Architecture as Revenge
Brady Corbet’s panoramic epic, ‘The Brutalist,’ may be technically brilliant, but it is a cheat and a fraud.
The best thing about The Brutalist—Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half hour period epic about a fictional mid-20th-century architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody)—is its astonishing visual beauty. Much of the film is so rich and precisely detailed that it takes the breath away, despite its stodgy, muted colour palette, made to match its 1940s–50s time period and the staid Pennsylvania town in which most of the action takes place. So, it is not a surprise that in addition to the Academy Award nominations it has garnered for Best Picture, Best Actor (Brody), Best Director (Corbet), and Best Original Screenplay (Corbet and his romantic partner, Mona Fastvold), The Brutalist has also been nominated for Best Cinematography (Lol Crawley), Best Production Design (Judy Becker), and Best Film Editing (Dávid Jancsó).
I was never bored despite the inordinate length, because I could always gaze at some exquisite new composition: a road meeting a crystal-clear horizon, the top of a sun-silhouetted verdant hill, the blinding-white and grey-veined marble quarries of Carrara in Italy. Tóth, a penniless Hungarian-Jewish immigrant who barely survived the Holocaust, has been commissioned by his gentile-industrialist patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, Best Supporting Actor nominee), to design and construct a labyrinth of Brutalist concrete that will function as a “community centre” for the citizens of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
For this panorama, we must credit Corbet’s resurrection of VistaVision, the 1950s technology employed by Alfred Hitchcock in films like Vertigo and North by Northwest. It uses 35mm film running horizontally, not vertically, along its sprockets to create vast crystalline images. The musical score by Daniel Blumberg (Best Musical Score nominee)—aggressively dissonant and heavy on low-register brasses reminiscent of 1950s cool jazz, yet somehow mournful and beautiful—adds to the ambience of a lost era. Corbet filmed The Brutalist almost entirely in Hungary to save money, but the landscape looks convincingly like the midcentury American mid-Atlantic: as yet undivided farmland and omnipresent smokestacks and other earmarks of heavy industry. Coal, steel, and manufacturing made Pennsylvania an engine of World War II materiel production and comfortably prosperous for decades until it collapsed into the Rust Belt during the 1980s. Although critics have compared László Tóth to Howard Roark, the Promethean architect-hero of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, The Brutalist is even more redolent of her 1957 magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, with its midcentury mines, steel mills, cranes, and heroine Dagny Taggart’s family-owned transcontinental railroad.
Indeed, Corbet splices into The Brutalist’s footage several excerpts from an actual mid-1950s promotional documentary, Pennsylvania... Land of Decision, filmed to lure tourists and businesses to the Keystone State by showing off its natural beauty, storied political history, entrepreneurial climate, and family-friendly middle-class culture. These excerpts even preserve the original film’s buttery male voice-over while swapping in Blumberg’s score. “Perhaps no state or nation in the entire history of man has been the deciding ground of so many human issues as the state of Pennsylvania,” the voice-over intones. Threaded through those clips are images of the sleek diesel engines of the now-defunct Pennsylvania Railroad gliding along rails as glossy-smooth and glamorous as those illustrated on the first-edition dust jacket of Atlas Shrugged. Later in The Brutalist, when a train of Van Buren-owned railroad cars carrying materials to Tóth’s construction site derails and crashes, seriously injuring two brakemen, the comparison is inevitable and clearly intentional. Pennsylvania... Land of Decision is in Corbet’s movie strictly for ironic purposes.
All this said in The Brutalist’s favour, the movie is a cheat and a fraud. As its title and the profession of its protagonist indicate, its subject is Brutalist architecture—typically, immense buildings made of naked grey concrete, often bearing the striations and nailhead marks of the wooden board-moulds into which it had been had been poured, that dominated large-scale construction in Europe and America from the 1950s through the 1970s. The word “Brutalist” derives from the French phrase béton brut, which literally means “raw concrete.” But it also quickly came to connote the overpowering and even menacing effect of the enormous monochrome and sometimes windowless edifices in which Brutalist architects specialised.
