The Brutalist (2024, Corbet)

(Spoilers)

Overture

Let’s, for a moment, set aside the hysterics, the histrionics, and the hyperbole. Let’s imagine that The Brutalist hasn’t been met with a response equal in rapture to Dark Side of the Moon playing backwards in your veins, with claims not unlike Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s for The Immigrant ten years ago: “No one’s written the Great American Novel yet, but James Gray went ahead and made a movie out of it anyway.”^[1] (A better movie from which this one draws enormous inspiration, but still--too much). Let’s ignore that Amy Schumer announced The Brutalist as the film of the year on her Instagram stories. Let’s pretend.

Part I - If This Is a Masterpiece

I was excited for The Brutalist, and its subject matter had me hoping it was some sort of fluke: someone dared to make a modernist historical drama, something solid and sincere, in our ironic postmodernist movie landscape. Having not seen Corbet’s other work, I went into it wet behind the ears and tabula rasa. Well, nearly tabula rasa. I had skimmed some of the early notices, one of which compared it to the work of Primo Levi, which got me into Primo Levi and then disgusted me in its wrongheaded interpretation of Primo Levi. Another capsule mentioned the opening scene, in which protagonist Laszlo Toth emerges from the bowels of a ship onto Ellis Island, and treats us to a shot of the Statue of Liberty upside down. The sequence is not as cringe-inducing as I expected based on the write-up; it’s handled with care and grace. It's pitched as an obvious tableau (kind of like the closing shot of The Immigrant), but as a breathless glimpse of the fear and excitement fresh-off-the-boat immigrants must gave felt c. 1947. It’s messy, bold, and deeply felt--even if it’s easy to see where Corbet gets his information from.

The Brutalist is the most heavily annotated film I've ever seen. This shot? It’s from Son of Saul. That one? 12 Years a Slave. Over here we have a buffet of 2000s-2010s Paul Thomas Anderson, with particularly heavy ladles from the likes of The Master and Phantom Thread. But Corbet doesn't actually do anything with these influences. I get the impression, watching The Brutalist, that Corbet is moderately intelligent and well-watched, yet superficially engaged with actual mechanics of image-making. He certainly points at big ideas, but in spite of a virtuoso opening salvo, he never props his stick-figure characters up enough to actually say anything about America, artistry, capitalism, or the immigrant experience. I left the movie flogged for my complicity in believing the romance of the American experiment, for believing–in spite of her constant reminders that she doesn’t rise to the challenge–what she set out for herself in 1776. That if we haven’t done it yet, we can never do it. Corbet’s film is yet another in a now long string of vague, nihilistic movies reluctant to actually engage with our political moment, and replace that concrete engagement with the broad and reactionary inversion of major symbols. The Statue of Liberty is upside-down, oh my God! The crucifix is upside-down, oh my God! These are juvenile engagements with large institutions.

But the film does have merit. Its large format is winsome, and it speaks to the increasing necessity of such things if a filmmaker wants a movie about human beings to be shown in a theatrical setting. And the format is not an empty gesture, either: Adrien Brody’s face looks like a Picasso painting under Corbet’s eye, and Vistavision lends what might otherwise be interpreted as a “mere” indie filmmaking process a hint of grandeur. If one really examines the production design and cinematographic style functionally–tight shots in urban areas, wides in rural (read: cheaper to clear out); an overreliance on chamber drama; pillow shots of specific objects like handbags or cranes that are interesting in isolation but don’t actually add anything substantive to the story or the context of the time period–the movie more closely resembles something like Short Term 12 than The Godfather Part II. This is not pejorative; we should just be honest about what it is we’re actually working with. What makes The Godfather work, by way of counterpoint, is that it treats the Corleone family as microcosmic. Much of The Godfather also takes place in close-quarters, but Coppola dodges Corbet's failure because Corbet tries to blow up Toth to superhuman proportions, and in so doing flattens both the character and the story. It’s the kind of thing that gets ideated about on r/movies, upvoted a ton, and forgotten:

What if someone made a movie about a brutalist architect who immigrates to America after the Holocaust, and he makes really cool shit, but it’s hard to be an artist in America, so he makes a deal with the devil, and he gets raped because that’s really what it’s like, right? Fucked in the ass! What it takes, bro. Just let artists be artists.

