The title of Brady Corbet’s movie about the hopes and dreams of a Hungarian immigrant to mid-20th century America refers to the contemporary architectural movement that the protagonist, László Toth (Adrien Brody), follows, but it also may describe Corbet’s own take on the monumental Hollywood epics that were popular during that time, and if it seems to copy the kind of big themes redolent in another movie about an arrogant architect, King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, released in 1949, based on the controversial novel by Ayn Rand, it certainly isn’t a coincidence. But Corbet stands Rand’s concept of the great man who transcends history on its head, because Toth ends up defeated by his time and the cultural forces that guide it, partially due to his arrogance. The main difference is that Toth is not only an immigrant, but a Jew who survived the death camps. His arrogance is born of anger and frustration rather than the superior mien of someone who naturally aspires to greatness, like the Gary Cooper character in Fountainhead. 

Toth’s strong suit is his stubbornness of vision. Having arrived at Ellis Island with nothing, he stays with his cousin, Attila (Allessandro Nivola), who has informally renounced his Jewishness after settling in Pennsylvania with a Catholic wife and a family furniture business. Attila has learned that Toth’s wife, Erzsébet, and niece, who were imprisoned in a different camp, are alive in Europe, and Toth is determined to bring them to America. Though Attila condescends to Toth for his purity of purpose, he brings him in on a job offered by a local rich kid named Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants to build a home library for his industrialist father, Harrison (Guy Pearce), as a birthday present. Toth throws himself into the project with more enthusiasm than it’s worth, working his Bauhaus training into the design, which involves louvers and hidden panels. The older Van Buren is scandalized, thinking the minimalist style stupid, even insulting. Equally enraged, Attila kicks Toth out into the street, where he makes a living as a construction worker, a vocation that exiles him to the margins. He hangs with lower working class Black men, patronizes prostitutes, and parlays a taste for morphine that was once medicinal into a full-blown heroin addiction. Reduced to designing bowling alleys to keep his architectural chops up to snuff, Toth is eventually sought out by Van Buren, who in the meantime has researched Toth’s illustrious prewar career in Europe and decides he is just the man to manifest his vision for a community center that will celebrate his own greatness as a philanthropist for all eternity. It’s a commission Toth only too eagerly believes he was made for.

The surface conflict of the movie is between the idealist Toth and the man-of-means Van Buren, but the real battle is within Toth for a soul that will never forgive the world for making him suffer, and if the great project he designs is a testament to ego, that ego is as much his as it is Van Buren’s, and this 3-and-a-half-hour tale still isn’t big enough for two; or three, for that matter. Once Van Buren’s lawyers secure a visa for the wheelchair-bound Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and her niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Erzsébet’s own demands force the issue of Toth’s relative inferior status compared to the men he is working for, not only because he’s a Jew and an immigrant, but because he’s an intellectual with an intellectual’s temperament, no matter how hackneyed that concept comes across. For sure, Toth’s ideals continuously run up against the prerogatives of big “C” capitalism, but the main hurdle is American exceptionalism that’s bred in the bone. Toth can’t win on that front, but he refuses to acknowledge that he can be beaten by philistines whose only source of power is money. What he can’t grasp is that their real power is their investment in the belief that America is the savior of the world, a belief Toth will never understand having lived through hell. The brutality of The Brutalist is in the cruel outcome of that basic misunderstanding. 

In English and Hungarian. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Brutalist home page in Japanese

photo (c) Doylestown Designs Limited 2024/Universal Pictures