What I learnt from The Brutalist
On the architecture of beauty and power
On Sunday night, I went to see The Brutalist. I thought it would be a good idea, when the world was apparently ending, for Anthony and me to have a nice night out. The last film we saw, for Valentine’s Day, was Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Let’s just say it was quite the contrast.
We knew it would be long. Three and a half hours, in fact, which is why we smuggled in some smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels. We knew it might be a little bit short on feel-good factor and giggles. There would, I imagined, not be many snogs with handsome young men in wet shirts who had just leapt into a swimming pool to rescue a dog. There would be no Hugh Grant playing, well, Hugh Grant or Leo Woodall playing toyboy-love-interest-of-the-month. (He will, for me, be for ever the sinister Jack in White Lotus, but that’s a whole other story.)
We knew it wouldn’t be a picnic or a barrel of laughs. But oh, my, God.
I’m not sure if Adrien Brody has ever played a character with, say, a soupçon of self-deprecating wit. His Oscar speech 10 days ago, for winning Best Actor in The Brutalist, was the longest in its history and appeared to be unburdened by anything you could call a sense of humour. And so is the film he starred in. It’s hypnotic. It’s chilling. It’s sumptuous. It’s monumental. It almost feels as if it could have been carved from granite. What it isn’t is fun.
Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who arrives in New York Harbour on a boat from Bremerhaven after the Second World War. He has clearly been through some major trauma. Since he’s Jewish, and has been forcibly separated from his wife, it’s not hard to guess what that might have been, though the detail is never fleshed out. That trauma, one assumes, is what has turned him into a glowering, sneering, half-wreck of a man. He’s handsome, but with a hint of menace that keeps the audience permanently on edge.
For a while, he sleeps in the storeroom of a furniture salesman owned by his cousin, who emigrated to the US before the war, married a Catholic and now claims to be one. The two men get asked to renovate the library of a wealthy businessman as a birthday surprise funded by his son. László and his workers are thrown out when the businessman arrives early, finds a mess and refuses to pay.
Three years later, when his library has been acclaimed in architecture magazines, the businessman seeks László out and commissions him to design a community centre in his mother’s memory. I think you can guess what happens next. It all goes brilliantly, is hailed as a triumph and everyone lives happily ever after.
Just kidding. Three-and-a-half-hour films need plenty of conflict and this one certainly has it. On the positive front, László’s wife, Erzsébet, accompanied by her now-mute niece, Zsófia, is reunited with her difficult husband. On the negative front - well, where do we start?
Erzsébet, it turns out, is a journalist. I am, or was, a journalist (this piece explains that change of tense). Anthony is an architect. At one point, we nudged each other, but our “just like us” moment swiftly passed.
Anthony has worked on some extraordinary architectural projects, but none that were inspired by Buchenwald. He has never, as far as I know, been a heroin addict. He has never, as far as I know, been raped by a client. Yes, as I said, The Brutalist is not Bridget Jones.
What László creates for the wealthy businessman is a monumental structure made out of concrete, which seems half-factory, half-cathedral. It’s almost aggressively austere, but there’s something dizzying about those soaring ceilings. There’s a cross-shaped hole in one of them that, at certain times of day, creates a crucifix of light. Quite a feature for a man who nearly joined six million others in being murdered for being a Jew.
When Anthony and I staggered out of the cinema, we were both convinced that The Brutalist must have been based on a true story. It was a strangely literal-minded response. I was relieved to see that Peter Bradshaw, in his review for the Guardian when the film came out, also had the feeling that “it must be based on a real-life case, or at least a literary source”. It isn’t. Brutalism as an architectural style emerged in the Fifties in the UK, not in America. Perhaps the most famous examples are the Barbican Centre and the National Theatre. I lived at the Barbican for three years and worked for eight years at the Southbank Centre, just along from the National Theatre. I can’t say that stain-streaked concrete is my idea of a good time.
But we both came away from the film with the sense that we had just experienced something huge. It’s that feeling, I think, that gave me, Anthony (and Peter Bradshaw!) the sense that this must have come from a story that was “true”. Here was a grand vision for a vast building, watched on a giant screen. Here, too, was the sweep of history, a history that in a few short years resulted in the death of millions and a world transformed.
It's 92 years since an unattractive man with a poor academic record was appointed chancellor of Germany. In rabble-rousing speeches, he raged against “elites”. He started, and spread, conspiracy theories. He launched a process of mass deportations. He censored the media and started silencing his critics. He withdrew from the League of Nations. He decided that his country needed more “Lebensraum”. He decided to annex his neighbours. He wanted, he said, to make his nation great again.
Watching The Brutalist, I was struck again by how much of history, how much of life, is bad luck. The wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time and Bob’s your uncle or Adolf’s your chancellor. Or Donald’s your president. Your mad uncle has the nuclear codes and is basically blowing up the world.
In The Brutalist, the brutalised try to pick up the pieces of their lives. László tries to turn his suffering into a brutal beauty. The second part of the film has the heading “The Hard Core of Beauty” taken, I presume, from Peter Zumthor's 1991 lecture of the name. He’s a Swiss architect known for his pure, austere structures, which have been described as “timeless and poetic”.
There is something timeless and poetic about the film. Humans are, unfortunately, very good at being brutal and the brutalised can turn into brutalisers. Just look at Gaza. Brutalisers and brutalised on both sides. Sometimes, the brutalised can turn their suffering into something beautiful. There is bleak beauty in the building László designs, but there is certainly something hard at its core.
What we are seeing, in this current twist of history, is the rise, and rising respect, for brute force. Might is right. Omelettes don’t get made without cracking eggs. Strong men make links with strong men and carve up the world.
By strong men, we mean, of course, men with armies, weapons, wealth and power.
And then, caught up in the current power play, there’s a short, dark Jewish man. He believes in art. He believes in comedy. He had a successful career as an actor, comedian, writer and director before he decided to do something different. His grandparents died when the Nazis burned their village. His three great-uncles were all killed by the Nazis in the Second World War.
When Russians invaded his country, he could have left, but didn’t. He stayed. For three years, he has strained every sinew to save his country and it shows in his face.
No wonder Trump can’t stand him. No wonder Putin can’t stand him. When they see true strength, they have to crush it because they can’t face the brutal, ugly truth.
Thank you for this - spot on as always
A lovely piece1