I’ve been mulling why it is that The Brutalist has captivated film critics. At three and a half hours, it’s a weighty film, and much was clearly invested in the cinematography. It makes a lasting impression — but for all the wrong reasons. It scrambles history in many ways big and small and has so many dropped or unexplained plot elements that I started to wonder if it had been conceived as an eight-hour miniseries and we got only episodes two, five, and eight.
I had eagerly awaited the release of the film, since it was said to be partly inspired by the life of Marcel Breuer. For the last two years, I have been immersed in restoring Breuer’s Wellfleet summer house and archiving its contents. I’ve been obsessed with Breuer’s work since high school. He is one of the main inspirations for my own attempts to make buildings and furniture.
The Brutalist follows the fictional László Tóth, a Hungarian Jewish Bauhaus-trained architect who ends up in the U.S. But aside from these few details, the fictional Tóth and historical Breuer have nothing in common.
László passes through Ellis Island and on to Philly, where he is hired and then betrayed by a cousin. He gets a commission to do a fancy library redesign for a rich industrialist, who, upon seeing it, flies into a rage, fires him, and refuses to pay. The entire design, fabrication, and installation, including custom furniture, takes place in seven days. This was where I started to think that no architects were consulted on the script.
The next time we see our protagonist, he is shoveling coal, living in a flophouse, standing in a soup line, and shooting heroin with his only friend, Gordon. László’s wife, Erzsébet, appears, disabled by famine, as does his niece, who seems to have traumatic muteness. Like everyone else in The Brutalist, these characters remain mostly opaque. Subplots are floated and dropped.
In the second half of the film, after the abusive industrialist has rehired László to design a huge community center, tiresome tropes take over: the cruel capitalist client, the sensitive suffering artist. Why doesn’t László find another client? Why didn’t he find a job in his field instead of shoveling coal? Why does he have no office filled with people drafting for him? Has he ever tried to get off his unexplained heroin habit? There are lots of tantrums and cryptic proclamations about art, but these points are never clarified.
To explain his design to a concerned community group, László makes a large-scale model that looks like a hulking, windowless power plant. The site is the top of a steep hill looming over the client’s isolated mansion. Is this magical realism? The story has the illogic of a fairy tale but none of the freedom of imagination. How do people get to this remote community center? Where do they park? Is there a funicular? These are questions architects worry about.
Brutalism was a branch of late modernism that sought to create monumental, sculptural works, mostly in poured concrete. Boston City Hall and Harvard’s Carpenter Center are two examples. The word comes from the French béton brut, raw concrete. Breuer was one of its most celebrated practitioners, as seen in his Whitney Museum (the original), the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and the Saint John’s Abbey monastery in Minnesota.
Believe it or not, the Brutalists were smitten with castles and Italian hill towns and were shooting for the same organic gravity and permanence. Breuer himself had a lifelong obsession with the duality of lightness and heaviness, which can be seen in the furniture of his own suspended screened porch in Wellfleet. Here, his Cesca chairs, which can be picked up with one finger and create the illusion that the sitter is floating on air, sit around a massive table made of cement blocks and a 600-pound slab of slate.
László’s community center is massive and grim but doesn’t look like any of the great Brutalist buildings.
In the course of the story, László’s pallor goes from sickly white to greenish. This, along with his perpetual look of torment, started to remind me of a commedia dell’arte clown or a silent film actor like Buster Keaton, but not in a good way. The actors don’t have a coherent story to tell or three-dimensional characters to inhabit, so they become caricatures.
A weird epilogue takes place at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where László is getting an award, though we never learn for what. His niece, who has regained her voice, reveals that László and Erzsébet were in concentration camps during the war and that the design for the community center has some cryptic connection to the design of the camps.
Breuer left Germany in 1935. He and other Jewish architects and designers certainly suffered persecution and had to flee for their lives, but after they came to the U.S. they weren’t broken and ground into the dirt like László. They thrived in America’s imperfect but still inspiring atmosphere of artistic and intellectual freedom. Director Brady Corbet doesn’t do justice to either the Holocaust or modern architecture but seems to be seeking gravitas by association.
The Brutalist has already won many awards and looks positioned to clean up at the Oscars. This makes me worry that people are losing their capacity for critical judgment. In fact, that’s how I’m feeling about the world in general right now.
Designer Peter McMahon is director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust. He lives in Wellfleet.
