‘The Brutalist’ is too big to fail.
Adrian Brody stars as Lászlo Toth, in The Brutalist.
I would like to set the tone for this perspective by keeping things plain and simple: pre-intermission, The Brutalist is just about sensational.
Lászlo Toth embraces a fellow traveller beneath the towering Statue of Liberty, in that shot from the trailer with that score booming over their elation. Brady Corbet’s lens sways unsteadily, from the vantage point of a ship docking at the Hudson. It inverts Lászlo’s view and ours of that unblinking muse: her torch, her crown, her conditional promise of freedom and reinvention. I can’t gush nearly enough. How in just a few seconds the moment’s unsteadiness captures both the sweet relief of arrival at last, and also the precariousness of changing countries. How it communicates perfectly the height above one’s immigrant head, the distance between prospect and process, and process and acceptance. What the shot represents at this specific moment in news time, as fascism all over the world brainstorms ways to disenfranchise the people whose ancestors built these countries with their bare hands, or their resources. How really Lady Liberty represents trading one form of endless struggle for another.
Lászlo, an architect, is a man of precious few words – a little bit because he’s insecure about quite decent English, largely because he’s trying to make sense of a new and beguiling land. New York at first, before a cousin (Alessandro Nivola from, yeah it’s been 20 years, Junebug) receives and shuttles him to accommodation and under-the-table grind in Philadelphia. We learn via some narrated mail correspondence, the theatrics of which perhaps the broader film can do without, that Lászlo has been forcibly separated from his wife. The mission therefore isn’t quite complete, and so cousin Attila and his wife Audrey (Emma Laird) will keep Lászlo up until he can make a passable American of himself. She’s classically blonde, uncomfortably compliant, malignantly quiet: the perfect shield with which Attila may engage other men in suits, when he is or isn’t peddling living room carpentry. A gig comes up, a perfect match for Lászlo’s superpowers. While his wealthy father is away on business, a Mr. Harry Van Buren would like for an expert to give the family study a makeover. Attila uses some distinctly American charm to underline that he and Lászlo are precisely the men for the job. Lászlo proves it quickly, by crafting a library that swirls on the spot and gleams with heavenly light it somehow merely recycles.
Lászlo’s buildings are mazes that hurl proclamations at the sky. We learn that he designed several eccentric structures in Europe, a temple or two, a bureaucratic centre, etc, before being forced to flee. When Harrison Lee Van Buren returns from his travels, as Guy Pearce marching into cinematic proceedings, there is at first distrust, consternation, a threat of swift recrimination. Then there is a fondness and admiration, for Lászlo’s gift, that is easy to mistake for respect and equality.
Pre-intermission, the brilliance of The Brutalist is in how it solves problems with minimum dialogue. Each scene making up this crackling start — Lászlo cast against the dark green swathe of a municipal bus; he and Attila and Audrey drinking and dancing in a bright red sunset the colour of her dress; and that refashioned room, that library, beckoning for God — is a still from the bright-side recollections of someone very specific and very afflicted. Brady Corbet shuffles each card smoothly, with the deftness of hand that enables legendary directors to claim, This is none of my business: I’m just documenting things. Mr. Corbet seems deadly fucking serious about being remembered.
The one question my co-pilot and I had before the bathroom break, besides whether we needed one bag of M&Ms or two, was how and when Lászlo’s crack habit would hinder his advancement through American society. I had arse muscles clenched through a tense dinner at the Van Burens’, at the presentation of a large and fragile model to a room full of penny-pinching fuddy-duddies. The work alone is Lászlo's certainty in life and in America. His trust in the materials and in his measurements is everything, even when he seems to have compromised the steadiness of his own hands. This ship is thundering forwards, and docks once more to let Erzsébet, Lászlo’s long-lost wife, aboard.
Initially the most tragic thing about their reunion is he’s forgotten how to be present for her, emotionally, sexually. So Lászlo devotes himself to his craft, relying on the devil’s needle to keep his professional intensity high. Hitherto, Corbet has subsisted on sublime visual engineering — enabling characters, for their shared quest towards individualism, to delay confronting challenges to their inertia. When Lászlo happens to not have his wits about him, he is in illicit, shady corners, far from Erzsébet’s sight and any of the Van Burens’. An act of force suddenly casts everything, every handshake, every blueprint, in a brand new light.
Perhaps Corbet believes the steady degradation of Lászlo’s work experience – how it fills him with less and less joy to have to defer (in his opinion) to buffoons, how money intervenes and costs people jobs, and how it’s all reflected to us, the viewers, in the form of darker, grittier, more industrial frames – justifies the swift devolution of the script’s main players. That spontaneous violence is supposed to mark the film’s breaking point and also that of the American dream: the inevitable juncture at which corporate power takes what it wants, and makes it impossible for the working class to carry on without mortgaging self and soul. But there is too little groundwork in between Laszlo’s gradual and then instant loss of dignity. There is no sprinkling of gingerbread crumbs, to equip these characters with the emotional vocabulary required to justify their dark turns. Where the first part of The Brutalist floats effortlessly from one séance to the next, its second needs a wrench to stick the landing. The phrase I’m bandying about this week is ‘authorial intervention’, and how this set-piece eventually calls for too much of it. The film sacrifices the detachment of its director from its characters, to alter complexion, deteriorate, and ultimately crash-land in a complicated sea. The very detachment that keeps authors lucid and makes characters real.
The Brutalist will nevertheless win far too many awards in a few weeks’ time because it’s too technically brilliant to ignore. To of its time to not use as framework for a conversation about history repeating itself. Too loud to not insert into white wine arguments about canon. Too big to fail.
