‘The Brutalist’

Everything​ talks in Brady Corbet’s films, especially the scenes and objects that are silent. A snowy Italian mountain face seems to be some sort of fable, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down in an empty sky, the world spins at the end of a French motorcade as if it had gone crazy. Corbet likes to shoot cars at night, where we see mainly a dark screen, and just a few moving lights. Or from cars in daytime, where all we see is the road racing towards us. If we are at a nightclub, it is crowded and we are very close to the dancing figures – they look as if they are about to fall from the screen into the front rows of the cinema. At a school where a shooting takes place, the scene has a curious intimacy, as if the children are scared but not shocked – the shooter is one of them.

The motorcade and the school appear in Corbet’s The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), stories of a politician who resembles Hitler and a singer who resembles both Britney Spears and Lady Gaga. The rest of the images described above are from The Brutalist, Corbet’s most recent film. The hero is an architect trained at the Bauhaus, and a couple of chairs by Mies van der Rohe have strong cameo roles in the movie. It’s clear that all three films are about fame: fame and power, fame and art. All three are written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold.

In a way they all follow the model of the first film, based on a 1939 short story by Jean-Paul Sartre. They dramatise questions rather than answer them. How brutal or damaging does your childhood have to be to make you a great dictator or a memorable pop star? Are the connecting words ‘because of’ or ‘in spite of’? Or is there no causality here at all, just a sort of baffling coexistence? Are the films in love with an ugly idea of chance? This possibility seems especially relevant to The Brutalist.

The hero is a Hungarian called László Tóth, brilliantly played through an erratic scale of moods by Adrien Brody. The year is 1947. He has survived Buchenwald and we meet him in a roiling crowd getting off a boat in New York. He visits a brothel, in order to feel welcomed, and makes his way to Philadelphia, where a cousin awaits him. It’s clear that the jolly cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who owns a furniture store, means to exploit Tóth’s talents as an interior designer, not appreciating that Tóth was, before and during the war, an architect of considerable reputation. This is where chance plays its first major game.

A rich young man (Joe Alwyn) wants the Hungarians to convert a room in his family’s palatial house into a grandiose library. The conversion is to be a gift to the boy’s father, who currently knows nothing of this. Tóth and a bunch of workers produce a Bauhaus masterpiece – here and in Attila’s store are where we see the famous chairs. The room looks bare and stark and modernist; we might even say brutalist. The OED dates the first usage of the word to 1934 and tells us it means ‘one who exhibits brutalism’. A trifle tautologous, but the dictionary’s examples refer mostly to architecture and make the meaning clear. Take this example from the Guardian in 1959: ‘Churchill College at Cambridge will be built by a modern architect – perhaps even by a “new brutalist”.’ Tóth offers a more interesting meaning when he later talks about showing building materials, concrete, for example, in their natural light. He doesn’t use the word ‘brutalist’, but he is referring to an intriguing derivation of the word. It is said to come from the French word brut, meaning ‘raw’.

Predictably, the young man’s father, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), does not like his present. He feels his room has been ruined, as it has in one sense, and his son refuses to pay Attila any of the money he owes him. Attila compensates himself by kicking Tóth out of his house and job, and we next see him as a labourer shovelling coal on a building site. He’s not unhappy, but this is not the Bauhaus. And then chance grants him the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Harrison accidentally discovers who Tóth was in Hungary and brandishes magazine articles about him when they get together. He’s not just impressed, and he doesn’t just pay Tóth for the work he has already done. He wants to commission him to design a vast building to be constructed in the grounds of his house, a community centre combining meeting rooms, a gym, a library (of course), a chapel. This project becomes a reality, and the film gets lost for an hour or so while the local builders and consultants give the foreign artist a hard time. Nothing chancy about that, and in a way it’s a relief to get to the fifteen-minute intermission.

Chance intervenes again in the second half of the film when a train carrying building materials for Harrison’s project runs off the rails and two people die in the crash. Harrison, as purchaser of the materials, is held responsible and calls the whole thing off. This means Tóth is sacked and we next see him copying plans for an architect in New York. Another important event has occurred, however. When at the beginning of the film he was struggling to get off the boat in New York, a voiceover read to us a letter from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who had been in Dachau and was liberated by the Russians. She thinks of Tóth and herself as still married. He thinks of them as separated, and he has made no effort to bring her to America. He does now, with the help of one of Harrison’s lawyer friends. When she arrives, their fresh start is an uneasy one, but things get better.

Tóth’s relation to Harrison gets worse. They have, at times, seemed to like each other and were certainly each interested in what the other represented. But Tóth, it seems, had invested emotionally in the friendship and Harrison was incapable of investing in anything but vanity. When the two men visit Carrara to buy some marble for the now reactivated project – this is where we see the talking mountain face – they both get very drunk in a cave-like bar and Harrison rapes Tóth. This is an expression of superiority, not of desire. We see it happening, but the effect is rather like that of the cars in the dark. We watch Harrison from the back but have no real sense of what he is doing to the all but invisible black shape of Tóth. The event is confirmed for us, or announced to us, by Erzsébet’s later marching into Harrison’s house and accusing him publicly. The film really ends there. Harrison disappears, and an epilogue takes us to Venice in 1980, where a retrospective exhibition celebrates Tóth’s work.

A lot happens in the second half of the movie, but Corbet, intentionally I take it, makes very little effort to connect the dots. Tóth’s Jewishness is signalled but not interpreted; the same goes for his heroin addiction and his fits of bad temper, which briefly make him look like a bad guy. The general effect may create in us a nostalgia for the edgy coherence of the first part. There is, though, a refrain that echoes through the film. Despite the importance of the architectural meaning of the title, the other meaning, the wrong meaning, is also intimately everywhere, and Corbet does tempt us to believe that nothing and no one can fail to have, one day, their scheduled meeting with brutality.