The Brutalist (2024) is theodicy in concrete

by Adelaide Song on 2025-03-06.
Tags: film misc

Spoilers follow. Content warnings for discussion of sexual assault.

The Brutalist (2024) has one of the most aggravating finales that I can remember a movie subjecting me to. It leads with a jaunty techno remix of the incredible brass refrain that serves as the film’s primary motif, which immediately put it on my shitlist. The film then spent its dying minutes at an awards show, where the titular brutalist’s niece gives a painfully stilted “explanation” of the building which the rest of the story revolves around.

Finally, we entered the credits to another inexplicably bouncy tune, this time La Bionda’s “One For Me, One For You.” The moment the needle dropped, I remember looking around at the theater of 60-70 year olds and feeling a cross-generational camaraderie I thought was denied to diaspora kids. The collective mixture of our disgust and confusion could have set off carbon monoxide detectors.

I’m no stranger to disliking movies, but I tend to curate what I watch carefully enough that I sour on things after sitting on them, rather than hating them off-rip. Part of me was so incensed that it was willing to write the whole movie off as a waste of three hours. The rest was stuck wondering how the hell something so clearly well-made could have missed its own point so thoroughly in so short a time.

For all the lofty expectations I had going in, the first half of The Brutalist is a profoundly conventional story. Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor fleeing to America. His early hopes are dashed when his avant-garde renovation of robber-baron Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce)‘s library sends the industrialist into a foaming rage; then, after years of toiling in poverty, Harrison returns with money and a job he can’t refuse.

We’ve seen plenty of Laszlos before, in fiction or reality. The immigrant following the American dream; the Holocaust survivor running from the devastation of his past; the artist who refuses to compromise his vision for practically-minded philistines. In combination with the film’s emphasis on verisimilitude, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking Laszlo is a real figure, despite the occasional slip-up in set design¹ and the film’s writers specifically minimizing any resemblance to actual historical figures². This pitfall got me even though I know at least one proud Philly cinephile, who would’ve jumped at the chance to talk about a local architectural icon starring in an Oscar winner.

And indeed, the film’s first act deviates very little from these well-worn tropes, to the point where it was almost disappointing. I only say ‘almost’ because it’s impossible to be upset at a film this well-executed. VistaVision isn’t just used as a gimmicky way to evoke the film’s time period; in the hands of cinematographer Lol Crawley, it feels like the perfect medium to capture the scale of a story this literally monumental. A single shot of bookshelves opening bought me to tears in the theater, helped in no small part by composer Daniel Blumberg’s beautiful, Glass-esque score.

This would all end up being just a consolation prize if the performances weren’t excellent across the board, and it’s near-impossible to argue otherwise. Even side characters are given enough attention and careful study to exceed the limits of their sometimes-flat writing. Isaach de Bankole is a magnetic highlight as Gordon, Laszlo’s closest companion in both work and addiction. His quiet charisma and clear love for both Laszlo and his son provide some of the few glimmers of brightness in a movie that’s so often unflinchingly bleak.

My main qualm with this half of the movie is that while hyper-competent, it’s still so ordinary as to fall short of its colossal hype. Everyone is firing on all cylinders, but the height of their powers being restricted to the well-trodden ground of its premise would be disappointing beyond words. If the film is going to escape banality, we have to wait for the film’s back half to do so.

The second act of the film, fittingly titled “The Hard Core of Beauty”, is an exercise in repeatedly and aggressively dissatisfying its audience. Maybe the most unfulfilling dramatic thread of the film is the relationship between Laszlo and his wife, Erszebet (Felicity Jones.) Erszebet spends the entire first act as a voice off-screen, trapped inside the grinding purgatory of the immigration process. When the two finally reunite in the second act, you’re almost begging for her to take the central position in the story she’s owed, but she still ends up spending most of the runtime largely sidelined.

If you view The Brutalist as a film mostly shot from Laszlo’s perspective, you get the impression that Erszebet has to force her way into her husband’s attention span, over and over again. Jones plays her attempts to proposition him after their reunion with profoundly uncomfortable desperation. Part of it is her use of sex in an attempt to bandage over their time apart; part of it is the implication Laszlo might have stopped caring about her, let alone loving her.

