erik lundegaard

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Monday February 03, 2025

Movie Review: The Brutalist (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Twenty years ago, in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” Adrien Brody played an uncompromising Jewish artist struggling to survive in Nazi-occupied Europe; it led to a Golden Globe nomination and an Oscar for lead actor. In Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” Adrien Brody plays an uncompromising Jewish artist struggling to survive in America after the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe; it led to a Golden Globe for lead actor and an Oscar nomination (so far). 

You could say Brody has a niche.

Watching “The Brutalist” at SIFF Downtown last month was an event. It’s three and a half hours with intermission, and there’s a clear demarcation between the two halves. In the first (“The Enigma of Arrival”), Brody’s character, László Toth of Budapest, is a post-World War II refugee in America who maintains his dignity under rough circumstances, and whose talent and artistry are eventually recognized and rewarded. In the second half (“The Hard Core of Beauty”), let’s just say things go awry. The center doesn’t hold. For him and the film. 

I still recommend it. It unfolds in a way most movies don’t these days. It takes its time. It’s literary—right down to the naming of the chapters. 

Upside-down
At the open, we see Toth and a friend arrive in America, celebrating as the ship passes the Statue of Liberty—which, from their point of view, appears upside-down. Yes, hold that thought.

After an unsuccessful hookup at a brothel—“We have boys, too,” he’s told as he leaves—Toth takes the train to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), with pretty Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird), runs a small furniture shop called Miller & Sons. Who’s Miller? He is. Are there sons? No, but it has a sound people like. As for the furniture? It’s not beautiful, Toth admits. That’s why you’re here, Attila tells him. Toth smiles wearily at all this—this brave new world where people pretend to be what they aren’t in order to sell the second-rate.

But they catch a break. A rich son, Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), wants his father’s study redone while he’s away. What I like? Attila is supposedly the deal-maker but he agrees too quickly to a $1,000 pricetag. It’s László, the artist, who looks at what needs to be done, and the timeframe with which to do it, and says no, not for that, and doubles the price. He does it not because he’s a businessman but because he’s an artist. Attila is willing to cut corners, László isn’t. So he makes the better deal.

A problem I had with the film, particularly its second half, is I’m not a fan of brutalist architecture. Too blocky. But the study László designs is beautiful: simple, clean, allowing for light while ensuring the sun doesn’t fade books. Who wouldn’t love it? 

Well, the father, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), when he arrives home early with his dying mother and finds a Negro worker on his front lawn. He yells at the cousins and threatens them with lawsuits. Then the son doesn’t pay his bill. So Attila cuts László loose. He wakes him up to kick him out, tossing in an additional accusation of making a pass at the wife, when it was Attila, drunk and happy after the $2,000 contract, who creepily pushed László toward her. I like the way László looks here: slightly stunned, slightly fearful, but with a kind of acceptance:  “Oh, this is who you are. I thought as much.” We never see Attila again.

Because Van Buren Sr. does a 180. The study László designed is such a hit, so visionary, that it winds up in a photo spread in Look magazine. Then Harrison researches him and discovers that, before the war, László was a Bauhaus-trained architect who designed massive public buildings in Budapest. He finds László doing manual labor at a construction site (and, unbeknownst, using heroin for war-related pain), and invites him to the Van Buren mansion, where he is feted at a fancy dinner party. Afterwards Harrison leads the guests outside on a frigid night, to a hill overlooking the town and his property, and says he wants to build a vast community center there, named after his late mother, which will include a chapel, gym, theater and library. And he wants László to design it. Oh, and Harrison’s personal attorney (Peter Polycarpou) will work to expedite the immigration of László’s wife and niece, hung up in channels in Europe.

That’s the first part of the film, and its lines are clear: arrival and rise. In the second half, László becomes a martinet while overseeing the construction of the center, increasingly at odds with cost-cutting and any deviation from his artistic vision. He’s joined by his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), who arrives in a wheelchair accompanied by their near-mute teenaged niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy). The addition of women, damaged by war, creates awkwardness and friction. Is Harrison trying to cuckold László? Does the son sexually assault the niece? “We tolerate you,” the son tells the artist. The pressures of all of this seem to be building toward … something … when it’s derailed by a literal derailment. One of the millionaire’s trains goes off the track, he’s being sued, he shuts down the project. He does another 180.

