GROSS DISTRACTION - The Brutalist - holocaust as plot twist

I'm struggling to phrase this without sounding like an idiot (I mean more like an idiot than usual).

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed. Occasionally I stop and do something contemporary.

THE BRUTALIST, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce; written and directed by Brady Corbet; 215 minutes; Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.

It is time, I think, that I considered being a bit more assertive about the paid-for options around here - turn this thing into an actual subscription newsletter (not least because those of you who actually do pay for this don’t get anything special for your money!). What do you think? What would be the best approach? Leave a comment (or email me if you like).

---

What do you call it when a movie frustrates you and confuses you continually for almost its whole length - really drives you mad. But then, right at the end - in the final scene, in fact - provides some information that makes you abandon everything you’d decided about that movie and completely upends your understanding of what kind of project it is?

I’m describing my experience of The Brutalist. I spent almost the entire movie developing a confused and honestly quite bitter resentment for its incoherence and awkwardness; for the weird, sideways dialogue, the inconclusive conversations, the unmotivated behaviour (so much unmotivated behaviour). Some of the dialogue was so stilted and cross-purposes I convinced myself it was AI. I was working up an interpretation for the switch-back dialogue and dysfunctional relationships that there was some kind of deliberate, exploitive intention here. I texted my wife in the intermission: ‘I think it’s toxic bullshit’ (and don’t get me started on the intermission).

But then, in the jarring final sequence, in which we are first asked to marvel at the Vistavision wonders of Venice from a gondola and then to accept the intolerable substitution of one actor for a new one we’ve never met (I’m not going to try to explain it to you - it’s still making me twitch). We are then given some information that so alters our understanding of what has gone before that we’re left stunned and then mentally scrubbing back through the film, scene by scene, trying to accommodate this new information and to understand how it effects the meaning of what we’ve seen.

And this is why I’m embarrassed to write this, really. Because I’m kind of half convinced that you, subscriber, didn’t actually need this new information, inserted in a discontinuous scene that’s set decades after the action of the movie. I reckon that you’re smart enough to have assumed everything we learn right at the end so that, for you, it wasn’t new information at all but really just a dramatic confirmation of everything you already knew, being so smart.

Information

I suspect you know the basics. I mean it won a bricklayer’s hod of Oscars. But, in summary: Hungarian Jewish architect - a brilliant and successful modernist practitioner before the war - finally escapes Europe and, once settled in Philadelphia, tries to reconstruct a career and to bring his wife and niece, from whom he was separated, to America…

I’m going to start with the two critical pieces of information we acquire right at the end - the information that throws everything in the air, as I explained above - and then lay out the events from earlier in the movie that are altered by that information:

1. We learn that Tóth’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) both survived Dachau; and that Tóth himself survived Buchenwald. To be clear - I’m not a complete idiot - we obviously already know that Tóth and his family are Hungarian Jews who have survived the holocaust but it’s not stated until this point that they had survived imprisonment in the camps.

2. We learn that there’s a reason Tóth’s masterpiece - the project he’s working on, an arts centre in a small Pennsylvania town - has rooms that are strikingly small in area but soaringly tall - something we (and his client) had already indulgently concluded was one of the artist's many aesthetic eccentricities. We learn that they have the same floor plan as rooms in Buchenwald; a stark artistic statement, made by the architect without, at the time, telling his client.

Again, there are a couple of possibilities here. One is that all of this ought to have been obvious to me while I was watching the movie. I mean you’re now going “oh, Steve, you big idiot. Obviously they were camp survivors. Where else do you think they could have spent the war?” Another is that some people did know these things - they’d either seen some spoilers or, for the narrower group of film reviewers, they’d been given a handout at a press screening or something. For instance, Michael Wood, a good and famous critic, says in his LRB review:

“The hero is a Hungarian called László Tóth, brilliantly played through an erratic scale of moods by Adrien Brody. The year is 1947. He has survived Buchenwald and we meet him in a roiling crowd getting off a boat in New York.”

Did Wood know this fact about Tóth on encountering him in that first scene? Did he intuit it? Has he retrospectively inserted this knowledge into his reading of the movie? I’m gratified that Edwin Heathcoate, who is an architectural historian and this more alive to this aspect of the story, does notice the plot twist.

So now I’ll catalogue the ripples this new information produces, backwards through the narrative we’ve just experienced. I suspect there’s more to it than this too: the more I think about it the more The Brutalist becomes a kind of recursive puzzle, clicking together after the fact in a way that I don’t think I’ve experienced before in the movies.

