The Brutalist

 Here is The Brutalist is a nutshell:  A visionary artist who is a stranger in a strange land attracts a powerful and wealthy patron.  The patron commissions the artist's magnum opus.  After a number of setbacks and quarrels with the patron, the great work is almost completed.  But the plutocratic patron betrays the artist in an unforgiveable way.  The patron, whose role is merely instrumental as far as history is concerned, vanishes into the work.  Many years later, the artist is celebrated and it is revealed that trauma lies at the center of his work.  This plot is the same, more or less, as The Agony of the Ecstasy with Charleton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as the patron, Pope Julius II.  Brady Corbett's version of this archetypal story runs for three hours and 20 minutes -- some of the film is obtuse and unnecessary but, in large part, the length of the movie seems justified.  This is primarily because the picture's individual sequences are shapely and abbreviated -- there is no bloat or distention in the mise-en-scene; the movie trips along in a sprightly and agile fashion and, in fact, feels shorter than its run time.  Brady Corbett, the film's director, is probably the most interesting American movie-maker active today -- his two previous feature films, The Childhood of the Leader and Vox Lux, don't look or sound like any other current pictures.  These pictures are extremely ambitious and their reach often exceeds their grasp; there are weird blurry spots in these pictures and, ultimately, they don't exactly cohere -- but these films are thought-provoking and approach their subject matter (fascism and mass shooting respectively) from wholly unexpected angles.  As I have suggested The Brutalist, in many ways, is a more conventional bio-pic -- but it is also peculiar and creates its own peculiar atmospheric fog:  we're never exactly sure what is happening and outcomes of particular scenes and of the movie as a whole are always unexpected.  The picture creates a strong and lingering impression, a  residue of uncertainty and idiosyncrasy that haunts the viewer long after the movie is over.

A good example of the film's unusual approach to its material is the opening section, about 12 minutes entitled "Overture".  A young woman in an institutional uniform is harshly interrogated by an unseen questioner -- the interrogation is conducted in Hungarian with subtitles but we can't really tell what is being said:  it has something to do with being punished for someone else's offenses.  Then, the image is dark and we see a man roughly roused.  A handheld camera, poised too close to the man (Adrian Brody as Laszlo Toth), tracks him as he climbs upward, moving through blurry masses of shabbily dressed people into the light.  (We later conclude that he is climbing out of the steerage of a ship.)  In the blinding light, someone points upward.  Then, we see the Statue of Liberty upside down, hanging from the void:  the camera tilts several times but never manages to get the monument right-side-up.  (The effect is like the scene of the Statue of Liberty in Kafka's Amerika or Der Verschollener in which the monument is visualized bearing a sword and not a torch -- the image is recognizable but subtly distorted, off-balance, rendered strange.)  We see a crowd of displaced persons in a hall, probably Ellis Island, being offered a 25 dollar travel voucher.  On a dark street, a prostitute beckons.  Inside the whore house, Toth is with a girl who is kneeling in front of him, groping at his pants.  In the background, someone from the ship is having sex with a naked girl.  In a voice-over, we hear a woman, later revealed to be Toth's wife, Erzebet ("Elizabeth") reading a letter to the protagonist, something about a niece named Zsofia, probably the girl referenced in the opening interrogation scene.  The movie announces that it is shot in Vistavision and the images have a dense, granular and rough texture -- in fact, they are brutalist, like the surface of raw prestressed concrete.  The camera placement is always expressive and not narrative -- the images are too close to show location or the orientation of persons to their background.  We can always "read" the images and, generally, understand what they mean, but there are curious disjunctions, obscurities, and the soundtrack (Toth's wife reading a letter while her husband is engaged in an unsatisfactory encounter with a prostitute) often cuts against the grain of the pictures.