I’d be lying, however, if I said I wasn’t moved by much of the first act. I was bowled over by the overture–such a concise and rousing depiction of immigration–and I loved to watch Laszlo crawling around, trying to figure out what America is. The score is amazing, and the movie owes 90% of its reputation as monumental to it. From start to finish, too, movie is edited really well. A scene happens, teeing up a response, and then we get that response. It moves at a comfortable gallop and reasonably earns its runtime.

Part II - The Drowned and the Even More Drowned

There’s a montage midway through part one during which Laszlo makes a chair, and it’s indicative of what Corbet is very good at: depicting the act of creation. But Corbet must have been in a silly goofy mood the day he cut that scene, and he plants a voiceover of the announcement of U.N. Resolution 181 over the act. The first time I saw the film, it stimulated my curiosity. What are they going for here? I wondered. Earmarking the time period, or setting something up? The second time I saw the film, its function was obvious: Corbet is correlating Jewish creativity/ingenuity with the creation of a Jewish state. Israel is not mentioned any further in part one, but as Elie Wiesel has it: “In Jewish history there are no coincidences."

The first scene mentioning Israel in part two begins sufficiently ambivalent, but slowly grows to capitulation. Israel becomes the shadow looming over all of the action in the second half of the film, and as such it becomes yet another simplisitc icon for Corbet to play with. By the time Laszlo accidentally gives his wife a near-fatal dose of heroin and she sees HaShem--who tells her to make aliyah--Corbet has lost the high ground of moral contemplation (see reddit thread parody above).

So what’s the difference, then, between a movie like The Brutalist and a movie like There Will Be Blood, which both tackle the rot at the core of American life? To say nothing of the fact that, in 2024, America is way too easy a target, Anderson understands the ouroboric nature of the American experiment. It's a maze from which we'll never escape. Corbet, not being as savvy as Anderson, offers a way out. To . . . Israel? Really? The film was in development before October 7th and its aftermath, but surely Corbet--if he is as smart as his acolytes say he is--would know what live a wire he’s touching here.

What if The Brutalist had been about the failure of the state of Israel instead? Already a much more interesting and thorny story. And what if its engagement with the issue extended as far as turning the Israeli flag upside down? Many would call it hateful, antisemitic. This is not to say a story about Israel and its many contradictions w/r/t the Jewish experience can’t be told. To depict Israel as a sufficient antidote to the corruption of the American way of living, however, is to endorse Israel's genocidal acts across its history as a nation. There's a thin line between Israel as an idea and Israel as an actual, historical place, and The Brutalist is on the wrong side of it. Just my 2¢.

Epilogue

There’s this proclivity among Millennial filmmakers, in defiance of certain Gen X antecedents and in the footprints of others, to wince at humanism. There's no doubt in my mind that Corbet intended audiences to applaud at the end of part one, like mine did, and leave the theater after the epilogue in a befuddled fog, like mine did. The epilogue is such a clear repudiation of the seriousness with which the movie ballooned itself. Perhaps admirable on its face--one musn't take oneself too seriously. But it's delivered with such wry vitriol, it undermines its already underbaked ideas; it's a pinch in the butt of the audience who cared enough to spend three-and-a-half hours with it. I find that mean-spirited and disingenuos, and I'll echo what I said when I saw the film for the first time back in October (on Kol Nidre): if a modernist drama is not enough, what is?

Fortunately, New York City audiences can reliably be counted upon to puncture the weight of any movie playing in any theater at any time in the city. Right as the movie began, sirens wailing, a woman sitting across from me blasted TikTok dances on full volume. It was hilarious. Later, right as the film reached its climax, the same woman yelled, "What did she say?"

"He's a rapist! " her companion shouted in kind.