The Brutalist (4/5 Stars)

There are many impressive features of The Brutalist and I want to make sure I mention them up front lest the reader come to the conclusion that I didn’t like watching this movie. I did and I recommend it. I do wonder how much more I could have liked it if I didn’t have an avid personal hatred of the architectural school of design called Brutalism. So let me be positive first and get all the well earned compliments about this movie out in front before I let loose on Brutalism. The movie does have some very good examples of Brutalism, and like all real world examples of the same, they are awful.

The movie is directed by Brady Corbet and written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. It is one of those movies that seem to come out of nowhere. It is not like there is some sort of established demand for movies about architects and Brady Corbet is not an established or productive director. His career is actually mostly acting and only in recent years has he started directing small projects like TV episodes and music videos. You probably haven’t heard of them and even if you had, you wouldn’t expect his next project to be a three and a half hour epic. But here we are, a movie with a pace and length that reminds one of large scale big studio Hollywood movies from the 1950s-1960s. It even has an intermission. Settle down and watch it at home over a weekend. I think it is better broken up into two watching periods, this will give the viewer the opportunity to mull over the first half before watching the second. Both sides of the intermission have their own languid buildup, diverting tangents, climax, and denouement. One can complain about the length, but just compare it to an 8-10 hour television series. This story takes half that time.

The Brutalist is a low budget film, but it doesn’t feel that way. One of its most notable features is a large and expansive original score (the composer Daniel Blumberg just won an Oscar). Same goes with the cinematography that pries distinctive images from everyday events (the cinematographer Lol Crowley just won an Oscar). Same goes with the editing which masterfully overlays different elements of the story and makes the movie feel shorter than it is. The opening is a masterclass in all three of these elements (and acting and directing). It overlays the audio of a spoken letter by a woman in Soviet-held Eastern Europe at the end of World War II with a camera that follows our main character Lazlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody) as he is awakened and makes a minutes-long journey through the interior of a crowded ship. As the man struggles through the belly of the boat, we more and more become apprised of his situation via the context of the written letter. As a Hungarian Jew, he has spent years fleeing the death and destruction of World War II becoming separated from his family and wife in the process. As he exits the interior of the ship, he glances upwards and sees something that transforms his mood from exhaustion to ecstasy. The music swells and the camera wildly veers upwards until we see the Statue of Liberty peeking out from the top of the frame upside down. It is a scene on par with the more classic and straightforward opening of Godfather II. Again, it is notable that It was made for no money, but feels huge. The audience is immediately assured that it is in the hands of people who know what they are doing. That is an especially comforting thought at the beginning of a marathon of a movie.

For whatever reasons, some actors seem destined to play certain types of roles and have become intertwined with their meaning. Adrien Brody has now starred as and won two Oscars playing Eastern European Jews either suffering through the Holocaust (2022’s The Pianist) or making a life in its aftermath 2025’s The Brutalist). These roles are more than twenty years apart but feel like they could be seen one after the other in a double feature. His portrayal of Lazlo Toth is one of mystery and contradiction. He is a gifted architect but has a haunted past and an uncertain present. He is best understood in contrast to his main antagonist, the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. who picks him up from a coal-mining job and, depending how you interpret this movie, takes pains to employ him, or adopt him, or own him.

Van Buren Sr. is played by Guy Pearce is a strikingly impressive performance. There is a seriousness to this businessman, a capacity for charm and generosity, but something undeniably mean about him. And I’m not just talking about his penchant for making vaguely racist remarks. He’s healthier than you and has more money and commands more respect and it just hurts to be around him. This is one of Guy Pearce’s best performances. It is uncanny how he has grown into the role. Lots of actors get rounder as they age (Russell Crowe?). Pearce’s Van Buren Sr. is as sharp as stone. In comparison, Lazlo Toth is sickly and weak. But Toth has something that Van Buren lacks, a capacity to create and the vision to match it. Van Buren knows this, hiis jealousy mixes with his disgust for Toth’s inability to escape addiction and post-traumatic stress, until one night in Italy, the relationship culminates in a rape while Toth is preoccupied in a heroin stupor. It is a shocking scene that doesn’t completely work due to the physical logistics of space and time. Instead, it feels more metaphorical and maybe even ideologicall like the rape scene in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I don’t know exactly what to make of it, so I won’t speak too much about it. I will say that the first half of the movie also has a scene of unwarranted cruelty that sets in motion the second half of the movie. That too seems ideological. One interpretation is that America is not a place for Jews. That the real homeland is Israel (two other characters make that move), where art and identity do not have to be compromised.

That is the good parts. Let’s talk a little about Brutalism and what makes it so terrible. The first example of it in this movie is the transformation of the library at the Van Buren Sr. estate. The room doesn’t start well. It’s a bit of a mess and has long ugly red curtains lining up across a rotunda of large paned windows looking onto the gardens. One of the main problems pointed out is that the books are large and old first editions, so you don’t want sunlight on them directly as it will make them grow old prematurely. The design of Toth deals with this problem by encapsulating the books in large wood cabinets. Here is a picture of the finished product. The lounge chair is also Brutalist.

