The Raw Concrete of America

The architectural term “Brutalism” is often subject to a false etymology. Most people think it refers to the force exerted by some of the more muscular Brutalist buildings, but in reality the term describes the materials employed. Brutalism draws its name from béton brut, French for “raw concrete.” But as far as most people are concerned, that’s beside the point: The false etymology may as well be the true one. And many Brutalist buildings are in fact massy structures that are intended to overawe—or oppress—with their monumental austerity.

Brady Corbet’s Brutalist draws on the popular conception of the architectural movement at the expense of its factual reality. His film, which runs at nearly four hours with an intermission, is not too concerned with the genuinely fascinating story of how Walter Gropius and his disciples transformed the American architectural landscape after World War II. Instead, Corbet is more interested in using Brutalism as a rhetorical tool to teach his audience a lesson about the deadening, brutal force that, in his view, the American empire exerts on its subjects.  

The story follows the fortunes of the Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) after he flees the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe to seek his freedom in the United States. Almost from the film’s opening shots, Corbet shows that this dream is a delusion. Tóth emerges from the bowels of a ship in the New York harbor in a noisy, disorienting, and exhilarating scene to behold the Statue of Liberty—upside down. Meanwhile, in a voice over, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), stuck behind the Iron Curtain, reads to him that famous line of Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” My wife walked out of the film halfway through its run, but she may as well have left after that first scene. It’s not as if anything different happens in the ensuing three and a half hours. Once Corbet has established his theme, he never bothers to develop on it; he only restates his thesis again and again until the audience feels as if it has been crushed by one of Tóth’s creations. 

Tóth settles with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture-maker in Philadelphia, who is enslaved by his desire to assimilate: He marries a shiksa, he becomes Catholic, he even changes his Hungarian surname to Miller. Tóth regards him with contempt. Soon, he encounters the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an ersatz Charles Foster Kane, who is of course enslaved to his own money, but also to a driving desire to be thought of as a serious, intellectual man. Van Buren, in turn, enslaves Tóth, all but forcing him to design and build a large, self-consciously modern community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And of course, Tóth enslaves himself, first to drugs to numb his despair, and then to despair itself, as he comes to see his American experience as little more than an extension of his detainment in the concentration camps. 

In case anyone in the audience isn’t tracking with the brutality of it all, Corbet helpfully includes a scene where Van Buren rapes a drunken Tóth while making antisemitic observations about the causes of the Holocaust. (Yes, yes, we get it—America has raped the world....) And in case that brainy symbol isn’t clear enough, shortly after, he restates the film’s thesis in the mouth of Erzsébet, who declares to her dejected husband, “You were right, this place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat—this whole country is rotten.” And so it goes until the very end, when Corbet unveils his final exhibit: At the first Venice Biennale, Tóth’s niece reveals in a speech that his forced labor for Van Buren was really just an extension of his Holocaust experience, that what his patron has intended as a monument to a modern, forward-looking America was in fact a re-envisioning of the death houses at Buchenwald. 

I recount all this not to criticize the anti-American animus of The Brutalist, as many other critics have already done. I am more concerned with its artlessness. Armond White, in a characteristically insightful essay at National Review, mockingly writes that Corbet has initiated himself into the warped pantheon of “Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier and their trite acolyte Yorgos Lanthimos.” There is some truth in this: Corbet certainly operates in the same heavy-handed nihilistic milieu as his Euro forebears. But he doesn’t rise to their level artistically. Say what you will about Haneke’s perverse Piano Teacher, but there is something coldly beguiling about Code Unknown. And criticize the excesses of Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac series all you like, but there is something weirdly tender about Breaking the Waves. No such favorable sentiment could be expressed about The Brutalist. Even using VistaVision as a crutch, visually, the film could at best be called technically accomplished, and even then only in the pejorative sense applied to the apple-polishing student. At the screening I attended, we were given brochures that were designed to look like gallery programs at a retrospective of Tóth’s work. The point, I think, was to emphasize the realism, the truthfulness of The Brutalist. But I left the theater disappointed and dejected by its falsehood—especially its lack of interest in its nominal subject. It was only the next day, as I entered my local Brutalist landmark, the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, and settled down under the fluorescent lights in one of its windowless cubicles to work, that I started to feel better, my mind a little more free. Maybe that was a delusion. Or maybe it was the raw concrete of America.