‘The Brutalist’: A Must-See Masterpiece? Or a self-indulgent, exploitative, Hollywood agitprop? by Danusha V. Goska
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-brutalist-a-must-see-masterpiece/
I have never witnessed the avalanche of acclaim for a new release such as I’ve seen for the 2024 film The Brutalist. The Brutalist is the biopic of a fictional character. Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who is commissioned to build a Doylestown, Pennsylvania community center in the Brutalist architectural style. A man of intense artistic dedication and integrity, he overcomes roadblocks, and realizes his dream.
Why is a movie about a Hungarian immigrant in Doylestown, PA advancing like a tornado through a wheat field, toppling critics into adoring prostration? Filmmaker Brady Corbet doesn’t understand. “If something is really radical, people initially don’t like it … people are connecting with The Brutalist … I’m completely confused.”
Below, a review of reaction to the film, a summary of the film, and then my own take on The Brutalist.
The Brutalist is a three-hour-thirty-five-minute long period drama. It was directed by former child actor Brady Corbet and co-written by Corbet and his life partner, Norwegian actress Mona Fastvold. It stars Adrien Brody, who won an Academy Award for his depiction of real-life Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman in the 2002 Roman Polanski masterpiece, The Pianist. The Brutalist has been nominated for dozens of awards. It racked up five wins at the Venice International Film Festival, and Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture – Drama; Best Actor for Adrien Brody; and Best Director for Brady Corbet.
The Brutalist enjoys a 93% positive rating at RottenTomatoes. Fico Cangiano’s review is representational. “Stunning … sweeping … epic. An ambitious exploration of the immigrant experience, the pursuit of the American dream and human behavior. The best film of 2024.” The Atlantic says “An expansive but stark look at the successes and challenges involved in making personal art in a capitalist system.” The Washington Post says, “An irresistible object — Laszlo — meets the immovable forces of American caste, capitalism, aesthetics and exclusion … [these] slowly tighten” their “stranglehold on Laszlo’s dreams.” The San Francisco Chronicle reports, “Adrien Brody is a walking open wound.” American capitalists “attempt to distort his vision for budgetary or bonehead creative reasons. Yes, The Brutalist is a metaphor for ambitious personal filmmaking.” The Standard decrees that there is only one way to react to The Brutalist. “It is impossible not to recognize The Brutalist as anything other than a filmmaking triumph … a brutal parable for all immigrants and artists who struggle to sublimate themselves in the meatgrinder of America.”
What follows is a brief summary of the action of The Brutalist. The Brutalist is a dense film. It throws much information at moviegoers. For example, during a rape scene, the song “You Are My Destiny” plays on the soundtrack. The rapist had previously announced that the meeting of himself and his victim was fate. In another scene, a woman masturbates a man. That scene is said to be an homage to a similar masturbation scene in the film The Master. A scene of people marching up a hillside is an homage to a scene from The Seventh Seal. The approach to Van Buren’s mansion reminded this viewer of the approach to Manderley from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca. As Toth joyously begins working on his project, he is eating an apple. The apple is a reminder of satanic temptation and the fall from Eden. One actress plays two different roles. The character name “Harrison Lee Van Buren” combines the names of two presidents. William Henry Harrison served the shortest term; Martin Van Buren is the only president for whom English was a second language. Lee, of course, is the name of a Confederate general. This brief summary will make no attempt to capture all of The Brutalist’s allusions, homages to other films, or other bells and whistles.
The Brutalist begins with Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), a Hungarian woman, being interrogated. She refuses to respond. The scene ends.
It is 1947. Laszlo Toth is below decks on a ship. He is reading a letter from his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones). She reports that Red Army soldiers are sexually menacing women in Hungary, including Toth’s niece, Zsofia. Erzsebet quotes Goethe “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Hungary was recently liberated from Nazism by the Red Army. Famine followed.
Toth sees the Statue of Liberty upside down. He rejoices. He is processed at Ellis Island. American officials give him money.
Toth visits a brothel. Naked young prostitutes perform sex acts. Toth cannot perform. He is offered boys. He declines.
A midcentury chamber-of-commerce promo film boasts of the greatness of Pennsylvania.
Toth reunites with his cousin, Attila Molnar (Allesandro Nivola). Toth sobs copiously and the men embrace at length and intimately.
Attila’s Philadelphia furniture showroom displays American colonial-style furniture. Attila asks Toth if he is not impressed. Toth responds that the furniture is not beautiful. Attila escorts Toth to a small, windowless storeroom where he will be sleeping. To relieve himself, Attila explains, Toth must go outside, climb a stair, and knock to be allowed into Attila’s apartment. Attila’s blonde, beautiful wife, Audrey (Emma Laird) is a “shiksa.” Toth asks why Attila’s store is “Miller & Sons.” “Your name is Molnar and you have no sons.” Attila says he has assimilated and he now considers himself Catholic, like his wife. A crucifix hangs over their bed.