The second part of the film, about an hour and 20 minutes is called "The Enigma of Arrival" --  it is titled 1947 to 1953.  Toth takes a bus to Philadelphia where he is offered lodging with his cousin, a Hungarian Jew who has reinvented himself as a furniture dealer ("Miller and Sons" is the name of his business although the man's real name is Mahler.)  Miller has acquired a blonde Catholic wife and has become a Roman Catholic.  Toth works for him designing modernist chairs and living in a storeroom where sleeps on a cot.  It is implied that Toth has a love affair with the blonde wife -- although this is only intimated.  (We see the wife and Miller dancing to the Broadway tune "Buttons and Bows" and, then, Miller encouraging Toth to dance with the woman -- in the next scene, Toth is urinating into a sink with the woman watching and commenting that his aim isn't too good, suggesting some level of intimacy with her.)  On the street, Toth stands in line for a soup kitchen behind a Black man and his small son -- it's not obvious why Toth is frequenting the Salvation Army and the scene remains unexplained, although the Black man and his boy introduced in the sequence will be important characters throughout the film.  A customer, the callow son of a plutocrat named Harrison Van Buren wants to surprise his father by remodeling the mansion's library -- the father collects first editions.  Toth does a brilliant job remodeling the property and shows that he is a sophisticated businessman as well -- he ups the fee by 100% and gets away with it.  But a glass cupola gets broken and, when the plutocrat returns to the mansion with his ailing mother, he encounters a "Negro poking around the property" -- this is the Black guy from the soup line who is helping Toth.  Van Buren isn't amused by the surprise and becomes enraged.  He throws Toth off his enormous estate and refuses to pay for his services.  (The estate in Doylestown features a small covered bridge over a little creek bed, a wholly incongruous feature on the huge property, a mansion that looks like a vast French chateau, and an imposing bluff overlooking the city where Toth will later build his magnum opus.)  Toth is stranded.  He has to sleep at the Salvation Army since he has been booted out of the furniture business primarily because of the debacle with Van Buren but, also, for "making a pass" at Miller's wife.  The Black man has found Toth a job working on an enormous hoist suspended over the river at Philadelphia, a giant intimidating structure where the men work a hundred feet above the ground.  Later, while Toth is shoveling coal, Harrison Van Buren appears.  He takes Toth to lunch and apologizes for pitching a fit and not paying him for the library renovation.  In fact, the library renovation is now famous, featured in LOOK magazine.  Van Buren has done some research and learned that Toth was once a famous architect in Europe; he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau and has designed a number of well-known modernist structures.  Van Buren excuses his bad behavior by claiming that his mother was dying and that he was grief-stricken when he was surprised by the library renovation.  He invites Toth to his palatial mansion where the plutocrat's lawyer (he represents the vice-president of the United States) offers to assist with immigration proceedings necessary to bring Toth's wife Elizabeth and his niece Zsofia to America -- "they were forcibly separated" Toth explains.  (The lawyer is a Jew with a Shiksa trophy wife -- there is a subtle aura of anti-Semitism associated with the Protestant Van Buren clan.)  Van Buren gets drunk and, although its cold outside, leads everyone from the house, across the grounds and over the little covered bridge, and, then, up to the top of the big bluff.  There, Van Buren announces that he will engage Toth to build an enormous structure -- a library, chapel, gymnasium, and lecture hall/theater -- a cultural center dedicated the memory of his late mother.  Toth agrees to the commission and begins to draw plans.  He devises a system of clerestory windows that will convey light into the massive structure and cast a radiant cross onto a block of Carrera marble that will serve as the altar in the building's central chapel.   A building contractor named Woodrow is engaged -- he dislikes the brutish concrete design for the complex of buildings planned for the crest of the big bluff, already decorated now by towering construction cranes.  A  scene in an underground cavern of a Jazz club, all frenetic beebop and sweaty close-ups establishes that Toth, with his Black sidekick, have become junkies -- he shoots up with heroin.  (It's implied, I think, that Toth is self-medicating with heroin for trauma caused by his experiences in a concentration camp.)  A still photograph of Toth's wedding with Zsofia in attendance, the party standing under Hebrew letters at the portico of a synagogue signals the film's intermission.

