'The Brutalist' Is Nothing Less than Brutal

Who is Brady Corbet? In the avalanche of press coverage that has accompanied the release of The Brutalist, which he co-wrote and directed, Corbet has been generally spoken of as an auteur—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, a man with unusual seriousness, ambition, and purpose. Even though he has helmed two previous feature films—2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux—I confess that my prevailing impression of Corbet has been as an actor in art-house fare from the Bush and Obama years. With an unerring eye for the trendy and the utterly forgettable, Corbet appeared in Thirteen (2003), Melancholia (2011), Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), and others of the same ilk.

I do not mean merely to pour cold water on Corbet’s artistic metamorphosis from one who appears in pretentious movies to one who makes them, but to draw a through line from his previous line of work to his current one. At the height of Corbet’s acting career, such as it was, he had a leading role in a film that, in its savagery and soullessness, prefigures The Brutalist. In 2008, Corbet appeared in Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games. That movie received attention for its technical qualities—it was a strikingly meticulous and detail-oriented remake of an earlier Haneke film—but it has stuck in my mind for the past 17 years for its stunning moral turpitude.

Corbet and Michael Pitt co-starred as well-heeled hooligans who connive to torment, torture, and finally kill the members of a family chosen at random. That audiences were likely to be repelled by the film was no credit to Haneke, who, throughout, maintained a tone of pernicious indifference—the atrocities committed by the lead characters were presented with such passivity, void of any authorial outrage, that they suggest that their maker had himself become inured to images of violence and sadism. Undoubtedly, Haneke’s studied apathy was in furtherance of some deep insight, but to we lowly untutored viewers it looked merely like cinematic callousness.

In fairness, Corbet the Actor cannot be held responsible for his director’s provocations, but on the basis of The Brutalist, Corbet the Director inherited from Haneke a Hobbesian vision of existence: As Corbet sees it, the world is solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, though it is not particularly short: Among the most attention-grabbing aspects of The Brutalist (for highfalutin critics if not poor ticket-buyers unprepared to give up their entire afternoon) is its three-and-a-half-hour running time, which incorporates a prologue, an epilogue, and a timed intermission. Both filmmakers—the master and the protégé—mistake length for depth. Like Haneke, Corbet is persuaded that the very act of lingering on awful scenes—scenes of suffering, pain, angst—confers those scenes with some ineffable greatness.

The Brutalist, which unfolds after the end of the Second World War, stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Jewish architect who has attained prominence in his native Budapest before the war. The Holocaust tears asunder László’s family: Transported to Buchenwald, László is separated from his spouse, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and his sister’s daughter Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who are sent to Dachau. Miraculously, the tattered remnants of this family manage to stay alive and, equally miraculously, they all find their way to the United States—the nation that, as the historical record amply demonstrates, led the charge to obliterate Nazism from the face of the earth.

Yet Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold decline to endorse this traditional picture of America as a force for good. In a much commented-upon early shot, László’s arrival in his new country is announced by the inclusion of a topsy-turvy shot that offers the Statue of Liberty from an upside-down angle. Perhaps the angle is a reflection of the manic cinematography—the harried, hyperactive camerawork renders almost pointless Corbet’s self-important choice to shoot the film in the visually opulent VistaVision process—but it is just as likely a sign of the attitude of the storytellers: László, Erzsébet, and Zsófia are not delivered from unspeakable evil upon settling in America but merely subjected to more evil. This perspective is clearly enunciated by the characters. “They do not want us here,” László says at one point. “This place is rotten—the landscape, the food,” Erzsébet says at another.

Corbet concurs. In his notion of postwar America, all acts of generosity are insincere, all expressions of kindness are fake, and all opportunities are merely occasions for exploitation. Relocating from New York to Pennsylvania, László is initially supported by a furniture proprietor cousin named Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his Catholic wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), but this arrangement quickly devolves into recriminations and accusations: Audrey feels inconvenienced by László’s presence, and Attila accuses him of fouling up his relationship with the powerful Van Buren family, local magnates who dominate Doylestown and have bought furniture from his concern. Would Attila really behave so cruelly, so quickly, to a relation who has been through hell? Perhaps, but the narrative turns throughout the film feel engineered to underscore Corbet’s vision of America as a netherworld of anti-Semitism, exploitation, and literal rape.

