Content warning: “The Brutalist” contains heavy references to the Holocaust, drug abuse and sexual assault.
Dispossession and pain are the words most apt to describe “The Brutalist,” the decade-spanning epic from actor-turned-director Brady Corbet.
László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survived the Dachau concentration camp, is the film’s protagonist. A man already broken by the horrors of the Holocaust and physically separated from his wife Erszébet and niece Szófia, he fights a heroin addiction that one suspects is intended to drown out the hell of the camps.
As soon as Tóth makes his way to Pennsylvania to meet his immigrated kin, he is met with reminders of his outsider status: his cousin Attila has changed his last name to Miller and converted to Catholicism upon marrying his wife, with whom he runs a furniture store. When he is contracted by wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren to design and construct a community center, the central conflict of the film begins.
While his motivation for becoming an architect is hinted to be without reason, it is heavily implied that it is connected to the lack of belonging he feels as a Jewish person.
Tóth’s relation to Judaism and his society’s prevailing antisemitism are the most gripping parts of the film. We see him not only grimacing in pain attending synagogue, but being continually derided by Van Buren as a “leech” on WASP society, an outcast from the nation of immigrants.
This same internalized pain that Tóth feels is off-screen expressed by the looming specter of Zionism and the prospect of immigration to Israel as some escape. It is in these moments that Corbet makes one of the film’s most divisive political statements: that Zionism is a philosophy born out of suffering and dispossession in an attempt to carve out a place in the world for a long-persecuted people.
This is contrasted with Tóth’s disillusionment of the American Dream, where Corbet offers a glimpse into how arrival in a supposed promised land can quickly turn sour. This moral grayness toward Zionism has stirred controversy among critics seeking to place the film into a neat political box.
Instead, Corbet explores reasons why Zionism was able to spread across Jewish communities after the Holocaust, letting the audience draw their own conclusions. Viewing the unique pain of immigration and discrimination makes the film’s colossal runtime fly away and lets us ruminate on the long-lasting repercussions of the 20th century’s atrocities. The film premiered during Israel’s war in Gaza, and Corbet has used its press tour to urge distributors to secure a U.S. release for “No Other Land,” a documentary by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers on the illegal occupation of the West Bank.
“The Brutalist” would be nothing without the performances of the lead cast with Adrien Brody masterfully mumbling, chain smoking and wincing his way through his role as Tóth, communicating an unbearable sadness with his eyes through all three-and-a-half hours. Guy Pearce so utterly embodies the sinister nature of mid-century capitalists in his speech and movements as Van Buren that it’s easy to forget this is only an actor.
In mentioning the performances, it is important to note the AI tool Respeecher was used to correct the sound of vowels in scenes where Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian. It is hard to assess if the tool had a significant impact on the authenticity of the acting itself, but it is ultimately lamentable and opposed to the theme of creation that a digital crutch was used to imitate an accent that could otherwise be done with dialect coaching.
“The Brutalist” is a moving work of art that captures the deep pain of dispossession and the long-lasting mental scars of the Holocaust on the Western world in increasingly subtle ways until a final denouement provides a coda sure to haunt the audience for a long time to come.