Brutalism was a second-generation offspring of the avant-garde German Bauhaus art school’s modernism, the architectural practitioners of which—most famously Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van de Rohe—eschewed all forms of decorative ornamentation as decadent relics of the past. The acknowledged father of Brutalism, a Swiss-French architect who called himself Le Corbusier (1887–1965), wasn’t technically affiliated with the Bauhaus, although the Bauhaus school worshipped and imitated him. He touted concrete because it was cheap and proletarian-looking, which made him something like the Cotton Mather of architectural puritanism. At one point, he proclaimed that decoration of any kind was an “abominable small perversion.” The Brutalist’s László Tóth, we learn, is a Bauhaus alumnus of some fame in his native Hungary. Tóth’s edifices, shown in a series of (partially AI-generated) renderings, betray the distinct influence of Le Corbusier, especially in the ribbons of tiny high clerestory windows running along the otherwise blank walls of some of Le Corbusier’s most famous buildings.
But, contrary to what The Brutalist would have us believe, the concrete-loving modernists who took up Brutalism were extraordinarily popular from the very beginning among the fashionable architectural academics and the progressive-minded government officials who commissioned their structures. And while many leading European modernists fled to America as refugees (the Nazis hated the Bauhaus, even though the majority of Bauhaus practitioners weren’t Jewish), they did so during the 1930s, not after the war like Tóth. When they arrived in the United States, they were fêted as celebrities and deluged with homegrown fans and disciples. In the movie, a destitute and emaciated Tóth is reduced to living in a men’s shelter and shovelling coal for a living, despite having designed important public buildings in Budapest before the war. In real life, he would have gone right to work as an architect and been showered with commissions to choose from. Fuelled by government and institutional money, the Bauhaus Brutalists and their American imitators planted their concrete colossi in towns and on college campuses all over the country, including Harvard and Yale.
The movie also ignores the fact that, although Brutalist buildings are still beloved of architectural theorists, they are loathed by practically everyone who has to live around them. As well they should be because they are almost always aggressively oversized. The flat roofs, lifeless concrete faces, and thrusting concrete cuboids resemble maximum-security prisons, which is not what most people want in their neighbourhoods. In 2023, a British housing-supply firm, Buildworld, published a list of the world’s ugliest buildings, extrapolated from complaints about their appearance posted on social media. The number-one eyesore in the US was the FBI headquarters building in downtown Washington, DC, (completed in 1975) not far from where I live. That edifice is two city blocks’ worth of angular concrete topped by a forbidding tower and pockmarked with opaque windows and a dank and cavernous second-floor deck suggesting that torture of political prisoners is going on inside. I always avoid the FBI building when I’m in the neighbourhood lest I get sucked into the interior and never reappear.
Number two on Buildworld’s list was Boston’s City Hall (completed in 1968), a 318,000-square-foot (around 96,000 m²) cantilevered monstrosity that has been compared to an Aztec human-sacrifice platform. Boston recently designated the building a historic landmark—probably to protect it from the stream of calls for its demolition that began during its construction. The Brutalists also designed furniture, much of which was and is spectacularly uncomfortable. A friend of mine owned a pair of Marcel Breuer’s famous “Wassily” chairs fashioned out of steel tubes and stiff leather straps. I sat down in one of them only briefly before jumping right back up because one of the straps was biting into the backs of my thighs like a horse’s saddle girth.
Charlotte Allen
In other words, contrary to its description as “Beauty” in a title for The Brutalist’s second half, Brutalist architecture is actually a visual punishment, deliberately inflicted on its viewers for their sins. In the movie, those unfortunate viewers are the respectable inhabitants of Doylestown, a distant suburb of Philadelphia where Pearce’s Harrison Van Buren occupies the stateliest mansion and lords it over everyone as faux-benevolent petty king. (There actually is a Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which in 1954 produced its own boosterish film highlighting its friendly Main Street retail stores and its schools and churches.) The citizens of Doylestown—and, indeed, all the Americans in Corbet’s movie—reveal themselves to be complacent conformists, whose veneer of glad-handing and genial niceness barely conceals insular and small-minded religious bigotry. They detest and fear the Jewish immigrant outsider Tóth.
