I honestly didn’t love The Brutalist

Complaint No. 1

As a kid I read The Arrival by Shaun Tan. In the climax of The Brutalist’s overture, when László emerges from a dark labyrinth to reveal he is on a ship arriving at Ellis Island, my mind went to Tan’s fantastical, disorienting portrayal of an abstracted immigrant experience. The parallels to my own family’s arrival in America—Eastern European Jews fleeing antisemitism, albeit in an earlier wave of immigration—left me shivering in anticipation of what I was sure would be a transcendent epic about a violent collision of worlds, the transition from the world of separated families and uncertainty and letters and ships into the world of the postwar, a world indelibly marked by grim confrontation with the fact that the turn of the century’s optimism and fervor of progress had given way to all manner of barbaric ideologies and atrocities in the first half of the 20th century. I submit my first complaint: that in my excitement, I misled myself; that this is not what The Brutalist is about.

Complaint No. 2

The trailer blew my mind when I saw it in the cinema. It was epic, opaque. The score promised everything. I submit my second complaint: having seen the movie, the trailer holds no more mysteries for me.

Complaint No. 3

So the film continues; the immigrant narrative unfolds, characterized by unending difficulties and enduring optimism. László finds his footing, falters, and we find him shoveling coal at the port, and then Harrison Van Buren comes back and takes over the story and neither László nor the audience ever escape his gravitational pull.

I guess I am just not terribly interested in diving into the perverse psychology of American nouveau riche barons. This is a cultural fascination we seem to have that feels so far removed from anything common and mundane—from anything actually interesting.

This film could have dared to go big; instead it goes small. Invites us to New York City and Philadelphia, to the story of the everyman ¹ immigrant, and then spirits us away to a parochial town where the sole focus is this one dude’s oedipal complex.

I submit, as my third complaint, The Brutalist’s inexcusable narrowness.

Complaint No. 4

I submit the fourth and principal complaint: that there was far too much Harrison Van Buren.

Once drawn in, the film seems to stop caring about anything else and we only get Harrison. László escapes to New York for all of about one minute. We see Harrison’s lawyer sent to retrieve him before we see László himself. That brief scene starts and ends with the sense of inevitability that László shall return to Doylestown. He doesn’t get a choice. And the audience is put in Harrison’s predatory vision as we locate László to bring him back; we don’t get a choice about that either.

Some more stuff happens. I have ceased to care.

Then Harrison vanishes and we get the most visually striking sequence of the film, a search through the brutalist (oh!) labyrinth that László has erected, to mark Harrison’s departure. Too bad it was proceeded only by the epilogue and credits.

Complaint No. 5

On that “more stuff” I mentioned—a considerable chunk of it is the dreamlike Italy sequence. Brady was worried we wouldn’t understand the Theme, so he kindly clobbered us over the head: don’t you get it!

But that is not my complaint. My complaint is this: that once again the audience takes on not the perspective of László, for whom the Carraran quarry would be familiar if not comforting, but the perspective, again, of Harrison, to whom Italy is a mysterious and foreign land, where reality and dreams blend and nothing counts. What happened to the immigrant story? This is now a film about the psychology of American Industrial Magnate Stereotype No. 14. László’s struggles are an afterthought. He shoots up off-screen.

Complaint No. 6

The only scene in the film’s second half that promises some actual development for László and Erzsébet is when their niece announces she will make aliyah to the newly founded State of Israel. The couple struggle to accept the news. They are loath to abandon all they’ve worked to build in America, even if Israel purports to be a place where Jews can finally live somewhere they would not be permanently othered.

And then the matter is dropped except for a perfunctory remark at the end, and the film basically ends without returning to the thematic meat of this question. I submit that as my sixth complaint.

Complaint No. 7

In a movie like this, accidents don’t happen. Someone, either a producer or Mona Fastvold or Brady Corbet had to be like, “hey, about this ending…” and they decided to KEEP IT. It is baffling.

One of the minor conflicts in the film is László’s insistence on the height of the rooms in his plan for the building. Harrison’s team wants to save on costs. László preciously defends his artistic vision. Finally, the epilogue reveals that he was insistent on this detail because each chamber has the same dimensions as the rooms in the concentration camp he was sent to in the Holocaust, only with much higher ceilings as a poignant, poetic comment on the freedom of the spirit or something like that.

I cannot believe they made this the punchline for the entire movie.

Not to be a script doctor, but could they not have inserted this remark when László and Erzsébet discuss, in private, in front of his actual blueprints for the building, the personal sacrifices they are taking on to support his artistic vision? It almost feels as though this scene was originally intended as a vessel for this information, but it was moved to this strange, artificial epilogue, where it can have no bearing on our direct experience with László’s story. I have no problem with epilogues, but this choice is downright mystifying.

Complaint number seven is for poor writing.

Complaint No. 8

Other people don’t seem to appreciate the 80s synth arrangement of the main theme as much as I do. I submit, for my final complaint, that they are wrong and need to learn respect for genius artistic vision.

Conclusion

I returned home and opened Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, and found the story I was looking for.

As for The Brutalist… I don’t love it. But I might grow to.

I shouldn’t, I cannot know the meaning and significance of this film—or any film—immediately after watching it. Not to mention Susan Sontag’s invective against interpretation which hangs—for better or worse—in the back of my mind during any artistic experience. I spoke a bit about form. I spoke about primary experience. I hope I conveyed with loving description those few moments of the film that struck me. Now I go on with my life, and I will not forget The Brutalist, because it is not forgettable; I felt its impact. In two or three months, it will come to me again, and then it will mean something else to me.