Some kinds of creativity are harder to capture on camera than others. Eureka moments are fairly easy to present in music or occasionally in art. Architecture can have its napkin sketch epiphanies, but the fundamental requirement of the profession is then to tweak these dreams to hold up floors and keep out rain, a process that is often resolutely boring.
Perhaps for this reason, there are almost no films about the practice of architecture. Movies feature plenty of architect characters, but peering at models tends to be the nearest they get to doing any work. Charles Bronson does not put his knowledge of structural engineering to use in Death Wish. The Fountainhead has long been nearly the sole exception that seemed to at least ostensibly concern designing buildings. It’s been joined recently by Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. The former has received a mixed reception, and the latter was nominated recently for 10 Academy Awards. Most are deserved.
The protagonist is Laszlo Toth (played exceptionally well by Adrien Brody), a Bauhaus-educated modern architect. He is also more importantly Hungarian and Jewish, recently freed from Buchenwald and on his way to Ellis Island, with his wife and niece still stuck in Europe after surviving Dachau.
Toth is a fiction, inspired partly by a gap that Corbet and his spouse and co-writer Mona Fastvold found while circling the topic. There were numerous Bauhaus-trained modernists who arrived in the United States prior to World War II, but almost no one who turned up afterward. Toth’s character does draw upon real historical figures for inspiration, most prominently two fellow Hungarian Jewish refugees: architect and designer Marcel Breuer and polymath Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Most of these real-world architects had rather easy landings. Breuer started out teaching at Harvard while Toth is stuck living in his brother’s furniture shop in Philadelphia. Toth’s brother Attila (played by Alessandro Nivola, grandson of the Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola) is selling frumpy furnishings. Toth shakes this up, soon designing very Breueresque tubular steel pieces.
They obtain a commission to overhaul a mansion library in Doylestown from the obstreperously WASPy son of a shipping magnate. The problem is that the tycoon himself, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), turns up midwork in a fury. He hates it. Toth is soon tossed out by his brother and ends up living at a shelter, shoveling coal at the docks for work.
Van Buren returns shortly with a newly contrite attitude, having come around to his library’s merits and read up on Toth’s prior designs in Hungary. He comes bearing a huge commission for an institute dedicated to his mother on his estate, a project that is to contain a community center-theater-chapel-and-then-some. Toth, of course, accepts.
There’s then an old-fashioned intermission since this nearly four-hour movie runs up against the limits of the human bladder. Afterward, Toth battles the local Babbitts and budget-crunchers to see this all through, with everyone happy in this concrete gray elephant.
Well, no, not at all. The Brutalist juggles its two thematic balls, one about a Holocaust survivor and the other about a modern architect, with great skill in its first half. It then drops them both in its second. The Brutalist’s emphasis is on exile and not emigration. Toth’s unease in a new land is evoked well. He seems to find redemption in his work. Toth is treated with a mixture of curiosity and contempt even by his clients, with submerged or not-very-submerged antisemitism a regular hazard. There’s been some talk about the film advancing an anti-Zionist argument, which it does not. It doesn’t articulate any real position on Israel beyond Toth’s disinterest in going there. His is a specific kind of post-Holocaust despair of ever fitting in anywhere. Moholy-Nagy’s wife Sibyl did approach this feeling, writing in an essay, “No novelist has ever succeeded in formulating the agonies of the creative mind made homeless.” The Brutalist does this very well for a while, and then abruptly, it doesn’t.
The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that The Brutalist forsakes tonal subtlety for a full plunge into Southern or Mid-Atlantic Gothic, with the Van Burens becoming almost literally vampiric. It’s a Sebaldian tale that turns into a pulp novel, and the movie does not benefit at all from this genre shift.
This might be easier to forgive if the verisimilitude of the film’s production design didn’t veer off the track at about exactly the same point. Toth’s early furniture designs are very sharp riffs on Breuer tubular steel furniture. His library design is genuinely superb mimicry, an excellent set that feels midway between real Erich Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra projects. The Van Buren Institute then just takes leave of historical plausibility as a product of the 1940s. It is obviously a fictional building.
The production designer Judy Becker was working on a creative shoestring, for which much should be forgiven. The Brutalist cost about $10 million. Compare that to fellow best picture nominees Dune: Part Two at $190 million or Wicked at $150 million. They didn’t have the means to build much of the Van Buren Institute, however temporarily, and had to rely on models or other interiors to provide a sense of the place, and yet something feels abidingly off. There are notes of real inspiration from the era. Traces of Breuer and other brutalist architects such as Harry Weese and Ulrich Franzen. Other more recently declared production inspirations, such as Tadao Ando and James Turrell (figures in their childhoods in the ’40s), just blanch these out, leaving a building whose surfaces are smooth in a way that shouts 2007 and not 1947.
In the film’s epilogue, set at the first Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980, Toth’s Israeli niece advances a gloss of his work as essentially a therapeutic response to his concentration camp experiences that we seem to be meant to doubt and believe at the same moment. If there is no poetry after Auschwitz, there is brutalism after Buchenwald. I just don’t know.
The Brutalist does many things very well. The first film made using old-fashioned widescreen-intended VistaVision since 1961 (joining such company as North by Northwest and The Searchers), it looks reliably excellent and does provide an epic aura that belies its meager budget. Much of the problem is that the quality of the first half of the film sets a standard that the remainder simply couldn’t match. Like a gargantuan concrete building, what can start out impressive can crumble as time goes by.
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Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