Even Tóth’s American cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who gives the penniless Tóth a place to stay and a job at his furniture store in Philadelphia, turns out to have a Catholic wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), and to have converted from Judaism to Catholicism himself in a rush to assimilate that the movie clearly regards as unseemly. Audrey takes an immediate dislike to Tóth, presumably because he is Jewish (we are offered no other explanation), and apparently informs her husband that he has made a pass at her, at which point Attila kicks Tóth out of his house, leaving him with no option but the men’s shelter.
All this is symbolically foreshadowed in Tóth’s first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty as his overcrowded refugee ship sails into the New York harbour: it’s upside-down. Upside-down? Since I am a female with a typically poor capacity for mental object-rotation, I struggled for a while to figure out the physical position into which Tóth had contorted himself to behold the statue from that grotesque prospective. I finally decided he must be standing on the deck with his back to Lady Liberty and his neck and head angled backwards away from his shoulders. Why would he do that? Because director Corbet wanted to manipulate a cinematic image in order to make a heavy-handed ideological point.
If this all seems contrived and ridiculous, it gets worse. Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren (the name is an amalgam of three half-forgotten US presidents plus a Confederate general) is what you’d come up with if you crossed Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair: Babbitt meets A Captain of Industry. The precise nature of Van Buren’s business is never revealed (he built ships during World War II and dabbles in construction projects), but with his sloshing snifter of cognac, pencil moustache, and perpetual smirk, he needs only spats and a fistful of bulging sacks painted with dollar signs to resemble a Socialist Party newspaper caricature.
Van Buren is a small-town sadist who humiliates his employees at whim, obliges Tóth to live on his property as a beck-and-call servant, plays now-I-pay-you-now-I-don’t with his architect’s fees, and never misses a chance to utter an ethnic slur, no matter how far-fetched (“I never do business with Italians—they’re the spics of Europe”). When the train derails after he recklessly chisels on maintenance, his main worry is whether or not sending flowers to the hospitalised brakemen’s families in a cheap PR gesture will look like an admission of guilt. His sleazy son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), is a chip off the old block who can’t wait to get his hands all over Tóth’s teenage niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who is rescued from Hungary along with Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, Best Supporting Actress nominee) during the film’s second half. When Harry isn’t trying to paw Zsófia, he’s putting Tóth in his Jewish place: “We tolerate you.”
As for Van Buren père’s own psychosexual inclinations, they chiefly consist of flexing his iron will to make his subordinates squirm. It is unclear, for example, whether the mammoth hilltop project that he has asked Tóth to build—consisting of an auditorium, a gymnasium, a library, and a Christian church that the Jew must construct whether he likes it or not (the Carrara marble is for the altar)—will confer any benefit upon the people of Doylestown, or if it’s simply a vainglorious display of power. At a dinner party on a freezing night, he forces his shivering guests to trudge up the hill in single file without their coats to take a look at the project site, in a backlit scene resembling the finale of The Seventh Seal.
There is nothing wrong per se with a clearly told, tightly plotted propaganda movie; Casablanca is the consummate and superlative example. But “clearly told” and “tightly plotted” are concepts alien to The Brutalist. Corbet’s and Fastvold’s script is full of unexplained events, loose ends that never get tied up, and suspense points that simply dissolve and are forgotten. For example, at The Brutalist’s beginning, Zsófia, stuck in Hungary, is having trouble proving that she is actually Tóth’s niece (her mother, Tóth’s sister, is dead) and thus his family member for immigration purposes. A couple of scenes later, the problem is resolved offscreen—so why is it in the film in the first place? Similarly, Harry has a blonde twin sister, Maggie (Stacy Martin). Introduced at a party wearing a skimpy top, Maggie seems set up to try to seduce Tóth, but nothing of the kind ever happens, and she fades into the background without much to do. Critics have also noted glaring anachronisms in the Corbet-Fastvold script, such as Van Buren’s reference to Erzsébet as Tóth’s “significant other” even though that phrase didn’t exist in vernacular discourse until the 1990s.
