Building a mystery

The Brutalist has an artist, and architecture, but it's (mainly) about other things

[Getting close to Oscar nominations time! So I’ll start talking about movies that are likely to turn up in them — though I guess my review of Conclave also qualifies.]

At the end of the Second World War an apparently intelligent and well-mannered Hungarian refugee has, after terrible suffering, made it to America and attempts to rebuild his life. By giving you this accurate if incomplete description of the beginning of The Brutalist, the celebrated film by Brady Corbet, I am in no way preparing you for it. The rush of incidents is headlong, the photography vertiginous, the score unusually assertive, majestic but disorienting — that upside-down Statue of Liberty from the poster is there, but it moves around errantly, like a slide being inserted and re-inserted in a wrong-sized projector.

The image-storms calm down after a while, but the rush of emotions stays strong. Partly that’s because our refugee, László Toth, is played by Adrien Brody, one of our wettest movie actors (maybe the second-most, next to Paul Giamatti), and he is one big welter of feeling. But he has a right to be — the War was terrible on László, a Jew and an artist; he has been forced to leave his wife and niece behind at the Austrian boundary, and he suffers from unspecified trauma as well as an untreated smashed nose he got when he “jumped from a rail car.” He takes “something for the pain” — heroin, we learn later.

Though the refugee is glad to reach the new world, his New York arrival is not heroic or hopeful; the most vivid scene from it is a prostitute under the neon sign of a YMCA, luring the refugee by pressing her fingers against the inside of her thighs. This leads to a (to put it mildly) unfulfilling encounter.

László is strong on family, and almost pathetically joyful to be reunited with his cousin Attila, who runs a small furniture business outside Philadelphia, and hopeful that his wife and niece can come to join him. But László’s faith in the cousin is ultimately disappointed. One night after many drinks Attila pushes László to dance with his wife, a well-behaved and recessive Connecticut Catholic, to which László is extremely resistant but on which Attila is extremely insistent.

We sense something is not right between the cousins; maybe it never has been. Or maybe it’s the wife: The next night she and László have an unpleasant conversation that suggests things didn’t go well, and that she would prefer he didn’t stay — though, she makes clear, she would not be the one to say so.

I won’t go through all the threads in The Brutalist here — as I said, information comes through it slowly, and also it’s over three and a half hours long — but, looking back, I see in this scene foreshadowing and connection to a theme, having to do with László’s vulnerability, and sex, and what makes people exploiters or exploited.

This proves out when László is revealed to have been, before the War, a very successful Bauhaus architect. We learn this as it is discovered by Harrison Van Buren, a Main Line Philadelphia industrialist who, finding László working in his home on a job for his son, treats him viciously but, when he later finds out what he has been — that is, distinguished, honored — he approaches László with blustery apologies, which are really complaints about how he had been misled and provoked into the necessity of making them.

When Van Buren shows László magazine clips he’s discovered of his buildings back in Budapest, László starts to cry. Van Buren is embarrassed, but not for himself. “You could have elaborated a bit more on your background,” he says, almost irritably, adding that László “didn’t do yourself any favors” by not mentioning it. Later he offers László tantalizing prospects and becomes, in both senses, patronizing. In another kind of movie, this would be László’s big break.

Van Buren is an almost comically repressed character, played by Guy Pearce with a lacquered appearance and a sort of Clark Gable stiffness of speech that shows what such stiffness sounds like when you’re not Clark Gable. The type is an old wheeze and tracks with what we may have been primed to expect whenever an artist is picked up by rich patron, especially one who insists, as Van Buren does, that he himself lacks artistic talent and is fascinated by those who have it.

But this ain’t Sabrina. Van Buren turns out to be weirder than we may have expected. In one of those society parties patrons give for their pet artists, he tells László a long story — in elevated language, into which the script frequently veers and which the actors fortunately can handle — about his own family experience, his unwed mother and her rejection by her parents (“I hesitate to even call them my grandparents”), told with measured but unmistakable moral dudgeon and terminating in a very cruel revenge. László appears to understand, even relate, maybe because Van Buren has clearly been hurt, and that the hurt came from family — though (if I read him right; maybe he’s just being polite) he seems to miss what both family and pain mean to the rich man.

Then Van Buren asks László, “Why architecture?” and László tells him about the legacy he hopes for his own work: “When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us,” he says, “I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.”

“I do find our conversations intellectually stimulating,” says Van Buren. But we are to learn that Van Buren hasn’t heard László at all, in fact doesn’t understand what his work means beyond its power to fascinate him, and that this fascination will curdle into envy, contempt, and a need to dominate.

This becomes more apparent to us when his wife Erzsébet and his niece finally make it to America. László’s relationship with Erzsébet is not a disappointment like László’s with Attila, but it’s not just about picking up where they left off, either. As Felicity Jones plays her, Erzsébet’s wartime sufferings have hobbled her physically (osteoporosis from starvation). But her emotions and her morality are, if anything, heightened, electric. (She responds to Van Buren’s rage at Penn Station bums, “I’m a former bag lady myself,” cheerfully but with a faint, frosty wisp of reproach.) Her sufferings also seem to have sharpened a sexual issue between her and László that the film handles with dramatic frankness. This is not necessarily what László wanted, but it turns out to be what he needs, because it’s distinct from the exploitation he finds elsewhere and, in a turning point, it is shown to be his salvation from Van Buren.

I haven’t even gotten to the big architecture commission László gets from Van Buren, the protracted work on which takes up a large chunk of the movie and gives us some amazing visuals. There are plenty of things from that I could go on about — like the visit artist and patron pay to the Carrara marble quarry, where Van Buren, enraptured beyond his normal reserve, gingerly places his palm and cheek against the cold, white, blue-veined stone.

But telling the plot and privileged moments is close to a fool’s errand, anyway. We’d be here all day. There is a lot happening in the movie, and it plays on a massive scale — huge set pieces, dramatic clashes, decades of changing styles and status, even epistolary and newsreel insertions that made me think of Epic Theatre.

But in essence the story, while complex, is intimate: It starts out looking like an Immigrant Story, and it kind of is, and then a Story About Family, and it sort of is that, too. We have expectations of those stories, just as we have expectations of the László/Van Buren relationship based on screwball comedies and Horatio Alger and so forth. But in The Brutalist these tropes are turned inside out. The immigrant piece isn’t about reinvention to conform to society, but reinvention to remain human in spite of it. Family is not a refuge, but something that also has to be reinvented, at length and painfully, in order to survive. The rich are indeed wounded but not sympathetic because their wounds exude poison, which, like heroin, you can get used to and let kill you. And art? It’s doesn’t get the misty, worshipful treatment a lot of movies about tormented artists get. It’s just there, like a need or a conscience.

In short, it’s the kind of sprawling film that might exasperate you if you don’t, as I did, become fascinated by it. It’s also as close as we’re probably going to get to a David Lean kind of epic in this era. Come to think of it, Lawrence of Arabia is pretty weird, too.