The Hard Core of Beauty
A few words about The Brutalist
Spoilers for The Brutalist, fair warning.
So there’s this one shot I keep coming back to. A moment, really, more than a shot. Adrien Brody, playing the Hungarian modernist architect László Tóth, has left his wife Erzsébet, high on heroin, to use the toilet. The camera follows him as he steps out of the bathroom, closing the door and waiting against the adjacent wall. For just a few seconds, Lászlo stands in silence, looking stripped bare somehow. On Brody’s face, a wave washes over, some great sadness appearing to consume him from the inside, but also something resembling relief. It’s an instant, really. A flicker. The warm sound of a piano rises, Daniel Blumberg’s lush theme for Erzsébet coming to the fore after a drug-induced haze. In a film more notable for its loudness—announcing itself with loud music, loud images, loud ideas, and loud plot turns—the pause for reflection stands out. We’ll soon learn that during their night of passion László shared with Erzsébet that he’d been raped. Perhaps that’s why subsequent viewings of the film have lent the scene more power. Each time I’ve watched it, I’ve found it more heartbreaking.
The Brutalist is a film of ideas first. Brady Corbet, its director, has made no bones about this. It’s how he and his partner in life and work, Mona Fastvold, like to make movies. They start with ideas, themes, and then build out a story and characters to suit. This can—and sometimes does—feel programmatic. Corbet’s previous films as director, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, are more enigmatic parable than fully fleshed out storytelling. Not a bad quality given the intent, but The Brutalist is something greater. What that something is, is visible in its moments of lingering, in the marginalia, in the gaps between plot machinations. Corbet’s aspirations have always, in some crucial sense, been more literary than cinematic, and in The Brutalist he and Fastvold have fashioned a novel. Their ideas—about art, immigration, marriage, violence, patronage, capitalism, sex, fascism, placelessness—are woven through a tapestry of character and incident that builds toward, not a common movie-ish satisfaction, but an elucidation of the ambiguities inherent in the weaving. László Tóth, this inscrutable artist, drives through the film’s narrative to emerge as but one component of a wider picture, the meaning of which is left for interpretation.
It’s all by design. At the end of the film, László’s neice Zsófia, now an adult with a grown-up daughter of her own, speaks on his behalf at the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture, presenting a symposium on his life’s work. “In his memoirs,” she says of her uncle, sitting in front of her appearing elderly and infirm, “he described his designs as machines with no superfluous parts.” She says that his work, at its best, “possessed an immoveable core; a ‘Hard Core of Beauty.’” These are ideas drawn from the great Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and a 1991 lecture reprinted for his 1998 book Thinking Architecture, which were in turn inspired by the poet William Carlos Williams and his class of objectivist poets—not to be confused with Ayn Rand’s objectivism. Zumthor had heard a radio programme about Williams with the title “The Hard Core of Beauty,” taken from the poem of that name. A beautiful poem, which you can read here, but here is an excerpt of its first lines.
The most marvellous is not
the beauty, deep as that is,
but the classic attempt
at beauty,
at the swamp’s center: the
dead-end highway, abandoned
when the new bridge went in finally.
“I like the idea that beauty has a hard core,” Zumthor writes, “and when I think of architecture this association of beauty and a hard core has a certain familiarity.” Zumthor goes on to describe Williams’ objectivist phisophy, in which the poem, or the piece of art, is like a machine, and like a machine, it is at its best when it has no superfluous parts. “I learned from the radio program that the poetry of William Carlos Williams is based on the conviction that there are no ideas except in the things themselves,” Zumthor continues, “and that the purpose of his art was to direct his sensory perception to the world of things in order to make them his own.”
Williams’ poetry found some new resonance among cinephiles in recent years thanks to Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, inspired by the wordsmith’s great epic of the same name. It’s in that poem that Williams expresses, there are “no ideas but in things,” a notion at once direct and also descriptive of his work, which Zumthor recalls taking place “seemingly unemotionally and laconically, and it is precisely for this reason that his texts have such a strong emotional impact.” This engagement with a poetry of the real inspired Zumthor’s modernist, minimalist architecture. Structures which speak with boldness and the confidence of their materials and construction, but which, as he put it, “allow emotions to emerge, to be.” It takes precision and patient craft, he says, to achieve such generative vagueness, to discover that “richness and multiplicity emanate from the things themselves if we observe them attentively and give them their due.”
