Teotihuacan was once the center of the world. The pre-Aztec Teotihuacanos modeled their great capital in what is now central Mexico on the universe itself, imbuing their everyday lives with a sense of holy grandeur. Before the Temple of the Moon, a foundation was laid out on the pattern of a quincunx, a model of the five-pointed compass that defines Teotihuacan cosmology. This is architecture as cosmogeny: by constructing Teotihuacan at the center of the world, they were really creating a world centered around it. Its construction was a matter of divinity—the name “Teotihuacan” is a later Nahuatl word meaning “Birthplace of the Gods”—but also of power, and thus of violence. The city’s great pyramids were consecrated with the sacrifice of foreign warriors and nobles, their bodies laid out in sacred patterns beside snakes, cougars, eagles, and owls. There could be no construction without death, no prosperity without holy destruction.
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist—recently nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture—traffics in these same ancient dualities: the everyday and the universal, the symbol and the symbolized, construction and violence. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” asks the Hungarian-born architect László Tóth about a third of the way through the film. The meaning of a building, Tóth explains to his patron, a blue-blooded American industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren, arises from its geometric construction and the way it is put to use. These uses can be domestic, recreational, religious, or ideological, and the meanings they generate might remain opaque, even inscrutable, for long periods of time. A survivor of Dachau, Tóth certainly understands how short-sighted and cruel people can be. Still, he builds for the long-term, and he trusts that his buildings’ harsh geometric forms will reveal, when the time comes, radical forms of meaning and being. They just have to survive until then.
Since I first saw The Brutalist at the New York Film Festival in September, I have been turning over similar questions about the film itself: how to describe its construction and whether it will survive. It is a film of great strengths and deep flaws, and it succeeds less as a narrative work than as a work about narratives, especially how we often cobble them together in defiance of the truth. It sets out to defy critics and audiences who hope to arrive at a clean interpretation, and it largely succeeds, though it’s an open question whether the film adds up to something more than the ideas it presents.
The Brutalist is a mammoth slab of a movie, of vistas and horizons, spanning eras and continents, its characters seeking proof that something human might last. Yet it begins intimately, confusedly, lost in the dark. Tóth (Adrian Brody) rushes through a shadowed and hectic setting with horns blaring and steam engines clanking. The camera swings wildly behind him as he navigates the darkness. Finally, Tóth emerges up into the light on a ship packed full of refugees about to arrive at Ellis Island. In the chaos and confusion, the Statue of Liberty has been flipped upside down, her torch pointing downward; it only slowly rights itself, reorienting to the horizon. She does not so much welcome Tóth and his fellow refugees as direct them uncertainly onward, setting them out on their own.
Quite a lot happens across the film’s 215 minutes. Tóth first goes to stay in Philadelphia with his cousin Attila, a furniture designer who has changed his name and left Judaism to better assimilate. Through his work with Attila, Tóth meets Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a self-made millionaire indifferent to Tóth’s sensibility until proximity to it begins to bring Van Buren acclaim and prestige of his own. He receives Tóth’s lecture about the link between meaning and construction with something like bemused contempt, but he supports Tóth’s vision all the same, enlisting the architect to design a community center on a hill overlooking Van Buren’s rural Pennsylvania mansion.
This project becomes a symbol for a number of different struggles: between art and capital, design and use, the immigrant and the native. Corbet is obsessed with the instantiation of symbols in social life, and his films model the messy process by which things become ideas and ideas become abstractions—which is where the real violence begins. In his debut, 2015’s Childhood of a Leader, the abuses endured by a young boy are later recapitulated as acts of fascistic violence, home life serving as both source and inspiration for later political acts. 2018’s Vox Lux moved into the realm of popular culture, drawing a link between the pervasive brutality of American society and the narcotizing banality of pop music, which provides us immediate emotional relief without resolving the root cause of our distress.
In The Brutalist, Corbet returns to the relationship between domestic life and the abstractions of politics. In one of the film’s many bravura montages, Corbet sets Tóth’s construction of a clean, Bauhaus-style chair to the soundtrack of a speech by David Ben-Gurion asserting the founding of Israel: two forms of creation, achieved on vastly different scales, and to different ends. Later in the film, Tóth will be upbraided for wasting himself in the United States when his real home is in Jerusalem. But once Ben-Gurion’s speech has faded, the camera pulls back to reveal Tóth’s sleek table and chair set, and, in them, his enduring commitment to finding a core of beauty in even the smallest things.
These kinds of juxtapositions recur frequently in The Brutalist. The intimate is placed alongside the immense, creating a mythic naturalism that at its best elevates everyday human drama and brings the universal down to the earth. These associations—like a train crash unfolding alongside the chanting of the Vidui (the Jewish prayer of confession)—jostle us out of the spectator’s complacent role. They also throw the meaning of symbols into question. Corbet is measuring the gap between the sign and the signified—between the artist’s creative ideals and the way his creations are put to use. Whether a building, a country, or a block of marble, symbols are mutable, they are interpreted, appropriated, put brutally to use according to who holds the reins. Tóth’s radical design philosophy is commandeered to build an anodyne monument to capital. The Statue of Liberty stands now for a nation which rejects refugees and deports immigrants—no inversion needed.
Corbet’s film works best on this grand scale, where mundane events flow together with history, and people are dwarfed by their natural and built environments. These immensities can empower his characters or, more frequently, crush them, leaving them lost in a labyrinth of signs and symbols they can’t escape—or even realize they’re trying to. The relationship between Tóth and Van Buren is just as exploitative, as (literally) rapacious, as that between art and capital, the immigrant and the nativist.
It is only when The Brutalist attempts to complicate or challenge these roles that it begins to weaken. After an intermission, Tóth is finally reunited with wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) in America. Where László has come to accept his role as Van Buren’s lackey, Erzsébet challenges him to push back against the people who control his destiny. A well-educated journalist and a convert, she has often been defined and constricted from without—as a woman, a leftist, a Jew. But even debilitated by the osteoporosis she developed in a concentration camp, Erzsébet refuses to be shunted off to the sidelines, either by her patrons or by the film itself, forcing her way into the dramatic center of the story. Ultimately though, this story can’t help but upstage her. Despite her rebelliousness, she ends up capitulating to her role like everyone else. Even the unruly pain lodged deep inside her body is tidied up, reduced to a neat statement on homeland and exile, when it ought to be more.
Still, Corbet is up to something messier and more expansive than his confidently shaped film would have you believe. Brody’s László Tóth shares his name with a real man, a Hungarian geologist who in 1972 attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a rock hammer. The real Tóth removed Mary’s arm, broke her nose, and vandalized her eyes, all while shouting that he was Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. Corbet is raising the specter of desecration and iconoclasm, of symbols not only redefined but destroyed outright. We are a long ways from Teotihuacan, yet the work of construction remains ineluctably violent, its significance enlivened through destruction, dispossession, and blood sacrifice. No one lives at the center of the world anymore, but acquire enough power and you can begin to bend its symbols to your will.