This looks nice, but I want you to consider how it would actually work as a library in practical terms. That is, if you wanted to use the room as a library, not just pose for pictures in it for Architectural Digest. First, one of the main delights of any library is the ability to peruse the bookshelves for interesting things to read. You can’t do this if the books can't be seen. The design takes the most important part of the room, the books, and removes them. Second, the main purpose of a library is to read books therein. As was mentioned, the books in this library are large first-editions. They are big heavy books. How the hell are you going to read a big heavy book in that lounge chair? That lounge chair is good for magazines and nothing else. Moreover, the ground is barren and hard so you can’t lie on the floor and read a book there either. In order to read anything, you would have to leave the room. This room may look impressive, but in terms of functionality, it is terrible.

Van Buren Sr. is so impressed with the critical raves that his library receives from the high-brow architectural community (Brutalist architecture routinely received design awards in the 1950s-1960s) that he commissions Toth to build him an ambitious community center on a hill on his vast estate. Presumably the community center is to serve the neighboring town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, although neither Toth nor Van Buren Sr. ever appear to consult the town as to what they want and/or need. Van Buren Sr., not one for details, casually remarks that a community space of some sort is required, and a library because those are nice, and a gymnasium because he did wrestling in high school. At some point someone adds a pool. In order to get the town to chip in financially, they have to add a Christian chapel. Toth expresses surprise that a Christian chapel would be included in a community project, seemingly unaware that churches are society’s most basic communal organization.

Because this is a low budget movie, they couldn’t actually build the Van Buren Institute. The best glimpse we see of it are a small-scale model and certain parts of the inside and outside of the building. It is genuinely Brutalist though. It is giant and made of concrete. It looks like it might be impressive, but here are a few details that the movie (and its characters) don’t seem to consider.

One: Location. If this building is to serve the community of Doylestown, why are they building it out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere? How are the people of the community supposed to get to the building to use it?

Two: A big deal is made of the design of the chapel altar-piece. Only the finest marble from Carrera, Italy will be used. The building is designed so that sunlight will filter from an opening in the ceiling so that at certain times of the day, the altar will be illuminated. Okay, that’s cool. But how are people going to see it? From what I can tell, there is no seating in this church.

Three: The gymnasium has a pool which has no natural light and indeed seems to have no artificial light. It appears to be located in the basement where all it could possibly be good for is drowning. The building itself apparently has a multitude of underground passageways connected to the various rooms. These passages, particularly after hours, would be a convenient place to rob and rape and be robbed and raped. This is not only an ugly design, it is a dangerous one.

All of this is characteristic of Brutalist architecture. The look of the thing, impressive from a distance or in a diorama trumps all considerations of actual utility. Not a single frame in this movie shows the community actually using the community space. We are treated to an epilogue in which the building is praised, Toth is heralded as an uncompromising artist, and we are asked to be impressed by pictures of empty rooms of concrete. The building will last forever, that is true, and it will be a testament to Van Buren Sr. and Toth. But unless it is appropriated by an enthusiastic group of skateboarders, it is likely to remain empty and universally hated by the general populace. If you didn’t consider all the awards it received, it would be a massive failure.

Why is Brutalism so admired in the architectural community? I have a theory that derives from the idea of the comedian’s comedian. In one of the making-of vignette’s of Seinfeld, Larry David is revered as one such comedian, not necessarily because he was the funniest, but that he had very little patience with the audience, going so far as to treat them with outright contempt on some nights when, he felt, they didn’t find his jokes funny enough. Such a comedian inspires courage in his colleagues by pursuing ego gratification over compromised commercial self-interest. Here Lazlo Toth fits right in. As revealed in the epilogue, the expensive quirks of his masterpiece, the extra high ceilings and the underground passageways, have nothing to do with the community purpose of the project. They are personal memorials to his time in a concentration camp, a secret detail that benefits his ego and will mean nothing to the people of Doylestown or the financiers that paid for the project. He is a bright beam of inspiration for every megalomaniac that treats people like the tiny stick figures in their fancy dioramas. When a provocative comedian/writer/artist receives criticism from their work, they can always retort by telling the audience to change the channel. Architecture is different. The people in the area have to experience the building whether they want to or not. It takes a lot of egomania to not give a shit about other people on such a massive scale. It is no mistake that Ayn Rand chose an architect in The Fountainhead to express her uncompromising philosophy of uncompromising selfishness.

Brutalism isn’t an expression of freedom. It is an expression of the architect’s vision of freedom and the general public’s slavery to it. It is not a place to create or to become someone. There is no space for innovation or self-improvement. The forms are rigid and inflexible. It tells the user how things are and insists that they are never going to change. The structures being huge are designed to make humans feel small. The interiors of such places are perfect for prison cells and torture chambers. Its main practical use is to wash the brain and crush the soul. It is the only form of architecture that is routinely improved by graffiti. In 1984, George Orwell described the totalitarian state as a “boot stamping on the face of humanity for all eternity”. And if you wanted an architectural expression of that idea, it is Brutalism.

Having said that, this is a pretty good movie.