The Brutalist and the Nightmare of the American Dream
This article was originally published on Tropics of Meta.
The French philosopher Simone Weil once said that “the beauty of the world is like the mouth of a labyrinth.” She went on to tell an allegory of how the seeker, the petitioner, wanders into the labyrinth and feels lost, far away from family and friends and anyone she knows, and keeps moving about, looking for an end. But Weil says that the journeyer, if she keeps at it, will eventually find the center of the labyrinth, and then she will find God, and God will eat her, and she will be digested and spat out by this Minotaur-like deity in the heart of the maze. After that, she will go to the entrance of the labyrinth and entreat everyone to come in. She has been eaten by God — a wily reversal of the sacrament of the Eucharist — and wants everyone to venture in and see.
At first, it might seem difficult to apply this analogy or metaphor to Brady Corbet’s 2024 film The Brutalist, yet it seems apt. The Brutalist tells the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Jewish architect trained in the legendary and notoriously Nazi-hated Bauhaus school, whose whole life is destroyed when the Holocaust gets under way. Modernist architecture of the Bauhaus was considered too Jewy and decadent for the new Nazi censors and his life, like that of so many other artists and writers of the time, is turned upside down. He loses contact with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) as she is transferred to a Soviet camp alongside their traumatized and disabled niece Zsófia. But László gets to come to America.
Figure 1. Adrien Brody as László Tóth in The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet, 2024.
In the beginning, it is a classic American immigrant story — a man introduced to the temptations and pleasures of this crazy, blowsy country, where you can have everything you want if you grin wide enough and are willing to lie, haggle, deal, prevaricate. He settles in with a cousin, Attila, in Philadelphia, who owns a furniture store and has learned the ways of assimilating and wheeling and dealing.
László is not that. In his characteristic Eastern European way, he can’t pretend to like something he doesn’t or flatter people. He’s just like . . . okay, I don’t like it, or . . . that’s ugly. The great American way of deception is foreign to him and his character. When the oligarch Van Buren (played by Guy Pearce in a bravura performance) screams at him for a library makeover he and his cousin’s team have done, László says, “It’s quite alright” laconically and throws off his cigarette, walks away.
It’s not necessary to get into all the details of the plot, but László has to scrape and grind to survive in America, even shoveling coal when Van Buren eventually comes back to find him. The great Bauhaus architect is soot-smeared and sweaty, doing manual labor. Van Buren learns that people actually think the library redesign László did is really cool and so he wants to hire him to create a monument to his recently deceased mother. Hence, the plot really begins.
László quickly realizes that being ushered into the posh salons of the elite is a winning ticket, and even figures out that Van Buren’s connections could get his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia out of the Soviet hell they’ve been trapped in. So he is willing to do, mostly, what they want. So continues a story that tears Erzsébet and László apart, as he tries to serve the demands of these vile Anglo aristocrats.
“That a three-and-half-hour film about architecture got made by a big studio with name-brand actors . . . is just hard to believe.”
Suffice to say that László is trying to create a monument that works cross-purposes with its funders’ intention. I don’t want to ruin or spoil too much of the film but the architect has his own designs that the rich Anglos could not possibly understand.
The story continues with the ups and downs of László, Erzsébet, and Zsófia’s lives, always in the orbit of Van Buren’s fortune. A critical point comes in a truly shocking scene in Italy when László and Van Buren have gone looking for marble to complete the monument. Erzsébet comes to confront the rich family about their cruelty and misdeeds, and we don’t know much more than that.
The Brutalist is a film about immigration, the American Dream, Jewishness, the Holocaust, addiction, class, sexual assault, and so many more things. But it somehow manages to wrap all this up in a tragic three-and-a-half-hour runtime — small beans for an HBO miniseries, but pretty big for a theatrically released major motion picture. The fact that a three-and-half-hour film about architecture got made by a big studio with name-brand actors like Brody and Jones is just hard to believe. I left it with mixed feelings, which is probably the best thing a film can do.
Was László just an artiste who insisted on his vision? Or was he trying to make a big point about the world-historic trauma many of these characters went through? It’s hard to tell at the end, but The Brutalist made a big impression on me, one that I’m going to be thinking about for a long time.
Citation
Alex Sayf Cummings, “The Brutalist and the Nightmare of the American Dream,” PLATFORM, Jan. 27, 2025.
