A BRUTAL REVIEW OF THE BRUTALIST
It’s a hair raising movie. For three and a half hours I felt almost breathless and entranced by the film’s spell. It dances between booms and busts in the main character’s life, at once slow and melancholic, and next boldly. Frequently, it uses lulls in its A-plot, the life of Hungarian-American architect Laszlo Toth, as a moment to engage in its B-plot, the establishment of Israel. Toth’s incredible education and talent contrasts his living conditions, immigrating to the US and working as an unskilled laborer, living in a homeless shelter. Repeatedly he jumps from successful employment and artistic freedom to deprivation and subjugation. The constant precarity, even when life is going well for him in the film, evokes the history of persecution Jews have faced for most of their existence.
The Holocaust, unspoken for the first hour of the film, looms over the plot. Many shots evoke events of the Holocaust in ways that aren’t direct but were clear enough to move me to tears multiple times through the film. I think in its hesitancy to speak the horror outright, it’s actually more arresting than movies whose immediate subject is the events of genocide. Adorno’s assertion that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” was heeded in practice. The fact that people were treated like raw materials to an industrial process whose product was murder, the fact that 11 million people were killed in this manner, the facts of the matter are the only means of appropriately understanding its horror. Yet after having heard these facts dozens of times, they lose their impact and become statistics. In Adorno’s own words, “the unspeakable became commensurable,” and ”genocide” became a series of measurements. Poetic form and oblique manner of reference in this film revive the horror I felt the first time I was taught about the Nazis.
What’s so tragic and heartbreakingly moving is the deformed but striving human spirit that persists after the Holocaust—that people attempted to write poetry again after escaping the camps. In the case of Toth and his wife, they attempt to live again and put the past behind them. Who wouldn’t want to be rid of the memory? But in doing so, both of them are dominated by the pain they live with and the coping mechanisms they’ve developed to go on living.
Very strong performances from the entire cast. The wealthy family (Guy Pearce & Joe Alwyn) act like they’re putting on an affect for most of the movie, which, in combination with their immense power over the main character, gives every scene they’re in a dreadful overtone. It always seems like either they’re about to break character and say what they normally withhold, or that they’re going to commit some incredibly harmful act without understanding the consequences. Adrien Brody always seems genuine, despite the in-media-res nature of the story hiding some of his motivations for much of the film. Perhaps he’s hiding them from himself. Felicity Jones too plays longing, anguish, hope, fear, and bravery perfectly.
The character Laszlo Toth is a loose adaptation of Marcel Breuer, who designed a number of buildings in the city I live in (notably Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services). Brutalism isn’t really rehabilitated in the film. Unlike Breuer, whose work is dominated by a warm art-deco-esque futurism, Toth’s magnum opus explicitly evokes cool toned prisons and labyrinths, pursuit and escape. In doing so, it not only evokes the original etymology of brutalism (French “art brut”—“raw art”) but also the colloquial American meaning: architecture which is brutal, hostile, unyielding, and dominating. As someone who wishes people saw brutalist architecture in a more nuanced way, the representation in this movie was unsatisfying.
Author: Max Scribner