Now László is working as a cog at a big architecture firm in New York. Now he's called back by Harrison. Now the two go to Italy to look at marble for the center. Now Harrison rapes a drunk László. Now they’re working on the center again as if nothing happened. Now László gives his wife a dose of heroin for her pain but she O.D.s. and nearly dies.

So much for clear lines. The second half is all over the place.

At this point, László and Erzsebet are disillusioned with America (join the club), and discuss moving to Israel as Zsofia and her husband had done. Then we see Erzsebet, suddenly using a walker, and heading up to the Van Buren mansion. How much time has passed? The family is in the midst of dinner but she refuses to sit with them. Instead she accuses Harrison of raping László. The family is shocked, particularly the son, who, to the horror of everyone, physically attacks Erzsebet; and then the father, after a full-throated denial, goes missing. They spend the night searching for him. Is he found at the center? In the chapel? Is he dead? And where is László? And how was Erzsebet able to walk again?

Instead of answers, we fast-forward 20 years, to our epilogue, “The First Architecture Biennale,” where Zsofia, middle-aged and thin, and in clear command of her voice, gives a speech for the now-celebrated László, a wheelchair-bound widower, during a retrospective of his work. We see all the great things we didn’t see him design and build. We hear her say that the Van Buren Center was created with concentration camps in mind. She ends her encomium with a line László often told her when she was a young mother in Israel: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination not the journey.”

And that's the end of our journey.

American Salieri
What to make of it? Was the rape a metaphor for what businessmen do to the artist? And is that too on-the-nose? It’s like the project being derailed by a derailment—all of Corbet’s metaphors are literal. They’re brutalist metaphors. And is that ending quote supposed to preempt the 3.5-hour journey we just watched? Or is the center not holding the point? It can’t all be clean lines, Gracie. Life gets messy and diffuse. We think it makes sense until it doesn’t.

Again, I still recommend it. I loved the scene where a patient László and a furiously impatient Harrison sit in the sun at an outdoor café in Carrara, Italy, sipping espressos and smoking while awaiting the arrival of László’s typically late friend Orazio (Salvatore Sansone). I loved the subsequent hike to the marble mines and the silent way Orazio pours the water over the marble to bring out its highlights, and how Harrison puts his face against the marble.

Despite his name, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. is not old money. He’s a bootstraps guy, built his empire, and runs hot and cold throughout the film. At the initial dinner party for László, there’s that slightly terrifying way he shuts down a friend who intrudes upon his long, pointless storytelling. Best of all? He’s so fucking dull. His voice is flat, his thoughts unimaginative, but he’s what grows in the American landscape.

Wait, is it jealousy? He wants to be an artist but isn’t, wants artistic vision but doesn’t have it; so he buys it and wrecks it. He rapes it. He’s Salieri as American businessman.

Is this the first movie I’ve seen Adrien Brody star in since “The Pianist”? That Oscar didn’t open many doors, did it? He’s done his share of Wes Andersons, and I loved his two-episode turn in “Succession.” There’s a depth to him, a humanity in his eyes.

Watching this, I assumed “The Brutalist” was based upon a novel—epic nature, tattered second half—and looked forward to reading it. Nope. Director Brady Corbet wrote it with Mona Fastvold. Who’s Fastvold? Norwegian actor-producer-director-writer once married to Sondre Lerche. Who’s Corbet? Similar but American, and no Lerche. He’s had a lot of small roles with European directors over the years: Michael Haneke (a psychopath in “Funny Games”), Ruben Ostlund (a post-avalanche dinner companion in “Force Majeure”), Lars von Trier (Tim in “Melancholia”), Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria”). Maybe something rubbed off. He directed two films in the 2010s: “The Childhood of a Leader” with Berenice Bejo, and “Vox Lux” with Natalie Portman. Haven’t seen either.

Well, he’s got our attention. The irony of this one, juxtaposed against its closing quote, is that I didn’t think much of the destination; but the journey was great.

Posted at 01:58 PM on Monday February 03, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024