A winner at the Venice Film Festival for best director and New York Film Critics Circle for best film and director, “The Brutalist” introduces us to Lázsló Tóth (Oscar winner Adrien Brody). Lázsló is a Hungarian architect who studied at the Bauhaus and then was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Like many immigrants and Holocaust survivors arriving in America, in the film’s first scene, Lázsló tries to center himself in a ship’s dark, dank steerage on a boat that has sailed from Bremerhaven, Germany, to New York. His first glimpse of America’s seemingly endless sky ends with a shaky, distorted view of the Statue of Liberty, first seen upside down and then perpendicular. Lady Liberty’s monumental appearance foreshadows the Brutalist architecture that will dominate Lázsló’s work and grounds director Brady Corbet’s three-plus-hour film in excess and starkness.
Bauhaus architecture was a forerunner of Brutalist architecture, which came into style in the UK in the 1950s. Both styles of architecture use materials like concrete and brick to eclipse decorative design. In Brutalist designs, concrete and brick are often exposed, creating an industrial effect. Brutalism was trailblazed mainly by immigrants. Notable practitioners of the style included the architects Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Moshe Safdie and Frank Gehry.
The 215-minute historical epic, with an intermission, is divided into three segments, the first of which takes place from 1947 to 1960. In the second segment, Lázsló and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), reunite after they had been separated at Buchenwald, where Erzsébet was then sent to neighboring Dachau. In her post-war letters to Lázsló, Erzsébet writes she is doing her best to protect their niece Zsofia from the advances of Russian soldiers. Zsofia’s subsequent selective mutism in America seems to indicate that her aunt’s efforts were unsuccessful.
Lázsló came to America in 1947 hoping to work again as an architect designing Bauhaus-style buildings, a goal easier imagined than accomplished. He is almost immediately on a bus to Philadelphia, where he lives on the city’s outskirts with a cousin who gives him a place to sleep in a storage room at his furniture store. One day, a wealthy young man approaches the cousin to renovate his father’s library on his estate in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
The van Buren family are the one-percenters of their generation, and the father, Harrison (Guy Pearce), does not like surprises. Nor does he take kindly to immigrants, particularly the Jews and Black people seemingly invading his estate. He pitches a fit when he sees Lázsló’s minimalist design, but he gradually recognizes Lázsló has enlarged the space by removing the clutter and replacing the heavy maroon drapes with light ones in both design and color.
Addicted to heroin that he first took on the ship to ease the pain of a broken nose, Lázsló ends up in a breadline and sleeping in a shelter for the homeless after his cousin’s wife accuses him of trying to seduce her. But a lucky break comes his way after Harrison gets curious and does his homework about the architect. He tracks Lázsló down at a worksite and invites him to lunch.
The sounds and sites of industrial America—the clang of steel girders and the roar of blast furnaces—contrast with Harrison’s lofty vision of building a substantial memorial to his late mother on the grounds of his estate. He offers Lázsló the commission, and Lázsló moves into his own quarters on the estate to direct the project—something that van Buren insists on. However, in an eerie foreshadowing, Harrison repeatedly tells Lázsló at lavish parties and other social gatherings how “intellectually stimulating” he finds the architect.
Lázsló’s architectural plans for Harrison’s memorial reflect Corbet’s ambitions for the film. Both projects are large in scope and scale. The memorial will have an auditorium, gymnasium, various meeting rooms and a chapel, which has a cross of white light beaming from the ceiling onto a piece of Carrara marble in the middle of it. Corbet observes in the film’s production notes, “Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen—but the people [like Lázsló] who designed or built them are fighting for their right to exist.”
Throughout the building of the grand memorial, Lázsló struggles to prevent the project from turning into a boondoggle. The project intermittently stalls and almost shuts down after a devastating train derailment. At one point, van Buren brings in another architect to tweak Lázsló’s design. One of those changes is to lower the ceilings throughout the building. Lázsló adamantly opposes reducing the height in a given space—he offers money from his commission to fund the expansions required to keep the high ceilings.
For all its vaunted ceilings, the cross etched into the skylight and the subsequent white light gleaming on the piece of marble, the building itself is designed to look like rooms of concentration camp bunkers. The memory of the Holocaust dwells in the building, mirroring Lázsló’s linkage of the past to the present and his obsession with eradicating the claustrophobia of the camps. As Corbet notes, “This is the manifestation of 30 years of trauma in Lázsló Tóth and the ramification of two world wars.”
The film ends with a brief epilogue spotlighting Lázsló Tóth’s retrospective in Venice in 1980 entitled, “It’s not the Journey, it’s the Destination.” Lázsló had been creative and productive in the intervening years, designing synagogues and recreational buildings. However, the film does not offer a resolution to key events. The epilogue skips over how Erzsébet died and Harrison’s disappearance the night Erzsébet confronted him about assaulting Lázsló.
The memorial in Doylestown will always stand as a testament to Lázsló’s genius, his fortitude in surviving the Holocaust and his triumph over van Buren as he stayed true to his vision.
“The Brutalist” opens in select Boston-area theaters on Friday, Dec. 20. Visit your local theater’s website or check online listings for showtimes and availability.