It hardly takes much ruminating over The Brutalist to see the influence of these thoughts. “The Hard Core of Beauty” is namechecked in dialogue, and is also the title of its second part, post-intermission. The talk of “no superfluous parts” is there—and Corbet even told me, of his own film, that there were no scenes cut in the edit, “There’s nothing superfluous”—as is the concept of there being “no ideas but in things.” And the whole thing feels possessed of “the classic attempt at beauty” from Williams’ verse.
Sitting across from his soon-to-be benefactor, László is asked, why architecture? “Nothing is of its own explanation,” he responds. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” The movie has shifted into a dreamlike space at this point, with subtle slow-motion, panning over faces, dissolves, and rich strings reverberating in the score as László begins to speak in an English well beyond his ability.
“There was a war on, and yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there, still, in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate the communal rhetoric of anger, fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed, but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.”
László’s ideas about architecture sound right out of Zumthor and the objectivist poets before him. The attempt to create works which stand on their own, true to their nature, reflecting in their construction the reality that bore them, and thus revealing a multiplicity of meanings to people over time. In László’s case, this Bauhaus-schooled architect, no doubt a communist or fellow traveller, a cosmopolitan Jew, envisions his work as containing within it that Hard Core of Beauty, an intrinsic expression of his emotional reality within a political context. To step into the metatextual realm, it’s obvious from the film’s own surfaces that Corbet is striving for something similar. He has, to his credit, owned this, even if some have accused him of obnoxiousness as a result. It’s also led to a widespread sense, among many great critics, that he’s full of himself, and full of shit.
Truthfully, I sympathize with people who come away from the film seeing all its precise machinery either falling apart or adding up to not very much, annoyed with the pompousness of its presentation. Even having seen the film several times now and loving it, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s hampered by a lack of intuitive command, by Corbet, over cinematic language. It lacks the wit and playfulness of the best films, sticking instead to the stylistically austere prestige of the European arthouse, while operating like any number of old American epics and ‘50s melodramas. The dialogue, perfectly functional, and frequently memorable for its phrasing and thematic significance, is nonetheless absent musicality. Its novelistic structure, which jumps through time in chapters more than scenes, can at times feel airless even as it glides along at a pace that never drags—many have commented on what an easy sit its 215 minutes are, and I can attest it doesn’t become a chore on subsequent viewings either. The Brutalist is an incredibly assured piece of art craft, an achievement in a real sense. Whether it achieves transcendence is debatable, though in moments I’ve caught glimpses.
The first is in its overture, when László emerges from hellish the hull of a ship to glimpse the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Blumberg’s score blaring its four-note theme loudly, the monument framed upside down. It’s a tremendous entrance, and an encapsulation of the film’s grandest ideas about the relationship between America and the immigrants beckoned by its Dream. From there, László will go to a brothel, and then to Philadelphia. His cousin will put him up and give him work designing furniture, and then a job turning a study into a library as a surprise for a wealthy industrialist. It will go wrong, and the cousin and his Catholic wife will kick László out. But then he’ll end up working for that industrialist, living on his property, tasked with building him a grand Christian community centre as a tribute to his late mother. And so he will go about planning and beginning construction.
László will finally get his wife, Erzsébet, out of Hungary, alongside his mute niece Zsófia, who will be raped by the industrialist’s son. The project will be put on indefinite hiatus after an accident. Years later Zsófia, no longer mute, will move with her husband and future child to Israel, and László will get a call from his patron to return. On a trip to Italy, to pick out marble for the centre’s altarpiece, László’s patron will rape him, whispering in his ear the whole time about the moral degeneracy of “your people.” László, continuing the heroin habit he picked up on the ship to America, as treatment for his broken nose, will go forward with construction. After an argument with his wife, he will attempt to treat her osteoporosis pain with heroin. That night of passion will ensue, Erzsébet will overdose, and when she’s in the hospital, László will tell her about the rape, which will prompt her to go back to the industrialist and confront him directly, in front of his children and friends. The industrialist will vanish, a likely suicide, but as though into thin air. And finally we will end up in Venice, the old artist watching his niece expound on his life’s work. The centre will have been completed, at last, and she will tell the gathered audience that her uncle designed it to reflect the dimensions of the concentration camps where he and his wife were imprisoned during the war, except for its high ceilings encouraging “free thought; freedom of identity,” and with a series of passageways connecting the couple’s love across expanses of distance and time.
