The Brutalist traverses the industrial might of post-World War II America, straddling the landscape like a vengeful Cronus. This is the America of infinite trains, steel, concrete, glass, skyscrapers, modernity mined from the dead and dying husk of Europe. Swallowing up the brain and the brawn of the old world, enraptured by their brilliance and fearful of their presence on god’s own country, fearful of being overthrown by these new invaders just as they had overthrown the indigenous population before.
Whilst encased in the stomach of fear, European genius will send Americans to the moon and American ballistic missiles to far-off continents, but they will never be trusted, never be fully accepted.
Much like the old-world, Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and Bauhaus trained architect László Tóth was once beautiful. Jumping from a train broke his face and restructured his nose, an act of violence that changed the geography of his existence forever.
When we meet László, he is in the disorienting process of being regurgitated from the belly of a ship, vomited out like Jonah, greeted by an inverted Statue of Liberty, lurching like a broken pendulum, a vision of chaos rather than an icon of stability, justice, and freedom.
It’s a dizzying sequence, brutally accompanied by Daniel Blumberg’s overpowering score in a punishing crescendo, grandeur, futility and lies rush out of the ship like Pandora’s Box and we wonder… did hope escape too?
László is a man haunted by trauma, a survivor of Buchenwald – that name alone conjures horrors beyond human reason for those of us blessed with simple human empathy – but we can never know what it was like for László and his fellow survivors, nor the millions who were exterminated by the pseudo-science of progression.
Forcefully separated from his wife Erzsébet and his niece Zsofia, he has no way of knowing if they are alive or dead. Oceans and continents, months and years act as an impenetrable shield against the truth, only when his cousin Attila tells László they have survived can we know just a shred of László’s combined grief and joy as he clutches Attila’s head desperately like a life preserver tossed overboard into the tumultuous waters below.
Attila has a furniture business in Philadelphia and has fully assimilated into American life, converting to Catholicism to marry his wife, Audrey.
The furniture is ugly, American reproductions of what they imagine European history would find respectful. László’s sleek line minimalism disturbs the equilibrium of polite society, his Gesamtkunstwerk renovation of a library for the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren is met with the fury of a religious zealot casting out thrice damned heretics. László is gracious in defeat, he can afford to be as he doesn’t have to pony up the money for materials. Attila is left out of pocket, poison poured into his ear by a vengeful Audrey. László must leave the business. He has already experienced the worst humanity has to offer, so looking for gainful employment holds no fear for László.
The Brutalist explores the fragile dynamic between patron and artist, whether that is between the boss of a furniture business and their designer or a billionaire industrialist and their visionary architect. Years later, Van Buren realises that fashion and taste has caught up with László’s designs and seeks him out to commission a community centre in honour of his dead mother. Van Buren, who made his fortune by taking on US government war contracts, is enraptured by László, intellectually stimulated by the architect and becomes his sponsor and to some degree, his master.
László will come to discover that even men with generational wealth like Van Buren have their limits. At dinner, Van Buren throws László a coin as a cheap dig at his failure to assimilate into American culture.
Van Buren then asks for the coin back, “A penny saved”, he warns his charge.
When László’s wife finally arrives in the second half of the film, we realise why he has been so bereft. Her shadow, her voice, her words have been all pervasive despite her absence, the abyss where László’s heart once resided.
Erzsébet is his intellectual equal, a force of nature educated at Oxford and who reported on foreign affairs during the most traumatic time in European history. Erzsébet can articulate what László’s spectre-like demeanour tries to communicate about America: “This place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat. This whole country is rotten.”
László’s soul is slowly corrupted by the inherent racism and cruelty on which the American lie was founded. We wonder why he endures, why he perseveres with the multitude of barbs and threats that lacerate his impoverished psyche.
The artist-as-martyr trope is well worn, but what motivates László to continue to build his monument upon Van Buren’s hill? John Winthrop’s lecture in 1630 gives us a clue and referred to the “City upon the hill”, later corrupted as the idea of American exceptionalism and exploited by politicians and presidents, America as a “beacon of hope” to the world.
To paraphrase Alien, the “beacon of hope” is a warning signal for people to stay away.
László’s monument is dark and foreboding, a brutalist folly that transports the architecture of the death camps to America for the entire world to see. Jesus warned that “a city on a hill cannot be hid” and America’s complicity and failure to act when genocide is committed is exposed through László’s structure.
Even the light that flickers through the concrete beams at night is reminiscent of the furnaces that incinerated the innocent, the inverted cross a symbol of the failure of Christianity, the marble altar at its heart an executioner’s block.
The Brutalist smites the myth of American exceptionalism, but it is an exceptional American film. It is a brooding, sometimes crass, sometimes towering monument to art, culture, commerce, the struggle between Ayn Rynd’s belief that individualism is superior to collectivism, the immigrant experience within America, the decline of Western civilisation, Zionism, appeasement, and what America stands for when fascists and fantasists run the “greatest democracy on earth.”
At least Van Buren wanted to honour his mother with his building. What the hell do Trump and Musk want to honour with their twisted vision of the future?
Artists like László are our best defence against them. His buildings are seen as “political stimulus” and “designed to withstand erosion”. After all, as László states to Van Buren, “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”
The Brutalist is testament to that statement.