Brody always looks at least a little sad, a trait that lends his tragic heroes instant pathos and gives other characters an edge when he plays against type. Whether he is an Anglophile punk stripper from the Bronx, a tax-evading art dealer, a billionaire in athleisure, Arthur Miller, Salvador Dalí, or a stop-motion field mouse, melancholy seasons the motivations of his roles into more precise emotions, establishing a link between grief and indignation, determination and disappointment, loneliness and regret, guilt and shame, fear and defeat. It should come as no surprise, then, that his finest performance—as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), for which he won an Academy Award—should portray a survivor of one of the most obscene tragedies ever to befall humankind.
If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware.
As Corbet’s script, which he wrote with his collaborator and wife, Mona Fastvold, plumbs the metaphorical richness of architecture as a means for self-invention, Tóth triumphs, stumbles, and fails in cyclical ascension to the top. His pinnacle is the 1980 Venice Biennale, where a major retrospective celebrates the expansive achievements of this now elderly and Israeli champion of brutalism. If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware. Corbet’s indulgence in symbolism is heavier-handed than a fistful of concrete and steel, and yet it works, primarily due to a strong ensemble, Lol Crowley’s expressionistic cinematography, and an uncompromisingly willful directorial vision, imperfect though it may be.
Meanwhile, Tóth meets Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), a Black widower, waiting in the breadline of a church only to get turned away; Tóth becomes a white savior immediately, promising to hold a place in line for Gordon and his son, William (Charlie Esoko and, later, Zephan Hanson Amissah), the next morning. The two men go into business together when Miller & Sons scores a premium client and Tóth hires Gordon as his foreman. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) wants to surprise his father with a renovation of the library at his Doylestown estate into something “proper”: “Maybe make him a ladder with little wheels on it?”
Months later, Tóth is bearded, smoking opium in the shower of the charity mission where he has joined Gordon and William in seeking shelter. The two men are working construction when Van Buren Sr., pulls up with an envelope of cash and a copy of Look magazine, in which the library is featured. The millionaire has done his homework, learning that Tóth studied at the Bauhaus, and digging up a dossier of his designs. “I did not realize these images were still available, much less of consequence,” Tóth modestly responds. The two men hit it off: “I found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating,” Van Buren rattles off with the fast-talking 1940s patter that Pearce mastered in L.A. Confidential (1997) and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce (2011).
Approval of the $850,000 project concludes the initial half of the film, which is interrupted by a built-in, 15-minute intermission (again, with the countdown), and a second act. Tóth is reunited with his wife and niece, though Erzsébeth is in a wheelchair (famine-induced osteoporosis) and Zsófia is a mute but stunning young woman, no longer a small girl. As husband and wife attempt an awkward reconciliation, the Tóths and Van Burens grow uncomfortably close; a veteran journalist, Erzsébeth gets a newspaper job in New York, while Tóth is left to fight penny-pinching engineers and consultants over the height of the ceiling. A train transporting materials derails, sending laborers to the hospital and convincing Van Buren to cut his losses and send the crew home.
It isn’t until 1963 that Van Buren once again fetches Tóth, underemployed as a draftsman in an architecture firm. They both want to complete the community center, though a pregnant Zsófia and her husband, Binyamin (Benett Vilmanyí), try to convince their aunt and uncle to make aliyah with them instead. Thus begins the film’s most arresting sequence, in which Van Buren and Tóth travel to Italy in search of marble. Functional as he may be, Tóth is still an addict, and Van Buren reveals that his interest in the brutalist exceeds the normal bounds of patronage or financial investment. What happens next is too deliberately shocking to spoil with summary—suffice it to say that Corbet does what he can to dispute Susan Sontag’s claim in On Photography that, even “at the farthest reach of metaphor,” the “camera doesn’t rape.” Corbet and Fastvold are more adamant than Fitzgerald was in psychologizing the depravity of privilege and wealth, and though there is truth in the caricature, the lack of subtlety feels juvenile, unbecoming of the film’s enterprising scope.
The Brutalist is almost exaggeratedly humorless, and it’s often unclear on which side of the screen what, if any, punch line is supposed to land.The Van Burens’ villainy may be inseparable from their status, but under their influence, Tóth has changed: He fires Gordon, and after he dips into his stash to alleviate Erzsébeth’s chronic cramps, she tells him, “You’ve become a selfish old bastard before my eyes.” With their romance perversely rekindled, she overdoses, then shows up at the Van Buren estate without invitation to stand up for her wounded husband. “He’s a sick, senile old dog,” Van Buren barks back. “And when dogs get sick, they often bite the hand that ...
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