“‘Don’t let anyone fool you, Zsófia,’ he would say to me as a struggling young mother during our first years in Jerusalem, ‘no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.’”
That is, in rough detail, the story of The Brutalist. It is a story of the concurrent struggles of a refugee and an artist in America, exploited and oppressed by the violent whims of the capitalist class. These experiences are analogous, though imperfectly, and they bump up against the differing experiences of the other characters around him. Corbet discovers in these imperfect analogues a productive tension that he refracts and refracts through the many ideas the film touches upon. And those ideas are remarkably coherent, threading between and through each other seamlessly, announcing themselves loudly, yet in exposing natural contradictions open up space for real ambiguity. I think, for example, about László’s inflated sense of agency as he immerses himself in work. Work that can never be fully his, on the one end built at the behest of his patron, capital, and on the other the public, who own the art’s meaning. The way this giving of oneself without ultimate satisfaction mirrors his relationship to America as an immigrant. His works still standing, monuments to some perseverance, but unceasingly tied to the form of their own construction: exploitation, oppression, violence. It’s all a perpetuation. The marble blocks dropped by anarchists on fascists, cut up and fixed into ornate objects for rich, religious racists.
The film does not actually begin in that ship’s hull. It starts instead with Zsófia, being interrogated by some liberator after the war who is trying to determine her relationship to the woman who claims to be her aunt. Zsófia, rendered mute by her experience of the Holocaust, appears fearful. This is also where the film ends, as a freeze-frame of the older Zsófia, delivering her remarks at the Biennale, dissolves into the image of her younger self, there at the beginning of her post-war saga. There’s an intellectual question here to argue over. Who’s story did we just watch? Which, of course leads to a series of further questions. What does it mean that Zsófia was speaking for her uncle? Is her intepretation of his work true to his intent? Does his intent matter at all? What does their life experience, and ending up in Israel, say about America and Zionism? What does it mean that most of the other work on display at the pavillion was built in Connecticut, the state his cousin’s “shiksa” wife was from? How can it possibly be the destination that matters, when we’ve just spent three-and-a-half hours watching a journey? Indeed, the ending of the film becomes a kaleidescopic lens through which to view, or re-view, all those refractions Corbet and Fastvold carefully created. It’s “intellectually stimulating,” to quote Harrison Lee Van Buren, Guy Pearce’s hilariously named industrialist character, and I’ve mulled the film over excitedly and discussed it fervently and with great depth, even with its detractors. Yet it’s the emotions the film gets out of me that I can’t shake, and I think are the real source of my divide with those who believe that, for all its ideas and impressive craft, it remains hollow.
Before Van Buren surprises László with a commission, he invites this fancy architect to a party, to view his work on the library. This is where László shares his artistic philosphy, after Van Buren tells the tale of his vengeful and moderately psychopathic treatment of the grandparents who abandoned him and his unwed mother. They sit for a meal, next to Michael Hoffman, Van Buren’s friend and attorney—“In that order”—a fellow Jew, with whom László shares something in common: a Jewish convert wife. Michael’s wife, seated there between them, asks the architect about his experience of the war, noting the stories they’ve heard “make one’s toes curl,” barely concealing the perverse titillation motivating her curiosity. László, looking sweaty and haggard from a drug-adled time at a jazz club the night before, takes a moment to comprehend what she’s asked him before saying, “I wouldn’t know where to begin, Mrs. Hoffman.” It’s a moment that made me think about my own grandparents, on my mother’s side. Holocaust survivors, also from Budapest, who similarly had to live with the horrors they were subjected to while reconciling their experience with the realities of daily life thereafter. In the moment before he answers, and even as he gets his words out, László appears to be collecting the entire weight of his agony and putting it in a box somewhere. It’s all there on Brody’s face, in a performance whose magnificence may yet be underappreciated.
