The Brutalist

Dramatizing an architectural movement

The architect in fiction can be a troubling force. As Justin Beal writes in Sandfuture, his hybrid biography-memoir of Minoru Yamasaki, most of the reference points are a bit disturbing. Henrik Ibsen’s titular architect in The Master Builder falls to his death from the steeple of the church he has spent the story constructing. Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, dynamites the building he designed, because of some design compromises, and stands trial. Then again, as Beal notes, the architect is quite often the ideal love interest in a romantic comedy film, the perfect fusion of artistry and practicality that usually makes the protagonist swoon.

Which brings me to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. The epic film, which releases wide this weekend, stirred critics at the Venice Film Festival and won the Silver Lion, and is expected to be a front-runner in the Academy Awards.

I’m here to tell you that these accolades are well-deserved. The Brutalist has been marketed as a “great American story” on par with The Godfather, and there’s certainly that kind of DNA in its construction. The film follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Jewish and Hungarian architect who studied at the Bauhaus and survived the Holocaust. As Tóth moves to America to find a new life, he struggles to find work in his trade, until he finds a new patron in Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a Vanderbilt-type who commissions Tóth to fashion a memorial for his late mother. The expansive melodrama, which lasts 3 1/2 hours across an intermission (yes, an intermission!), charts their evolving relationship as Tóth’s wife, a brilliant, yet tragically disabled journalist, Erzsébet Tóth (Felicity Jones) joins her husband in Pennsylvania.

The performances are engrossing, the music soaring, and the imagery, which takes us from Ellis Island to midcentury Pennsylvania and even the quarries of the Italian Dolomites, is extraordinary. Even more extraordinary on the reported $10 million budget, as the film feels much more expensive than that. (There’s a very dark twist toward the end of the film that will no doubt make the experience polarizing, but I wonder if there is a film without it.)

What The Brutalist gets wrong about its subject is that Tóth, being one of many Jewish and Bauhaus architects who fled Europe for America, would probably be in very high demand in the US. While Walter Gropius and Mies Van der Rohe were not Jewish, the Bauhaus style was attacked by the Nazis and its architects were forced to find more amenable patrons elsewhere.

But if the film had been accurate in that respect, it probably wouldn’t have indulged in one of the seminal images of The Fountainhead, which depicts its leading architect reduced to working in a quarry. In The Brutalist, Tóth ends up shoveling coal in a port, a striking metaphor for how far he’s fallen, for what America, the land of “opportunity” makes you do to survive.

Tóth (Adrien Brody), the great architect, shovels coal. (Credit: A24.)

But what the film does is dramatize the revolution in architectural style that was the Brutalism movement, an architectural trend from the 1950s to 1980s that involved minimalist expressions of concrete and brick, geometric shapes and materiality. Though many Brutalist buildings are considered ugly and have since been demolished, they have their fans, and have been increasingly valued and put on historic preservation lists. Some famous examples include the DC Metro underground stations and the main terminal of Washington Dulles Airport.

Tóth’s architecture seems to be a composite of various brutalist architects, and the sanctuary he creates for Van Buren seems to channel the bold geometric forms of concrete that Louis Kahn made, particularly for the National Assembly in Bangladesh and the Unitarian Church of Rochester, as well as Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church. (Readers, if you can identify some of the influences on the style of Tóth’s building, please comment below!)

In so doing, The Brutalist accomplishes what is extremely difficult—it situates a story around an artistic movement. This year, while reporting on the origins of the Architecture and Design Film Festival, most of the filmmakers I spoke to discussed how it was hard to make fiction narratives around these subjects—and indeed, most of the films featured in the ADFF festival, year after year, are documentaries.

The characters drive the story, and the artistic movement drives the characters. In an era when many are decrying the end of the cinema, here is a film that is trying to do a lot with architecture, and also make a broader comment about class and America and so many other things. It’s a bold, monumental swing. My suspicion is that this film is one that will be remembered (it has a very Tár energy), but even if it isn’t, it shows us the possibilities of storytelling in the dramatic, cinematic medium.

Tóth (Adrien Brody) at work. (Credit A24)