The building

Tóth wins a commission to build his arts centre, in a high-modernist style, in a small Pennsylvania town called Doylestown, home to his American patron millionaire Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). This fictional arts centre - an auditorium, a library, a gymnasium and, for pork-barrel reasons, a church - is self-evidently modelled on the many similar ones that went up in the world’s major cities after the war - many of them in modernist styles, some even fully brutalist. These places, often built on the ruins of city neighbourhoods destroyed by fighting or bombing or both, were all very grand and all very serious (and usually fairly pompous) in intent. They were statements about the human spirit and about art as a restorative force and a counterweight to tyranny and cruelty - aspects of the reconstruction, moral and physical, that was thought to be necessary. Everyone in Tóth’s new milieu reads his project in these terms - as an expression of the transcendence of the horrors of war and the defeat of evil; as an expression of the victory of liberal, enlightenment values over atavism and death. But - at this moment, as I keep saying - only Tóth knows that it is more than an arts venue but also a literal monument to those who died in the camps and a working-through of his own, essentially ineradicable trauma.

The matching floorplans is an extraordinarily vivid idea. Visitors to the Doylestown complex, people who might be there for a concert or a church service - would trace paths that are geometrically identical to - somehow recreating - those taken by inmates across the spaces of the camps: collapsing together the unthinkably hard lives of those detained with the comfortable lives of those visiting the arts centre. Once we know about these rooms the whole building seems to shiver and refigure itself and we look again at all its features, finding more than we did before. The building’s two major voids, we learn, during a tour of the building that László gives, are linked by a deep, concrete-lined tunnel below the original plan’s lowest point. This below-ground addition to the building is explained in the film as a response to a budget cut imposed by the owner’s penny-pinching project manager but, knowing what we do, by the end of the film, we’re obviously required to see more.

This windowless concrete tunnel must recall those cut by camp inmates at Nazi forced labour camps, including one that was linked with Buchenwald, where Tóth was held. Tens of thousands of camp inmates lived, worked and died in tunnels like these, often making munitions. The tunnels, hundreds of miles of them (some of which survive and have been preserved) are a kind of inversion, an unseen mirror for the above-ground infrastructure of the holocaust that we know more about - the barracks and incinerators and railway junctions. Tóth absorbs and transfigures the crude economic impulses of his client - translating a budget cut into beauty and transcendence. But the whole structure of Tóth’s complex is inflected by what we’ve learnt, not just the dark voids below but features like the huge, vertical, swinging concrete panels that recall air vents or baffles and could easily have been features of camp buildings or tunnel complexes - of an industrial extermination.

In the project, tensions rise and there’s a constant to-and-fro about the budget. In the moment, long before the final-scene revelation, we see this as the ordinary contingencies of a project like this; the usual clash of aesthetic and economic. It’s always like this, right? Flighty artist versus grounded client. Idealism versus practicality? But, of course, at the end we learn there’s more. Spooling back to the moment when implacable Tóth tells the boss he won’t tolerate the removal of critical features and that he’ll absorb the cost himself, from his own fee, we see that Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet, knows more than we do. She accepts this drastic cut to their income with resignation but without complaint: she knows exactly which aspects of the project can be sacrificed and which cannot.

Erzsébet, Attila and Zsófia…

It’s in the tense, befuddling, sometimes distressing nature of Tóth’s relationships with those around him, inevitably, that we see the biggest ripple back from what we learn in the epilogue. While watching the movie it was these awkward, incoherent, often starkly-cruel conversations, love scenes, arguments and confrontations - especially those that take place in the airless quorum of Tóth’s closest intimates - that were most frustrating, confusing and enervating for me. But once we know the whole story, once we’ve heard Zsófia’s revelations in the final scene about the trauma she the others endured, we see Tóth’s guarded, spiky, often hostile relationships with assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his American wife (Emma Laird); with clients and work colleagues and, especially, with his own wife Erzsébet for what they are: essentially impossible.

Love and intimacy have been short-circuited by suffering and it’s almost impossible to imagine their reinstatement. In their bed in Philadelphia there’s awkward, sad sex and Erzsébet tells László about the fantasies she had about him while they were apart (she calls them ‘visions’) and it’s almost unbearable. But once we’ve learnt that she was experiencing these visions in Dachau - while trying to survive and to protect her husband’s niece Zsófia from suffering, abuse, murder - we cannot but understand - and her attempt to reassemble their love, in America, while really knowing that to be impossible, is heartbreaking.