A similar pause occurs earlier than that, when László has come to stay with his cousin Attila. After getting the tour of his furniture shop, and watching how Attila has endeavoured to make himself American—new last name, new accent, the works—the two sit across from each other at a desk. László asks of Attila’s wife, “Shiksa?” Attila looks at him, a glint in his eye, and says. “She’s Catholic… We are Catholic.” And then the film holds on Attila as the humour of his statement dissipates and the reality of its meaning seems to take hold of him. Alessandro Nivola, in another of the film’s many excellent performances, almost seems to shed several pounds in that moment, his body language losing its confidence and edging into a sulk as he taps out the ash of his cigarette. He stares for a second or two into a middle distance, and in that brief moment we understand something about this man and the many men like him. The people who believe reinvention is their liberation.
The nature of liberation is another of the film’s many open questions. “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Erzsébet quotes from Goethe in a letter to her husband read over his emergence from that dank ship’s hull. “Falsely” is the key word, because how is one to know? Announcing her plan to make aliyah to Israel, Zsófia is met with upset and confusion from her uncle and aunt, who question the need. Zsófia is a true believer, though, not just a woman whose abuse in both Europe and America has her wanting another escape. It is, in fact, our first time hearing her speak, suggesting that Zionism itself has given back her voice. It is their duty, as Jews, to go to Israel and colonize the land. “Our repatriation is our liberation,” she says, like some pamphleteer. Liberation in some senses, perhaps, but whether that freedom is a false one, the film doesn’t answer. Again, I think of my family, who migrated from Hungary to Israel after the war, a little over a decade later moved to Montreal with my infant mother, experienced the gravest of difficulties as immigrants there, and finally moved back to Israel to live on a kibbutz. Their salvation real—I am a literal product of it—but also circumstantial. As I think about my grandmother, now a widow, sitting in her home mere miles from the wreckage of the genocidal campaign in Gaza, precipitated by a horrendous attack that she and my cousins very nearly fell victim to, itself a consequence of a century long project of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid in the name of liberation, the meaning of “freedom” takes on devastating implications.
Late in the film, recovering in the hospital after her overdose, Erzsébet tells László that she met God, that he allowed her to speak his name. She says this isn’t the first time they’ve met. László does not appear to be a religious man at all. When he attends services at the local synagogue, he looks bored to be there. When his Jewishness is highlighted by Hoffman’s wife at the party as a reason for the difficulties of immigrating to America, he expands the circle to include foreigners more broadly as people feared by the public. If anything motivates him, it’s his art and his relatively unspoken politics. Erzsébet, though, the convert, is more in touch with her chosen religion. The only other time Jewishness is specifically mentioned in the film is when Zsófia makes her announcement. “I am Jewish. My child is Jewish. It’s time for us to go home,” she says, to which Erzsébet, offended, responds, “Does it somehow make us less Jewish that we are here?” László chimes in, “Are we not Jewish?” Where aliyah for Zsófia was an ideological matter, for Erzsébet it’s a spiritual one. For László? All we know is he goes at his wife’s behest.
Their love—his for her, and hers for him—is the film’s true gravitational centre. Erzsébet’s letter is our first introduction to their relationship. After the opening credits, when László arrives at the bus station in Philadelphia and is informed by Attila of the Erzsébet letter, that she and Zsófia are indeed alive. László breaks down at the news in the most affecting way. Another one of those transcendent moments, when the script and the filmmaking and the acting all line up to unearth a well of emotions, excavating this character’s entire tragic experience with barely a word, mere minutes into the movie. Erzsébet’s arrival at the train station, in the first scene upon returning from intermission, is also her entrance into the film, and contains the same sort of bursting emotion. Later, while she is being bathed by Zsófia, Erzsébet remarks on how much she’s missed listening to her husband go about his work in the next room, the rediscovered pleasantness of the day-to-day and the love they share hitting her under the heavenly glow of sunlight streaming in through the window. The film’s much-dicussed handjob scene, somewhat tonally ill-conceived as it is, presents us another window into their marriage, which has survived a genocide and her husband’s infidelities. Their abstracted sex scene late in the film, high on heroin, is a beautiful and ecstatic expression of their everlasting intimacy.
