Don't You Want Some Good F***ing Food?: On The Brutalist

nothing, of its own explanation

Overture

There’s a moment in The Brutalist that I cannot get out of my head.

Over an hour into the film, architect László Toth (Adrien Brody) is having a conversation with wealthy American benefactor Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who has invited László to a party at his estate to discuss a major, multi-pronged construction project he is looking to finance. The two exchange monologues. Harrison tells a bullshit fable from his personal life about money and respect. László retorts with a diatribe on how his buildings are a kind of artistic and political vengeance. At this moment, he says off-hand, “Nothing can be of its own explanation.” Yet before this, in the middle of Harrison’s little story, a random party guest comes over to compliment László’s work on Harrison’s house. He compares the mastery over space to a short story he once read, about an infinite library.¹

Such a bluntly ironic interjection has nagged at me since seeing it, along with the Act-specific title cards, which derive their names from a Naipaul novel and Zumthor lecture, respectively. What is the point?² There is just no good reason to mention Borges beyond the mere act of literary allusion itself. Neither the preoccupations of that story, nor its cultural position, nor Borges’ own life make for useful reference. There is no uncertainty as to the meaning of the scene in question, so the inclusion of this line only furthers a sense that Corbet might lack the rigor to pull the whole thing off. It sounds like a nitpick, and it is, but, moreso than the ideological explications spouted by László and Harrison, that bizarre intellectual charade is emblematic of The Brutalist as a whole; Overwritten, baffling, and self-evidently hollow.

I. Literary Occasions

Well before The Brutalist’s festival debut, its status as an “event movie” was already clear. The newest output from actor-cum-autuer Brady Corbet is three hours and fifteen minutes (plus intermission), made for only 10 million dollars in Hungary, and the first feature film to be shot on VistaVision since Mary Poppins. It was swiftly crowned the year’s towering achievement in cinema upon its premiere, art with real scope, real power. This sentiment went beyond the marketing, its grandiosity was an immutable character of the work. The mere prospect of real audacity, of flawed greatness, sent screenshot accounts into a frenzy. Every inch of the film (and its extratextual promo material) promised something alive, an object of fascination, a tome to pour over on the biggest screen imaginable. This, finally, was a real movie.

I did not hate watching The Brutalist. Occasionally, I even enjoyed it. Joe Alwyn, for one, is terrific, probably the only of his peers to let himself be unappealing, willing to relinquish scenes to his counterparts without ever slacking on his own craft. Daniel Blumberg’s score feels studied but emotive, and when its discordant shards form those four killer notes, it’s exhilarating. The jokes (in dialogue, in framing, in dramatic irony) are clever and funny. How Corbet chooses to shoot buildings and their materials is some staggering photography. Though its mammoth length has been touted like a height requirement for a rollercoaster, the actual experience of watching the movie goes by smoothly. There’s an air of desperation here that can be enthralling.

What is so shocking about Corbet’s magnum opus is not that it is bad, which it only sort of is, but that it feels like play-pretend, a schoolyard dirt pie treated like a Michelin star tasting menu. Its ideas are basic and repetitive, its form is endearingly amateurish, its writing and acting grows progressively ridiculous. It is the kind of movie that will have two separate montages to explain the concept of “Philadelphia.” It is the kind of movie that features a rape scene in front of a literal hundred-ton symbol of what the rape represents while the rapist whispers in voiceover that the symbol is, in fact, a metaphor. It is the kind of movie with Stacy Martin in it.³

The first half gets by on mystique and charm; there’s a welcoming thrill to such an initially austere movie beckoning the audience in with broad gestures towards something they haven’t yet revealed. The leisurely pace of individual scenes could be highlighted as the sign of a bloated screenplay, but perhaps the script’s sole forte in the way it maximizes time spent in a state of limbo without ever losing tension. One moment László is putting his cousin in the cuck chair; the next he’s doing heroin at a jazz club. It is hard not to have a soft spot for a movie that effectively keeps its audience on the backfoot while being so blunt. There are just so many ideas and minor threads that for a while, at least, you’d be forgiven for thinking Corbet was really up to something.

The second László’s wife and daughter, Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones, god help her) and Zsofia, arrive at the Doylestown⁴ train station, it becomes clear we’ve spent the past hour and a half sitting like boiling frogs. From that point on, the film only gets more ludicrous, and its weaker elements only grow more egregious.

Besides my beloved Joe, the cast is a trainwreck. In the right role, Guy Pearce is extremely strong; this is not the right role. Adrien Brody performances always tick me off because he’s 51 years old and every movie you can still tell exactly what acting techniques were on his LaGuardia High School syllabus. Felicity Jones should sue for being hired. She should sue for negligence that they would give her notes during the shoot instead of just firing her. She should sue for defamation for the edit.

