Entertainment

“Brutal” is the epic inversion of the American dream


It’s not long after The Brutalist that director Brady Corbett plunges us into darkness—a darkness that, while neither formless nor empty, marks the film as a creation story. Deep in the depths of a ship that has just arrived in New York Harbor, the camera is pushed to the deck, along with a weary Hungarian Jewish refugee, László Toth (Adrien Brody), making his way through the crowd. It’s 1947, and the horrors Laszlo fled in Europe – he survived Buchenwald – seem to be gathering just below the deck in Courbet’s masterful shadow play. The weight of the past weighs heavily on Laszlo in the hand-held camera scramble, in the time-bomb beat of Daniel Blomberg’s music, and, most of all, in the dismal, disembodied voice of Laszlo’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). ), from whom he was cruelly separated. She writes to him: “There is nothing left for us here.” “Go to America and I will follow you.”

Laszlo has done it now, and as he emerges from the ship – from darkness and light! – and glances at Ellis Island, his weary features turning into a cheerful, boyish smile. Should we be upset that the Statue of Liberty is upside down because of the extreme angle? Of all the memorable images captured by cinematographer Lol Crowley, this one amounts to a visual thesis: We are witnessing an inversion, or even a refutation, of the American dream. Before the war, in Budapest, Laszlo was a much-admired architect; Swept away in America, trying to reclaim some semblance of a legacy, he will be seized upon and cast out, indulged and ridiculed, embraced and exploited, and, ultimately, horribly mistreated and cast aside. Patterns of ups and downs are built, with ruthless intelligence, into the structure of the film. “Brutal,” which Corbett co-wrote with Norwegian director Mona Fastvold, runs three hours and thirty-five minutes, and unfolds in two coldly interesting acts: a dizzying rise and a steep decline. There’s a fifteen-minute intermission, which is the only part of the picture that even remotely tests your patience.

With Laszlo’s arrival in America, his professional glories — and his lover Erzsébet, stuck in Hungary with their young niece, Sofia (Raffey Cassidy) — seem lost to the past. All he has now are his clothes, an ongoing heroin addiction, and the faintest hopes for the future. The film, for its part, progresses relentlessly. Crowley’s recurring signature shot is a direct view of a road or train tracks rushing beneath us, often backed by the rapid movement of the score: the music of industrial progress. Laszlo makes his way to prosperous Philadelphia, where he moves in with his friendly cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has a lukewarm Shiksa wife (Emma Laird) and a furniture store that outstrips demand.

“It’s Not So Pretty” is Laszlo’s honest assessment of the stiff, characterless wooden tables and chairs in Attila’s showroom, and the splendor of Brody’s performance can be found in his careful tweaking of that line – critical but tolerant and reluctant to also offer it as superior to judgment. However, Laszlo does not have a stifling belief in beauty. When the cousins ​​are commissioned to renovate a character study in nearby Doylestown—as a surprise gift for its owner, millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—it’s László who transforms the room into a minor marvel. And when Harrison was so surprised by what these men did, it was Laszlo who calmly stood his ground, certain that Beauty would win the day.

He proved himself right. After falling out with Attila (Nivola’s excellent exit too early), Laszlo finds himself swept up, in a stunning reversal of fortune, into the good graces of Harrison, a self-made titan of industry and avaricious connoisseur of other people’s gifts. Pearce, in a fine performance, plays him as a kind of castle – towering but human-sized, his immaculate dress and hairstyle hardly affected by occasional bouts of mood or twitch of the ego. “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating,” he declares to Laszlo, sipping brandy, and though the line elicits laughter, Pierce never turns Harrison’s amateurish pretensions into a mere joke. Even in the character’s most transparently manipulative moments, Pearce gives him an air of seductive liveliness—and enhanced breadth of spirit. When Harrison installs László in his guest house and commissions him to design the Doylestown Community Center, you can’t help but share László’s sense of triumph—or his instinctive yearning, against his better judgment, for his benefactor’s approval.