The second half of the movie is more conventional and less interesting, although it never really lags.  Toth's wife and Zsofia are brought to Pennsylvania.  Elizabeth is in a wheelchair, suffering from osteoporosis as a consequence of "famine" during the war.  Zsofia has huge eyes like some kind of nocturnal creature and seems so badly traumatized that she can't speak.  There are various setbacks and difficulties with the building project.  Toth is sexually inert. Elizabeth has to masturbate him while claiming that she was with him in spirit when he had sex with other women.  To increase their profits, Harrison Van Buren has contracted with transport and supply companies run by his son.  We see freight cars being loaded with heavy construction materials, the spring undercarriages of the cars flexing.  A very remote high shot, shows the train moving forward slowly behind a cloud of steam.  Suddenly, the steam flares with fire -- there's been a catastrophic rail accident caused by the negligence of Van Buren's son who has cut corners to save costs.  The project is compromised because of casualties and some of its features have to be cut or reduced in scope.  Toth insists on a maze of small chambers in the enormous building but with fifty foot high ceilings with skylights.  This makes no sense to the contractor and there are violent quarrels -- Toth accuses the contractor of making everything ugly.  Van Buren and Toth get into a fight and, then, Toth attacks the contractor Woodrow.  He is fired and goes to New York where he works as a draftsman in an architectural office that seems somehow affiliated with the United Nations.  (Elizabeth with Van Buren's assistance has got a job as a writer for a Manhattan newspaper.) Van Buren again repents of his rage and re-hires Toth to complete the project, now a complex of huge concrete walls and towers atop the bluff at Doylestown.  The two men go to Carrera to select a marble block for the chapel's altar.  (Toth has carefully packed his kit with syringe, tourniquet, and heroin.)  There's a wild party in some colossal underground gallery at the Italian quarry and Toth shoots up.  While he is semi-comatose in one of the marble tunnels, Van Buren snuggles up to him, calls the architect a "lady of the night" and, then, sodomizes him.  The next morning both Van Buren and Toth act as if nothing has happened.  Elizabeth has terrible pain at night and requires medication. Zsofia is pregnant and with her husband emigrates to Israel. One night Elizabeth runs out of medication and screams in agony -- she's out of pain pills.  Toth panics and injects her with heroin.  She wants to go to the toilet and so he seats her there.  But she has a seizure and Toth has to carry her to the hospital in Doylestown.  While they were both high, Toth has confessed to Elizabeth that he was raped by Van Buren.  She now can walk a little with a walker.  She drags herself to the mansion and accuses Van Buren of rape.  Elizabeth is thrown out of the house but Van Buren flees as well, seemingly vanishing into the colossal corridors and huge pantheon-like spaces of the monument on the bluff.  At dawn, the sun rises and casts a cross-shaped flare of light onto the altar of pure ice-white Carrera marble  There's a brief Epilogue set in 1980 at the Venice Biennial.  Toth has designed many prestigious projects, mostly churches and synagogues.  He's now demented apparently and confined to a wheelchair, a mere shadow of his former self.  Zsofia gives a speech at the Biennial revealing that the floor plan at the Doylestown monument to Van Buren's mother consisted of small rooms, the size of the barracks at Buchenwald where Toth was confined but with lofty ceilings penetrated by skylights, signifying freedom. The subterranean tunnels linking the parts of the complex were recollections of Toth's fantasy that secret galleries underground might connect Buchenwald to Dachau where Zsofia and Elizabeth were confined.  With this revelation the movie ends.

The scenes in Venice are brightly lit and staged like conventional post-cards or vacation travelogue -- the images seem to be digital or video in character.  The rest of the film is darkly lit and the photographic stock seems slightly distressed.  Camera placement and angles are generally odd and idiosyncratic.  There are many low-angle shots of the camera racing foward over the concrete highway, images depicting the motion between Doylestown and Philadelphia (or between Philly and New York City.)  The huge complex on the hill variously looks like a grain elevator with twin towers, a bleak cathedral or a prison -- and partakes of all those qualities.  Interior shots show colossal passageways and huge dim vaults.  The base of the structure seems to be an underground lake with the building above supported on vegetal-shaped sprouts of concrete -- the form of this huge space is like Johnson and Johnson Building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Racine Wisconsin.  In general, the architecture of the monumental complex at Doylestown looks a bit like Louis Kahn's government buildings for Bangladesh or the raw concrete walls and towers designed by Marcel Breuer, for instance at the Benedictine Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.  The quarries at Carrera are vast, glacial, an entire mountain terraced and cut into blocks with abysmal galleries chopped into the depths below.  Adrian Brody's acting as Toth is beyond reproach as are the performances of Felicity Jones as Elizabeth and Guy Pearce as the plutocrat Van Buren.  The central conceit is that American wealth and power conspires to screw emigrant artists -- this topic is literally materialized in the rape scene involving Toth and Van Buren.  The patron of the arts treats his artist as a disposable commodity, as a prostitute. American power is tangled up with implacable racism and anti-Semitism.  Although these themes are simplistic, the film's presentation is very complex, often obtuse, with fake documentary sequences about Pennsylvania and the United Nations and news broadcasts about the founding of Israel.  The Brutalist is well worth seeing and will probably induce different reactions in different viewers.  The picture is not dull and seems well-paced and stands also as an allegory about the production of films in this country and internationally.