Hemmed in by both budgetary and location constraints, not to mention a story about creatives divorced from the final products of their labor, it is understandable but surprising that The Brutalist offers few opportunities to ogle architecture⁵ in 70mm. More damning, however, is the lack of ingenuity in more quotidian scenes, which Corbet stuff with lazy medium coverage, skeletal tracking shots, and nauseating shaky-cam. The VistaVision calls undue attention to the uninspired mise-en-scene as much as the good stuff.

There are plenty of features here that rhyme with Corbet’s filmography: the credits over an aerial shot, the bourgeoise temper tantrums, the incessant avalanche of world events piling up around artists. But unlike Vox Lux - a laughably terrible movie that is so willfully garish and cruel that it blossoms into something devastating and genius - The Brutalist is too often unwilling to indulge its low-brow instincts and doltish pleasures.

With each scene it becomes clearer that the movie is floundering, as characters take increasingly drastic action at increasingly loud volumes. The climax of the film, helmed by none other than our sweet Felicity, is such a horrendous miscalculation that could only come from hours of miscalculation and once-amorphous scenes read, in retrospect, on suffocatingly narrow terms. I am stunned that something with such a holistic failure of vision has received widespread acclaim.

The nature of said vision, however, is an entirely different discussion.

II. A Feeling Of History

What is The Brutalist about?

Not Brutalism, that’s for fucking sure. As Phil points out in his review⁶, no character utters the word “communism” even once. Not all Bauhaus disciples were radicals, of course, but I will take issue with its absence in a movie about a Jewish immigrant ostensibly set in the midst of McCarthyism. For all its ostentatious posturing about Capital-H History, the film is, to its severe detriment, unwilling to interrogate the particularities of actual history.

Despite its commanding appearance, this is just a bog-standard movie about moviemaking. Buildings become less important than the images of places, of people, of conjured time that will soon become inaccessible. This is a movie about dealing with crew, with moody investors, with long hours and poor pay. This is a movie about how much it takes to make something that will last for others far longer than it will last for you.

It’s not a bad idea for a movie, but it’s not really enough to carry an epic, no matter how thorough its implementation. So instead, Corbet spends much of his time honing an aesthetic self-mythology. Those pet themes and signature shots, once pleasantly peripheral, suddenly feel like the main event. The raison d'etre for The Brutalist’s existence is to serve as an advertisement for Corbet’s own abilities and worthiness as a director. The cold swagger with which it all unfolds is hilariously unearned. There have been plenty of overambitious, somber films with enough humility to simultaneously succeed as comedies (Tar, There Will Be Blood), and plenty of asinine vanity projects that find beauty in their vulnerability (Megalopolis, By The Sea). This movie, unfortunately, falters in neither direction. The potential in The Brutalist for satire and autofiction is incompatible with its immutable status as a dick-measuring contest for every man involved, on- and off-screen.

It’s ironic, then, that Corbet’s limitations as an artist are most visible in his sex scenes. Erzsébet’s osteoporosis falls somewhere between mythic ailment and manifestation of her own psyche, a distastefully European creative shortcut. When Erzsébet and László touch, suffering and love implode from their previously volatile coexistence. Yet Corbet’s penchant for melancholic depravity and shoddy dramaturgy distorts moments that ought to brush against the unspeakable depths of human suffering and perseverance, rendering them flatly in frenzied, monotonous exchanges and overdesigned sensory flourishes.

What a shame it is, to find a movie with complex, mature sex scenes, ones which are every way essential to the work - only for the scenes to be so very clearly the worst thing in the movie, so bad they should have been cut, even if it necessitated the removal of entire subplots. This is not a case of me refusing to take a film seriously when confronted with something adult and raw. I balk, instead, at how juvenile and lost everybody involved seems when asked to tackle such a rich part of the text.

None of this, though, is what we’re talking about when we talk about The Meaning Of The Brutalist.

There’s already been plenty of pussyfooting around the movie’s relationship to Judaism and, specifically, Israel; to my eyes, the discourse has mostly given the film either too much credit or too much slack.

László moves through life with an impassioned but cloudy vision for the future, just as he mourns for a past that everybody refuses to speak about because it is unspeakable. This core emotional register is well suited to a movie about Jewish immigrant identity in the wake of WWII, and the best moments in the film foreground László’s jagged grief in compelling and distinctive variations. Admittedly, I am not Jewish (though neither is Corbet); there might be particularities here that I’m missing - bluntness and subtly are not mutually exclusive. But as much as the heart of The Brutalist feels appropriately beholden to these ideas, the head seems otherwise preoccupied.