László’s rape, the fact of it and its bluntly metaphorical presentation, has put plenty of audiences off. The use of sexual violence as metaphor is already tough to swallow, and made tougher still by it being a metaphor for making art as much as it is about the evils of bigotry and capitalism. I won’t justify it, except to say that I’m not generally bothered by such things in art, in part because I think art is exactly the space in which to toy around with such ideas with some distance and safety. What I will say, though, is I find the rape appropriately shocking, both narratively and stylistically, held the way it is, in one take, with Van Buren verbalizing his hateful, exploitative view of their relationship as patron and artist, as capitalist and immigrant worker. The moment I linger on, though, is in the subsequent scene, as the two emerge the next morning from that cave in Carrara, Van Buren his usual composed self, and László looking like a husk of himself. This is a broken man. Not very many scenes follow this one. László begins to retreat from himself, and his own film, into his work amid montage of the construction, before the film’s final set of scenes.
The film’s first part is called “The Enigma of Arrival,” named for the V. S. Naipaul book, a fictionalized history and autobiography about his experience immigrating from Trinidad to the U.K., reflecting on the constantly evolving nature of place and home. This section of the film is similarly open and complex, introducing characters and locations and situations that amount to the building of a world, a history that feels rich and real—to the point that some have confused the film for a biopic. Its second part is “The Hard Core of Beauty,” from the Williams and the Zumthor, and operates in kind, with more abrupt movements through time, and an even more utilitarian approach narrative development. The stylistic distinction between the two halves shouldn’t be overstated. They are still very much the same film working on the same overall wavelength, to the same ends, but the second half is where the machinery shows itself, deliberately, unadorned and abstracted like the exposed concrete of László’s brutalist creation. The construction becomes evident as the walls close in, and the events become more surreal, forcing a reevaluation of the whole work, revealing those thematic multiplicities. Indeed, what to make of the artist, who only sporadically voices his deeper thoughts? What does one see in his work, this man who’s been through hell and back a few times over? Whose flaws—drug addiction, bad temper, infidelity, pride—are real but also never exaggerated, always human?
On the way home from the construction site, after an angry outburst in which he rashly fires his longtime friend—I love, by the way, how the glimpses of Gordon and his son over the years are like a window into a whole other film we could be watching—László and Erzsébet have it out. She castigates him for his behaviour, and then complains about having to work a lowly job as a women’s columnist, a far cry from her Oxford-trained history as a foreign correspondent for a prestigious Hungarian paper. László explodes. “We came here because it was our only option!” And then he shares the reality he has been living with privately, ever since his cousin’s wife accused him of making a pass at her and they kicked him to the street. “The people here, they do not want us here. Audrey, Attila’s Catholic wife, does not want us here. She does not want us here!” he shouts, before very nearly echoing Van Buren’s words to him during the rape. “We are nothing. We are worse than nothing.” It’s this row that leads to the heroin, and the sex, and the revelation, and the overdose.
There in the hospital, Erzsébet asks her husband, “Do you remember everything you confessed to me at home in our bed?” He can’t even look at her, shaking his head. “You need not be ashamed, my darling,” she says. “The harm done unto us were done only to our physical bodies.” Each time I’ve seen the film, my heart has skipped a beat after that line. So devastating, spoken by one Holocaust survivor to another. Recently, talking with my grandmother, I asked her about their move to Canada and back to Israel in the 1960s, and she said it had been her desire in both cases. My grandfather had been working on ships, and was away from home for long stretches, and she thought a move to Canada would put an end to that. But their time in Montreal was difficult to say the least, and finally, after almost a decade, they left. I asked what my grandfather, a man who kept his opinions to himself, had thought of all that. She said that he simply loved her so much, that all he ever wanted was to be near her, that he would have followed her anywhere. In that hospital, held in each others’ embrace, Erzsébet at last agrees with her husband, “this place is rotten,” she says, and tells him that she wants to go to Israel to be a grandmother to Zsófia’s child. “Come home with me,” she says, urging him, “Come home with me.”
“I will follow you until I die,” László tells her. The last words he speaks in the film.
One of the best reviews I've read on the new american epic. I sort of get Richard Brody's take that it's "an idea of a movie about ideas" but even if I fully agreed with that how many movies nowadays don't have a single idea? You wrote so wonderfully here about all that succinctly, great work!
The way you contextualized the whole film in connection with your own family really opened up the second half of the film for me.