There are many other artefacts of the narrative that click darkly into place once we have our new knowledge. Erzsébet blames her osteoporosis, so severe she must use a wheelchair, on ‘the famine’ and, without the knowledge of the truth of her suffering, we assimilate this as an aspect of the generalised suffering of people living through war, but then, of course, we know that hers was not the hunger of a population but the much crueler, more desperate hunger of deliberate starvation. Corbet tells us again, obliquely, something dark and sad and we’re left to work it out.

Likewise, for most of the movie the niece Zsófia is mute. Again, we attribute this vaguely to the trauma of war or of living in hiding or to the cruel interrogation she’s seen to experience right at the beginning of the film. But, once we know she was imprisoned in Dachau, with her uncle’s wife, it becomes obvious and darker; more complicated causes come to mind. What accommodations were made in the camp? What did Erzsébet have to do to secure their survival. What did they go through in that hell? What we know about the holocaust, about the existential wounds suffered by all involved, tells us we can’t rule much out. And our heads are reeling again. Zsófia’s silence becomes a material indicator of suffering, a rational response to cruelty. And likewise, near the end, when Erzsébet susprises us again and confronts Harrison at a fancy dinner in his home, accusing him of raping László - a grim, difficult-to-reconcile act we witnessed earlier in the film, while they were visiting Europe to source marble for the project - it’s not an accusation of a crime any more, it’s a vastly more consequential accusation. In taking on the unimaginable difficulty of confronting the powerful man who has made their life together in America possible, Erzsébet is indicting everyone present - and everyone not present, let’s face it - in the mistreatment of her husband. And her love for László is, at that moment, overwhelmingly present to us.

And all this (and there is much more that I’ve not included) adds up to a heady vertigo of realisation. I’ll admit it took me hours and days to tune in to the dislocating effect of the new knowledge we acquire in the final scene. Corbet’s brilliance here is in this complex, essentially literary device - a time-folding narrative figure that’s novelistic in character. It’s as if he turns the screenplay itself into a kind of unreliable narrator; misleading us, misdirecting us, setting us up until, in a scene that can’t be more than two minutes long, the whole sequence of events is shifted and refigured. I’m still not ready to tell you that I like this film. My frustrations (or are they suspicions?) are still in the foreground for me. I wonder if it’ll be one of those films that I return to with a whole different impression in the future.

---

• Speaking of whole different impressions, next it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey!

• I’m happy to say that I watched The Brutalist’s gorgeous, soft Vistavision on a 70mm transfer in an actual cinema but you can now watch it in bog-standard HD on Amazon Prime and elsewhere.

• Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist and a Polish Jew who lived long enough to both escape the Nazi invasion in 1939 and to bitch about Facebook, says, in Modernity and the Holocaust, that the holocaust was not a regression into barbarism but a product of modernity - of rationalisation, bureaucracy, technical efficiency. I don’t have the wit or the subtlety to find a meaningful connection here, though, between architectural modernism and the slaughter of millions. Is there one?

• An absolute Who’s Who of modernists - including Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson (Johnson would become the postmodernist apostate, of course, but that was later) - worked on the Lincoln Center, New York’s own modernist temple to music and art. In London, the complex along the South bank of the Thames began, quite delicately, with the Royal Festival Hall in 1951 but went full brutalist in later decades with the Hayward Gallery and the National Theatre (in Paris they dodged the whole brutalist thing and wound up with a high-tech oblong of pipes and escalators).

• In 1951, British poet Geoffrey Hill, included the word ‘zyklon’ in a beautiful poem and it was a big moment for the acknowledgment in modern art of the horrors of the holocaust.

• A brutalist, concrete Protestant church was built on the site of Dachau in the 1960s and, in the same period, Marcel Breuer, Tóth’s primary model, built the fabulous St. John's Abbey Church at a university in Minesota.

• Is the Brutalist actually an art movie? An art movie accidentally widely released and given a bunch of Oscars? Art movies are often upsetting and fustrating - with the end of enlightening, educating or otherwise challenging a tuned-in, self-aware audience. I think it might be an art movie.

• I think the correct term for a plot twist or a late revelation of this kind from classical rhetoric is anagnorisis. But don’t quote me.

• These reviews are also on my Letterboxd. I’ve been blogging over here for 25 years. I’m not sure if that’s a recommendation or not.