Israel is top of mind for the Toth family and, as a radio broadcast suggests early on, America at large. Ultimately, Corbet seems interested in Jerusalem primarily as a site of ultimate displacement. As László repeats throughout the film, his family is not just Jews but also “foreigners.” The ending, accompanied by orchestration that brilliantly turns the score into a crass punchline, feels shot out of a better film, one afraid of flirtations with the parodic. The point is not László’s journey through America, but that he ended up elsewhere. The movie has no position on whether Israel is a sanctuary or an inherent act of colonialist violence. It merely knows that the US put it there just so they wouldn’t have to take in Jews. The Brutalist, in something between restraint and dullardry, stops short of ever being forced to confront the real world, instead dealing with symbols. The film opens and closes on László’s daughter being interrogated, in one form or another, about her family, about her home. The point of the movie is how violent and impossible it is to build a home once it has been robbed of you; thus, in the film’s view, Israel is snake oil akin to the American Dream itself. I think that this is a smart and true idea, on its own.

Yet Corbet and co. never interrogate how the Palestinian genocide is a tragic redux of these very phenomena, even in telling absences. I think it would be a stronger film if it had pushed its commentary further, and I’m not just saying that because of my firm anti-Zionist beliefs. Corbet has spoken repeatedly during the press tour for the film about the importance of “ambiguity” in art, but weirdly, the film’s exact position on Israel is the only idea that is ambiguous. To take a political stance, it seems to Corbet, would be to rob the film of its power, its ability to speak to some ineffable, complicated truth about the world. Back over here in reality, though, the historical backdrop only serves to distract from the simplicity of Corbet’s musings. “Is The Brutalist Zionist?” is an easy prompt. But none of the possible answers are all that interesting, because the movie in question is offers little beyond trite vagueness and obvious trolling.

I struggle to see the use in parsing The Brutalist as a story of US complicity in the aftermath of the Holocaust, or even as a long-winded but righteous lampoon/ inditement of Israel. Its historiographic tangents read merely as portentous excuses for the Corbet’s real interest - a displaced architect as allegory for the plight of the contemporary film director.

A period epic with no material insight or perspective on the world of its setting is the kind of thing you make when you think the important stuff is elsewhere. The Brutalist is only invested in a devastating fable about the post-war Jewish diaspora insofar as it can serve as a metaphor for making a TV show with Tom Holland, compensating for its lack of insight with crescendoing theatrics it does not have the skill to adequately support.

This is a narcissist work without being a personal one, a grandiose work without being an intricate one, a historical work without being a political one. It is a feat of good old-fashioned pretension, unlucky enough to find its disparate shortcomings unable to congeal under even the most sympathetic lens. The emperor has no clothes, and he’s razed the land of any flatteringly shaped bushes to hide behind.

Coda

I wrote about The Brutalist because it’s a new movie, and new movies are kind of my job, in the same way old movies are kind of my hobby. And like all new movies, talking about The Brutalist brings up the same old questions:

Don’t you want a movie to wrestle with? Don’t you want to solve your feelings? Don’t you want to defer to a stable of existential platitudes? Don’t you want some good fucking food? Don’t you want a movie to stir within you that feeling of instantly canonized art? Don’t you want to dig through garbage? Don’t you want to find something worthy?

Does it matter if it loses its lusters once the platformed rollout runs its course? Does it matter if the only time you’ll think of it in three years is when you see compressed clips of it set to Tyler, the Creator songs? Does it matter if it sucks shit?

The answer is that sure, I can’t help it, and no, it doesn’t matter. I am not above writing my way into loving a catastrophic picture. But The Brutalist makes chasing that dragon both unpleasant and empty in a way I haven’t felt in my entire career. It is the purest distillation of cinephilic commodity fetishism and the least rewarding film of the year.

Some Housekeeping:

Big week for little ol’ me.

• I went long on Anora for the gracious folks at LARB

• I wrote the lead review for Nickel Boys over at the marvelous Little White Lies

Plus, keep an eye on my socials for yet another essay tomorrow (one that’s been eight months in the making, no joke).

love ya lots,

helmet girl

1. My first thought upon hearing this aside was, “Borges didn’t get translated into English until the 60s,” which I know for a fact I was not alone in noticing, but we’ll get to that.

2. The reference to Naipaul offer us the key insight that the movie will feature moving to a place. The reference to Zumthor reminds us that this movie is about an architect.

3. If a man puts Stacy Martin in a movie, then he’s a hack. Those are the rules.

4. As someone who spent her teenage years working at a movie theater in the real Doylestown, (population 8.3k), it is astounding that the outdoor scenes, shot in Hungary, are convincingly similar to the hills surrounding Philadelphia (the trees are wrong, but that’s close enough). Also, it is a little crazy that I am one of *three* film critics I know who grow up around there. That is not a big or important town! Mona Fastvold, do not worry, I am receiving the messages you have left for me and I will be following your instructions very closely.

5. Kate Wagner’s excellent review for the The Nation digs into a lot of the medium-specific details far better than I can.

6. See, I told you somebody else noticed.