But others disagree, certainly not Harrison’s dastardly young son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), though his daughter, Maggie (Stacy Martin), is made of gentler things. There are also the residents of Doylestown, who hardly bother to conceal their hostility toward the Jewish intruder in their midst, or their suspicion of the sharp, clean lines and typical elements of his brutalist style. Tensions rose as the second half began, in 1953, and Harrison arranged for Erzsébet and Zsófia to be reunited with László, finally, in Doylestown. The two women, at first welcomed, soon insult their hosts with their disturbing independence of mind and spirit. They have survived much worse than the Van Burens of the world, and are less inclined than Laszlo toward compromise.

If László Tóth reminds you of Howard Roark, it’s clear that Corbett, who has good old-fashioned Rand, is already a few steps ahead of you. Like Rourke (played by Gary Cooper in King Vidor’s 1949 film version of The Fountainhead), Laszlo is unwavering in his loyalty to his vision, resisting every effort to curb his ideas and refusing to indulge his capricious and foolish whims. From public taste. What makes Laszlo the most interesting character is that, despite his stubbornness and strict judgment, he does not allow genius or arrogance to define him. It cannot be reduced to his addiction, his war trauma, his love for his wife, his devotion to Judaism, or his uncertainty — as other Jews flock to Israel — about where that devotion begins and ends. When you think back to “The Brutalist,” you’ll find that it’s not Laszlo’s arrogance that is likely to stick with you, but rather his reasoning, as well as the soft tone in his harsh voice, like a pillow placed on gravel.

Brody hasn’t been this good, or had a role this strong, since his Oscar-winning performance as Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist (2002). There are moments when Courbet’s film suggests a sequel: after surviving the Holocaust, where does an artist go next? Encountering The Brutalist for the first time, I wondered if I was watching a biopic, and I was so impressed by the flow of the story and the pointy precision of detail that I couldn’t help but assume the basic truth of the material. Foundation integrity. I should have known better; Corbett enjoys concocting artificial case histories, immersing fictional characters in the waves of real-life disasters. His first feature film, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), wove a chilling and cold origin story for a budding fascist. The enchanting and dark “Vox Lux” (2018) was dreamed up by a pop singer named Celeste – a mish-mash of inspirations (Madonna, Lady Gaga), born in the cauldron of American tragedy.

“Vox Lux” was about the tortuous cultural connections between musical celebrity and terrorist violence, with Celeste as a pop star supernova. Likewise, “Brutal” views Laszlo’s agreement with Harrison as a Faustian bargain—no big deal, really. As the years passed, delays set in, budgets skyrocketed, and Laszlo began to slip and stumble, becoming more dangerous than ever. slopes. A stunning trail leads Harrison and Laszlo to the mountains of Italy, where massive slabs of marble await their man-made fate. Perhaps it is not surprising that here, in the face of such natural beauty, the drama shrinks and shrinks, not so much realizing Courbet’s overarching ideas as translating them literally. The resonant and thematically intelligent story—about the predation of capitalism, the obstacles to cultural assimilation, the inherent dysfunction of the relationship between patron and artist, and the plundering and violation of immigrant Jewish genius—suddenly seems trapped in stone.

It doesn’t matter. “The Brutalist” is an American epic of rare authority, and I think what gives it its power is what gives some buildings their magic: the quality of dramatic breadth and material weight, the sense that what we see has been shaped and shaped by human hands. Modernist aesthetics may have been Courbet’s subject, but Hollywood classicism, as a style, suited him well; You can feel him surrendering, as he has rarely done before, to the sweeping pleasures of a well-told tale. However, his penchant for provocation persists in the film’s scorpion sting, which offers a new interpretation of Laszlo’s legacy: one that essentially recasts his work as covert propaganda, or a Zionist Trojan horse. Some viewers might take this attempt at redemption seriously, if only to miss the bitter, ironic coldness in Courbet’s tone, or the inconsistency in the translator’s own words, reminding us of the cold ambiguity of Laszlo Toth’s great works: “It refers to nothing; They don’t say anything, they simply are

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *