“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe they are free.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Brutalism is a very stark mode of architecture. Minimalist and rigid in aesthetic, but imposing and haunting -yet fascinatingly versatile. You might not call it beautiful -or this amateur art critic with no credentials wouldn’t- but it is impressionable. And, especially when designed for a specific distinct project it stands out: The National Theatre in London, San Francisco’s Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the Public Safety Building in my old hometown of Winnipeg. In its vacantness it can be compelling, expressive. Perhaps no other modern form of architecture can make a statement like brutalism.
That is the ultimate ambition of László Tóth, the visionary mid-century architect played so stirringly by Adrien Brody in Brady Corbet’s electrifying epic The Brutalist, a film of calibre, precision, and scale almost unseen since the New Hollywood era. Characterized by a thrilling ambition and intense, encompassing confidence, it belongs to another time -as evidenced by its use of the classic VistaVision format. Rarely has the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the form, its history and technical versatility so glowingly resonated off the screen. And yet it is in service of a story often bleak and severe in insinuation, much like brutalism, deftly relaying the tragedy of the immigrant experience in America through harsh and uncompromising subtleties.
Corbet’s first great trick comes to us at the beginning, as a handheld camera follows a flustered and seemingly desperate László through the dark, concealing context cues until he emerges not from some horrifying bunker but at the deck of a ship arriving at Ellis Island to jubilation. It will not be the last time a parallel is made between the horrors escaped in Europe and the United States. The film chronicles roughly fifteen years in the attempted American Dream of the Hungarian-Jewish László, a Bauhaus-trained architect and Holocaust survivor who designed several buildings around Budapest before the war. Now penniless, he begins in Philadelphia -first working in the furniture business of his Catholic-convert cousin Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), before luck and his old reputation finds him designing a massive elaborate community centre for the ultra-wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist and admirer Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Eventually through Van Buren’s connections, he is able to bring over his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), now suffering greatly from osteoporosis, and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).
The script, credited to Corbet and his wife Mona Fastvold, is articulate and layered, with reams of detail and character, and shrewdly baked suggestiveness -especially in scenes between László and Van Buren, where the niceties of the latter masks a sinister figure who, despite everything singularly looks down on László and bears great disrespect towards him as both a foreigner and a Jew. Even as he lavishes praise for his work and the “intellectual stimulation” of their conversations, his outward generosity is a means to an end -the ratification of an image rather than any impression of real character. There is a charm to his affect though that hides his condescension and micro-aggressions, until someone like Erzsébet can note the shoe polisher and beggar metaphors made about László and in front of him.
Pearce and Jones are each exquisite in these nuances. The former maintains well that dignified air of his wealth and station in this time, Pearce playing the part like Clark Gable by way of William Randolph Hearst. He is indeed a Citizen Kane type, with László creating his Xanadu. And yet it is László who is more invested in it, Van Buren guarding the depth of his own motivation until the reality of his deep-seated artistic envy and vicious compulsion to control comes to the fore. Jones matches that with tenderness and verve in her depiction of a woman who is her husband's fiercest advocate, but wholly autonomous. Erzsébet exudes power over László the same as Van Buren does, but where his is corrupt hers is pure. We see this in a couple parallel love scenes, non-explicit but intense and intimate, showing well the beauty of their romance.
Overall, the movie makes excellent use of its cast: a nasty Joe Alwyn as Van Buren's skeevy and more emphatically treacherous son Harry, Isaach de Bankolé as László's black friend Gordon who returned from the war to a country that still despises him, and Cassidy as the quietly traumatized Zsófia who eventually finds her voice. It is a broad canvas, but at the centre is László and Brody's consummate turn as this man of great pride and principal, starting from scratch in the land of opportunity, challenged or reduced by the weight of its true character. With a convincing Hungarian accent and an expression that oscillates between weary hope and despair in those tired eyes, Brody thoroughly embodies the struggle and passion of both László Tóth personally and the great demographic he represents -an ideal avatar of the post-war European Jew or even the modern refugee, by unlikely chance in the halls of power as an observer and just barely a beneficiary of privilege. Privilege can quickly be taken away however, as we see when an obstacle forces the abrupt termination of Van Buren's project, and next we see László he is in a small New York apartment working as a cog in an architectural firm.
That is the false American Dream he has to contend with, and while the concept has been critiqued in no short order by many a movie, Corbet goes deeper in its insidiousness; exposing not merely the false hope of what it promises but the facade that America is a welcoming place for the disenfranchised. László's journey begins with the image of the Statue of Liberty viewed upside down -a strikingly terse symbol. László's glories and successes are never permanent, and they come with a fleet of asterisks. First is a heroin addiction, borne out of a need for relief in his poverty. Then social isolation -nobody endeavours to truly understand him; Van Buren's rich friends -even the Jewish ones- only curious about László's experiences in the abstract, unwilling to comprehend his trauma. He encounters frequently espoused values on the ability to speak English, and suppresses discomfort with a primary function of his masterpiece being a Christian worship place -he is obligated to incorporate a cross into the design. All inconveniences he bears and sacrifices he makes. And for these, he is directly told it is because he is an immigrant and a Jew that he suffers, in ignorance of his pain and desperation. He is an undesirable, in some ways as much as he was under the Third Reich, and it's worth pondering why so much of the language around these sentiments towards him ring familiarly now.
The film is of course also about artists and their craft -one could identify it as a personal metaphor for Corbet, especially given the scale of both this film and the project László is working on for a jealous benefactor who could never conceive it himself. But more richly the movie conveys a universal passion in art and expresses a firm principle of the autonomy of artists themselves -László wants to create, not do a job. He wants his work to be immortal as the film emphasizes great art has the right to be. And by the end we see too -though it is suggested throughout the development- the role of trauma in art, as László reaches into the devastation of his experience of genocide to draw out something noble, to repurpose the pain.
Without venturing quite into that kind of context, Corbet is likewise driven by reinvention and excellence. He takes the brutalist aesthetic and applies it to the film’s presentation, from the opening credits that drift horizontally at the bottom of the frame, to the closing credits composed in a diagonal block floating towards the upper corner, to the architecture that is recurringly showcased through the movie at transitory periods, shot with a prescience and vastness to their monument. The movie is shot gorgeously by Lol Crawley in that old 35 mm format, and its this that accounts for much of its New Hollywood feel, the imagery is so crisp and tangible, especially in IMAX, and Corbet’s compositions all throughout so inspired. There’s a gracefulness to the movie in spite of everything, a sense of patience -the movie even features a fifteen minute intermission at the act break- as though it is simply luxuriating in the filmmaking process. And imbuing power in all of this is a serene score by Daniel Blumberg -one of the film’s strongest attributes- that resists any orchestration for simple piano and drum motifs that even in their minimalism aptly illustrate both the turbulence and elegance of László’s soul.
“No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” This quote is attributed to László in the end when the route of his immigrant story is fully clear. America, or what it represents, was indeed the journey and not the destination in this context. It was an obstacle that ultimately needed to be overcome. This movie validates a hatred of America, illustrates the myriad way it’s capitalist institutions can destroy the spirit of those trying to seek prosperity or fulfillment there. Corbet seems to position this story of the mid-twentieth century as a lesson for today. Yet sadly one that seems destined to fall on deaf ears. Still, The Brutalist is a triumph, and its humanism in the end rises above the cynicism. And like it’s namesake architectural style, it is poised to stand the test of time.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Comments
Post a Comment