“The Brutalist” is a brutally smart drama for a brutally stupid age.
Brady Corbet’s American saga touches on everything from classism and racism to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as its hero staggers along the jagged edge of American capitalism as he faces the white supremacism of the privileged rich.
The “American Dream” is as upended as the immigrant title character’s first view of the Statue of Liberty when arrives from Europe. Whatever László Tóth hopes this new world will be, whatever promise the myth of America makes to those who would come, it’s not just the “Land of Opportunity.” It’s a land that tolerates poverty and discriminates against many of the ablest and most talented, just because that’s what the rich elites desire — attitudes unchallenged, a status quo that protects them from all comers.
The central metaphor here comes from the school of architecture known as brutalism — rough, imposing forms that took the icy beauty of Bauhaus School design to a logical endgame — harsh, unvarnished reality commenting on boxy functionality and “efficiency.”
We meet László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as he is fleeing postwar Europe to America, where he doesn’t take the symbolic, jostled upside-down view (from steerage) vision of The Statue of Liberty as a warning.
He is a Hungarian Jew, “forcibly separated” from his wife by the Nazi Holocaust, eager to put the horrors of Europe behind him. A cousin (Alessandro Nivola) has sponsored him and summoned him to his Philadelphia furniture business. Attila has wisely changed his name to “Miller” for his “Miller & Sons” (there are no sons) business, married a Catholic “shiksa” and become Catholic himself.
Toth, “a trained and licensed (in Hungary) architect” will design and build furniture for Miller & Sons. He will give customers the “ugly” tables and chairs they want, which Attila makes to order. But Toth will also design sleek, minimalist bent-tube tables and chairs and play a part in launching the “mid century modern movement,” or so we gather.
The son (Joe Alwyn) of a rich client commissions a “study” makeover in entrepreneur Harrison Lee Van Buren’s (Guy Pearce) beaux art mansion on his suburban estate. Toth produces something radical and stunning and not at all appreciated by Van Buren Senior. The rich refuse to pay, as they often do.
Toth is ruined, kicked out by the cousin and forced into manual labor until that “American Dream” moment when Look Magazine does a pictorial of the mansion and Toth’s domed library creates a sensation.
Van Buren, a man who finds Toth’s aesthetic, his world weariness and cynicism “stimulating conversation,” and so he changes his life. Van Burn will “nurture one of the defining talents of our epoch.” Toth will design a vast suburban civic center honoring Van Buren’s late mother. It will be a hilltop landmark with a brutalist message for America.
We’ve heard, from the film’s beginning, the plaintive pleas of Toth’s wife (Felicity Jones), who has survived the camps and is taking care of his young niece, in (Hungarian, with subtitles) voiced-over letters. Years pass as the building project starts, and eventually the rich man commissions his Jewish lawyer to expedite Erzsébet Tóth’s immigration.
Once there, Laszlo’s indiscretions with prostitutes cease, but not the heroin injections he takes for the pain of his injuries in Europe, physical and psychic.
We’ve seen him lose any rose-colored glasses-view of America in Toth’s recognizing the poverty and racism (Isaach De Bankolé plays a single-dad he meets in a soup line) in a land of opulent wealth and selective, capricious charity by the filthy rich. Erzsébet, an Oxford-educated journalist in The Old Country, reinforces this view even as László is plainly less thrilled to see her than she is him.
The Toths will be tested as a grand, stark edifice rises on a hill in Doylestown in wealthy Bucks County in “Pennsylvania,” a state of steel and microcosm of America as a newsreel frequently-sampled in the film reminds us, “the land of decision.”
Continue reading