This is all told with a great deal of confidence on the part of Corbet, who, despite being born in 1988, has many views about his country and its prejudices as they existed decades before he was sired. In a rare dissenting review of the film in The New Yorker, Richard Brody sagely noted: “The definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn’t know firsthand; it’s, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth. As a result, it’s a severe test of an artist, demanding a rich foreground of imagination as well as a deep background of history and ideas.” Permit me to state plainly that which Brody hints at: Corbet fails the test. He is a dilettante. He conjures a period about which he knows little beyond what people wore and the sort of music they might have listened to.

The Brutalist is so desperate to convey human, especially American, depravity that it doesn’t mind being confused and confusing. Doylestown power broker Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) behaves so erratically as to be simply unbelievable. One moment Van Buren is raging against Attila and László for remodeling his home library on the orders of his grown son; the next he is seeking out László, now toiling as a coal miner, with an eye toward hiring him to design and build a community center in honor of his departed mother. One moment Van Buren is expressing his admiration for László’s artistry and innovation; the next he is condescending to him for his Hungarian accent and hiring a local architect specializing in shopping malls to dilute the original vision for the community center. One moment Van Buren is selecting the marble for the project during a trip to Italy; the next he is sexually assaulting László in an alleyway. This rape is utterly shocking in its grotesque defilement but no less so for its complete absence of meaningful foreshadowing or character plausibility; the act comes out of nowhere. But because the film cannot conceive a world in which László is valued and embraced in America rather than exploited and discriminated against, Van Buren must do whatever is required—to behave as monstrously as necessary—to advance this theme.

The film is no less muddled when it comes to László’s architectural practice. Corbet wants us to accept László’s brilliance as a practitioner of the harsh, purposely stark style of “brutalism” and to hold in contempt the rubes who question him, such as the construction managers overseeing the community center project. The problem is that the film also makes clear that Van Buren himself is the most enthusiastic, even hyperbolic, proponent of brutalism—the one who hires László with full knowledge of, and stated appreciation for, his aesthetic preferences—and Doylestown officials and townspeople seem to go along with the design with only mild reservations and emendations. (Incidentally, the center includes a chapel that represents the worst trends in contemporary church design, but no one says a word against this profound architectural crime.)

In truth, László is less a misunderstood genius than, at worst, a moderately ahead-of-his-time genius—after all, midcentury modern was a middlebrow favorite in the 1950s. By the same token, Corbet’s attempt to place the blame for László and Erzsébet’s marital stresses on their relocation to America falls flat when László nearly kills his wife by getting her hooked on heroin—ostensibly to control the pain of the osteoporosis that has rendered her confined to a wheelchair. But this near-tragedy must be laid at László’s feet, not America’s: He had developed and fostered a heroin addiction before he ever set foot in Doylestown.

In short, The Brutalist often makes very little sense. The film presents László’s involvement with Van Buren—the Faustian arrangement by which he is given a grand commission for the price of being degraded by the man who pays for it—as soul-destroying, but if that is the case, why on earth does László continue in his employment following his sexual assault? László has earlier proved himself capable of obtaining other paying work in architecture and standing up for his artistic convictions, so what possesses him to remain in the orbit of a criminal predator?

In an epilogue set in 1980, a now-elderly László is said to have become a greatly revered architect whose work is celebrated and explicated the world over. We are told that László designed the community center, his first major American project, with overt structural allusions to the concentration camps, but this disclosure—a jarring piece of information to be given in the waning minutes—tells us less about the character, his personal demons or his memories of the Holocaust, than the film’s essential theme: By its reckoning, murderous evil is inescapable, inexhaustible, even among the rolling fields of Pennsylvania.

It turns out that I was right to remember Corbet chiefly on the basis of his role in the horrific Funny Games. The Brutalist plays in much the manner of that Haneke film and others: a ceaseless series of ugly incidents that prove little more than their makers’ conviction that ugliness is all there is to life. Who is Brady Corbet? I had the answer

By Peter Tonguette