This isn’t exactly debunked by Laszlo’s neglectful attitude towards her malnutrition-induced chronic pain, where he jeopardizes her condition by repeatedly dragging them cross-country, then ends up having to medicate her with his heroin supply. It’s unsurprising that the most satisfying sex they have features Laszlo fantasizing about suffocating her with a sheet. You’d expect a Chernobyl-level relationship like this to end up detonating on-screen; in reality it just slowly endures more and more suffering to very little change from either participant. The most development we end up getting is off-screen in the finale, where it could be read that Erszebet left for Israel without him.

The other central thread of the story centers around Harrison. From the moment he first shows up on-screen, we see him slowly assuming control over Laszlo’s life: first putting him out of a home by refusing to pay for Laszlo’s renovation of his library, then sweet-talking him and offering him money he can’t refuse to be his pet artist. By the time he’s offering Laszlo help with getting Erszebet and his cousin Zsofia to the States, it’s clear that he’s already got a leash on both Laszlo and his artistic vision.

This desperate need for power culminates in the film’s most horrifying and effective sequence. In the bowels of the Carrara marble mines, Harrison rapes an incapacitated Laszlo, excusing his own behaviour by degrading him as a leech upon society. When Erszebet later accuses Harrison of the act at his dinner table in front of his family, it’s like letting out a breath you’ve been holding in for the past half an hour. If this was any other movie you’d expect her to just fucking shoot him dead; certainly you want her to. Instead, while Erszebet is nearly bodily dragged out of the house, Harrison excuses himself and leaves.

He is never seen again. An expertly crafted chase scene that could’ve been ripped from Manhunter follows his trail all the way to the community center that he commissioned from Laszlo. It concludes with one cop telling his boss “Think we’ve got something over here”, but what that is, we never find out. All we see is the sun shining through the cross-shaped hole that serves as the building’s heart.

So why the ending? Why the cut-and-dry explanation in a film that has, so far, done nothing but deny the audience closure in its most pivotal moments?

It’s difficult to tell if the speech even lines up with what we know about Laszlo. The assertion that the tunnels were put in to replicate the architecture of the concentration camps rings strangely when we see their backstory on-screen. The building’s ceilings were lowered for the sake of shaving on budget, and in immediate retaliation, Laszlo responded by adding to the building’s foundations. If they’re a monument to anything, it might just be his insistence on his vision.

That interpretation probably draws from production designer Judy Becker’s own thought process, since she effectively had to design the instiute as Laszlo. At the same time, the juxtapositon feels like a pointed statement, since the idea of a nice cut-and-dry explanation for the building is antithetical to Laszlo’s entire philosophy. Every time he’s asked about the depeer meanings of his architecture, he either deflects altogether or responds with cryptic nothing—“a cube is the best description of itself”, and so on.

The man himself spends the entire coda of the film completely silent and barely seen on-screen. His conspicuous absence from what is supposedly a grand, authorial statement totally undercuts what authority the speech would otherwise have.

It’s easy to read a straightforward explanation in this scene because the film is so often painfully blunt in its other messages. I’ll extend Corbet and Fastvold grace here, though, because the accusation that it’s just them expositing to the audience feels like it misses the equally obvious alternative: that this is yet another deprivation of Laszlo’s autonomy and vision. “It’s the destination, not the journey” is a profoundly pathetic platitude to reduce his work to, and a total repudiation of a film that if nothing else, is obsessed with one man’s journey through the hell of America.

I can’t help but still feel like there’s a gaping absence at the heart of this film, as with the cathedral. The film so often brushes up against ideas it seems to include out of obligation, but some of them are so weighty that even this brief contact threatens to bring down everything. It is impossible to view a film that literally uses a Ben Gurion speech as a backing track without thinking of Zionism, and its ongoing campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people. I don’t have the expertise to talk about the topic in further detail, but Noah Kulwin’s Screen Slate article here addresses the film’s unwillingness to tackle its most important and presently relevant subject head-on.

This is ultimately emblematic of the film’s fundamental flaw. Despite the film’s grandiosity and sweeping scope, it never really feels like it does much more than gesture at themes and theses greater than it’s willing to fully explore. It boldly runs down well-trodden paths—capitalism bad, immigration sad—but flinches away the moment it steps foot into the dark, comes to a conclusion that might shift someone the way its forebears did. The architects that served as this film’s inspirations leapt into the avant-garde with the New Objectivity; The Brutalist retreats, wounded, into the shell of tradition.