REVIEW:
The Brutalist
This review may contain spoilers.
The Brutalist has been sold as an American epic, and is easily mistaken for one due to its runtime and built-in intermission. it’s a much smaller story than that. yes, it’s an immigrants’ fable about how America chews up its lured prey to suck them dry and spit them out. it’s certainly also many other things, including the silent evil lurking just beneath the surface of the nuclear family and—despite what a lot of people say—a more stinging criticism of the Zionist project than most American films from the past two decades. but Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold seem less focused on making grand proclamations, instead honing in on Adrien Brody’s László Tóth as a faltering man but passionate visionary. it’s partially a misstep, treading mostly familiar waters of a man against his vices, the tides, and his own ambition.
instead, what truly gets interesting is latter half of the film, plumbing the deepest undercurrents of American success, Jewish guilt, and practical love. Corbet doesn’t hold back in making sure the Van Buren family’s unraveling feels truly perverse. a scene of László easing Erszébet’s flaring pain is both phenomenally sensual and deeply crushing. but as aforementioned, the film’s anti-Zionist bent is the least obvious and developed idea—and therefore the most interesting.
for nearly the last half hour of the movie, László disappears from view and has his story told for him. it’s Erszébet who confronts Harrison in the end (unfortunately not as harrowing as it could be due to an uneven performance from Felicity Jones); it’s Zsófia who explains his work to a broader audience, and ultimately us, at the opening of a retrospective for László’s career. with the epilogue introduced by a gaudy dance remix of Daniel Blumberg’s theme, transitioning from the darkness of the unfinished Van Buren Center as if the sun came up on, say, a rave near a militarized border of apartheid, Zsófia finally contextualizes the artistic choices László spent much of the film vigorously defending. he’s modeled the rooms of the Center after the prisons he and his family were tortured in by the Nazis. she then, of course, connects the story of this man overcoming all odds to create distinctly Jewish, monumental works to their lifestyle in Jerusalem, ending with the acerbic parable: “it is the destination, not the journey.” it is an absolution of all the sins they’ve committed in participating in the Zionist project; it is a hypocritical erasure of the devastation the Holocaust has wrought upon them. well, at the end of the day, it’s really a dismissive wave away of the genuine exploitation they endured from the paragons of American greed and wrath in order to even begin telling their story of survival.
these themes are blink-and-you’ll-miss it, and is perhaps why there’s so much debate on whether the film is pro-Zionist or not. as nebulous as it is and burdened with decades of emotional context, the epilogue makes clear a criticism of using the Israeli state as the last gasp of retribution.
with such a strong ending, it’s unfortunate that László’s arc as an artist is so flat overall. the end credits song, which blares the lines “one for you, one for me”, is perfectly in line with TÁR as a cheeky but scathing punchline against its own protagonist.