Pearce and Alwyn lay it on entertainingly thick as hair-oil-primped 1950s villains, so The Brutalist train rolls smoothly along its anticapitalist tracks. That is, until Corbet decides to up the antisemitic ante about two-thirds of the way into the film by having Van Buren publicly sodomise Tóth, while the two are drinking on a trip to Carrara for the altar marble. (I’m not revealing a spoiler here that other critics haven’t already revealed.) During the anal rape, Van Buren hisses a stemwinder into Tóth’s ear, evidently intended to be the film’s pièce de résistance of America First nastiness: “It’s a shame seeing how your people treat themselves. If you resent your persecution, why then do you make of yourself such an easy target? ... You’re just a lady of the night.” Bear in mind that, by the late 1950s, Tóth and Van Buren are both middle-aged men. At this preposterous point, I decided I couldn’t take The Brutalist as seriously as it takes itself and I started to snigger. The ending that follows is a mishmash of equally unlikely and incoherent events that include, apparently, Van Buren’s leap to his death at the community-centre construction site after Erzsébet Tóth crashes one of his dinner parties and exposes his sexual violation of her husband.
What’s interesting about The Brutalist is that Brody’s László Tóth is in many ways just as repellent as Pearce’s Van Buren—even though Corbet is eager to demonstrate Tóth’s superior virtue by making him the only white friend of the movie’s lone “Negro” character (played by Isaach de Bankolé, an Ivory Coast Francophone who is an odd casting choice for an American black), whom he meets in a bread line while down and out. Otherwise, Tóth cheats on his wife (the first thing he does upon disembarking is visit a prostitute) and haunts porn parlours, but can’t bring himself to make love to Erzsébet when she finally arrives, crippled from starvation in Dachau. He also mainlines heroin, implausibly blaming the refugee ship’s doctor for giving him the habit after he breaks his nose on board. At one point, he nearly kills Erzsébet by shooting her up from his stock of smack paraphernalia when she runs out of pain pills. (Tóth must have a dealer somewhere, but Corbet can’t be bothered to show us where he obtains his fix.)
Elsewhere, Tóth is gratuitously rude to everyone he meets in America, even Van Buren’s affable Jewish lawyer (Peter Polycarpou), who helps him extricate Erzsébet and Zsófia from Hungary. (The movie, by the way, never mentions that Hungary is being run by communists by then.) Tóth snobbishly snubs his eager-beaver furniture-store cousin, who is only trying to make a living in a new country and has offered him a home and a job besides. When Attila shows Tóth around and asks what he thinks of his stock, Tóth replies, “It’s ugly.” Thanks, cuz. And Attila’s furniture isn’t that bad; it’s just unremarkable, the kind of stuff that most people had in their homes back then, and that would have shown up in house-flipping makeovers had HGTV existed during the 1940s. But Tóth can’t resist grinding it into Attila’s bourgeois face by installing a pair of Breuer-esque leather-strap chairs in his showroom windows, likely ruining his business.
Attila’s wife, Audrey, may or may not have gotten Tóth evicted from their home by lying about him coming on to her, but she does catch an apparently drunken Tóth—or, more likely, Tóth stoned on heroin—urinating into a bathtub instead of the toilet, and with the bathroom door wide open to boot. I would have kicked him out myself at that point. Similarly, after Tóth’s community-centre project in Doylestown has dragged into years of cost-overruns, Van Buren hires another architect (Jonathan Hyde), actually an admirer of Tóth, to try to reduce the expenses by lowering some of Tóth’s planned high ceilings by a foot. Tóth’s response to his hapless admirer: “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid—but, most importantly, ugly—is your fault.”
One of The Brutalist’s thematic drumbeats is that antisemitism lurks just beneath the surface of all American middle-class affability. But Tóth insists on finding bigotry even when it probably isn’t there (although you never quite know with Corbet). While he’s living at the men’s shelter, one of the Catholic nuns operating the charity asks him to help out with the collection at Sunday Mass. The look on Tóth’s face indicates that this is yet another ethno-religious slur, but it may be that the good sister simply didn’t know he was Jewish.
