes. Maggie asks whether Mrs Tóth is saying she herself was violated by Harrison, to which Alwyn’s Harry almost winces before interjecting. As the camera follows the constantly praise-seeking unmarried heir as he shouts “Father…Father…they’re gone now…Dad…” the audience can draw some conclusions as to what might have happened in the home before. But I think some crimes were committed on the screen yesterday afternoon, and it makes me distrust the broader instincts of Corbet that he created such obvious booby traps for his supposed masterwork to fall into.
On The Big Picture, host Sean Fennessey pointed out that often the contemporary cinemagoer is ‘treated’ to year after year of low-ambition features, and therefore asked whether it fair to expect perfection from the few films that are maybe reaching for too much. Except…often when a great novel or film or show doesn’t land the ending, it’s that the ambition fizzles out, or there are too many loose ends. The final third of The Brutalist was a series of unforced errors, to the extent it made me worry that the vision behind the project overall had the visual language for ambition, but not the level of attention to detail to pull it off. Also: last year we had The Zone of Interest and an overall much better set of Oscar pictures, so I don’t completely buy that we’re in a conceptual desert.
And then there’s the bloody epilogue. I resent the Italo disco remix of the score’s key theme. Because by then I had grown joyless and worried I was watching a grand work of poor taste. And then when the credits rolled, I was high-key disgusted at a woman two rows in front doing a little dance to it as if we hadn’t two minutes before been listening to a speech from a Holocaust survivor about the cells in the concentration camps because Brody’s character, only 69, is so frail he cannot let his work speak for itself any more. I know it got gauche but a little decorum, please!
Are we to take it that Zsófia’s homily at her uncle’s retrospective in Venice was there to imbue to the wider audience that there is indeed love in the cold, forbidding slabs of concrete that put so many off Brutalist architecture? Is she being an unreliable narrator? By that point, I didn’t really care, though I did get to thinking again about how modernist buildings, as per the re-instatement of Trump’s executive order ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’ are once again understood as a kind of ‘degenerate art.*’
And so there we have it. It is good to be moved by art, I suppose. I’d love to hear what you all thought about it though.
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