Then there is the disturbing matter of Tóth’s name. As a number of critics have pointed out, László Tóth is also the name of the mentally deranged Hungarian-Australian who smashed at Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer in 1972. The Pietà, a sculpture of the Madonna holding the dead Jesus in her arms, may be the most famous Christian statute on Earth, carved out of the white marble of Carrara—the same town to which Tóth and Van Buren journey in the movie—where Michelangelo obtained the material for nearly everything he sculpted. Did Corbet, who is a gentile as far as I know, really intend for his Jewish protagonist—and hence, perhaps, all Jews—to be portrayed as Christ-killers? Is The Brutalist, with the ungracious, ungrateful, staggeringly self-regarding Tóth at its centre, itself a subtly crafted piece of antisemitism?
I don’t think so—mostly because I don’t think Corbet, in this movie, is really interested in Jews as a community of religious believers or a people, despite scenes of Tóth at Jewish worship and references to the then-brand-new state of Israel, whither Zsófia and, eventually, Erzsébet emigrate. Antisemitism and even the Holocaust only exist in this movie as cudgels with which to beat Americans. It is Americans who are Corbet’s focus of interest: yesterday’s but also today’s Americans, middle-class, middle-brained, Trump-voting, MAGA hat-wearing, majority-Christian, riddled (as Corbet sees it) with philistinism and secure-the-borders xenophobia. “They do not want us here,” Tóth tells Erzsébet, and he seems to be referring to the immigrant experience in general. Later on, Erzsébet agrees: “This place is rotten. The landscape. The food we eat. This whole country is rotten.”
The Brutalist intentionally withholds a comprehensive view of Tóth’s Doylestown masterwork until close to the end. When the dinner guests form a search party that fans out into the night in search of Van Buren or his body after the confrontation with Erzsébet, the camera pans over the construction site’s vast and bulky hunks of walls, concrete corridors, and underground labyrinths only half-visible in the dark. It is not remotely beautiful, as the genius-architect has promised, it’s just frightening to look at and astoundingly ugly, like nearly every other Brutalist structure ever built. It cries out for an exorcist. As for the church, with that sepulchral marble altar and a gimmicky skylight that lets in a cross-shaped configuration of sunshine, it looks like every other starchitect-designed minimalist house of worship ever built over the last seventy years.
In The Brutalist’s epilogue, we flash-forward to the year 1980, where we find Tóth, now a wheelchair-bound old man but a famous architect, being fêted with a retrospective at the Biennale in Venice (which, incidentally, must be the least Brutalist city on the face of the Earth). His niece Zsófia, now middle-aged and living in Israel, is also on the scene with her grown daughter (also played, somewhat confusingly, by Raffey Cassidy). Zsófia (now played by Ariane Labed) gives a speech explaining that Tóth had modelled the now-famous Van Buren community centre on the Buchenwald concentration camp where he had been imprisoned, down to “precisely the same dimensions”: the deep, tiny vaults of the cells are illuminated by the high windows, the inextinguishable light representing “free thought, free identity.” But photographs of the architecture at Buchenwald and the other Nazi camps show that they looked nothing like a Brutalist building—the camps were mostly low-slung barracks. Some critics of the movie have assumed that Zsófia was simply projecting her own interpretation on to Tóth’s expression of his individualist creativity. That may be so, but she gets one thing right: Tóth and the postwar Brutalist masters wanted to build something punitive, an affront to smug, self-satisfied bourgeois society with its petty appetites for kitsch and sentimentality. Brutalism is architecture as revenge.
I am not one to demand that every cinematic portrayal of American life be a dramatisation of “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue.” And there is much to criticise about bromidic midcentury American Christianity with its gospel of niceness. American society was provincial and blinkered, with a vast vocabulary of stereotypes for every perceived outsider. Still, Corbet’s movie struck me as ungenerous. Couldn’t he have paid some respect to a country that had just spent four years destroying, at no small expense of its citizens’ lives, a much worse enemy of the Jews? Don’t Americans deserve more than an inverted Statue of Liberty on every Brutalist poster?