Attila and Toth refurbish the library of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce); Van Buren objects to their changes and refuses to pay.
Attila kicks Toth out, alleging that Toth made a pass at Audrey.
Toth meets his new best friend, Gordon, a black man (Isaach de Bankole). They shoot heroin.
Someone has seen the library Toth designed for Van Buren. Van Buren comes to understand that Toth is a former Bauhaus architect, and his renovation of the library is actually artistic, something Van Buren was too philistine to recognize. Van Buren invites Toth to live in the guest house at his mansion, and to design a community center in honor of Van Buren’s late mother.
Toth visits a porn theater showing fully nude females performing sex acts.
Van Buren introduces Toth to Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), a Jewish American lawyer. Hoffman promises to pull strings that will bring Erzsebet and Zsofia to the U.S.
Van Buren tells Toth that after he made money, his grandparents, whom he did not like, hit him up. Van Buren gave them a check for $25,000. He neglected to sign it. His only goal was to torment his grandparents.
Van Buren asks Toth why he became an architect. “When the terrible recollections of what happened…cease to humiliate us, I expect [my buildings] to serve as a political stimulus sparking the upheavals that frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.”
Toth suggests that the community center include a swimming pool. “I can’t swim,” Van Buren replies. Toth is told that he must include a Christian chapel. Toth adds a feature that, when the sun hits it, will project sunlight in the shape of a cross into the chapel.
Erzsebet and Zsofia arrive. Zsofia is mute. Erzsebet is in a wheelchair. She has not told Toth that she suffers from osteoporosis, caused by the post-war famine in Hungary.
The Toth family eats dinner with Van Buren. Erzsebet says that she studied at Oxford and was a journalist. “Maybe you can teach your husband to speak so that he doesn’t sound like he shines shoes for a wage,” Van Buren says, throwing a penny at Toth.
Toth and Erzsebet are in bed at night in the guest house. Paint is peeling; it is shabbier than the mansion. Erzsebet encourages Toth to make love. Toth is afraid to touch Erzsebet, because of her osteoporosis. She masturbates him.
Van Buren helps Erzsebet find journalism work. He also hires consultants to supervise spending on Toth’s project. Toth is outraged. He tells one consultant, Simpson, that he is personally responsible for everything that is stupid, cruel, and ugly. But, Simpson is a Protestant, and a Protestant consultant will quell local antisemitism.
At a picnic, Zsofia, in a bathing suit, is alone by a pond. Harry, Van Buren’s cocky, privileged, xenophobic son (Joe Alwyn, excellent in this role), possibly rapes Zsofia. The camera cuts away. Erzsebet, who had been Zsofia’s zealous protector, is charmed by funny anecdotes from Van Buren’s daughter, Maggie. Thus distracted, Erzsebet does not protect Zsofia.
A train transporting construction materials has an accident. Van Buren cancels the project.
It is 1958. Hoffman travels to New York City where he tells Toth, now working at a large architectural firm, that the project is back on. Zsofia, who had previously been mute, now speaks. She is making Aliyah to Israel.
Van Buren and Toth travel to Carrara, Italy’s marble quarry. After they select their marble, Van Buren anally rapes Toth. Toth never reacts.
Erzsebet writes to Zsofia that Toth has changed. He has closed himself off to others. He no longer attends synagogue.
At the construction site, Toth yells at workers. He is even rude to Gordon, his black friend. “They don’t want us here. We are nothing,” Toth tells Erzsebet. Erzsebet cries out in pain. Toth injects her with heroin, then injects himself. They enjoy ecstatic sex. Erzsebet appears to die. Toth transports her to a hospital. She says she saw God while dead. She now knows that America is “rotten.”
Erzsebet has been in a wheelchair for the entire movie, but suddenly she is seen walking with the aid of a walker. She walks into Van Buren’s mansion. “You raped my husband!” she calls out. Van Buren runs away. Harry panics. Harry’s panic suggests to some viewers that he, too, was probably sexually abused by his father (see here). A search crew fans out. Van Buren’s ultimate fate is not depicted, but many viewers believe he committed suicide in the building he commissioned. The chapel cross is upside down.
The 1980 Venice Biennale. At a retrospective of his many successful projects, Toth is silent, aged, in a wheelchair. Zsofia, in a speech honoring her uncle, reveals that his community center was built as an imitation of Buchenwald, the concentration camp he survived, and Dachau, where Erzsebet was imprisoned. Zsofia speaks of the importance of Israel as a homeland for Jews.
As The Brutalist ended, I immediately thought, “I’ve been in this theater for four hours. I have squandered the meager allotment of sunlight a winter day begrudges. I’m in a shopping mall plunked like a meatball in the spaghetti maelstrom of four intertwining highways and I hope I can find my way back to Paterson before the witching hour, which, this time of year, is 4:30 p.m.” My own reaction shocked me. After watching a movie depicting immigration, rape, addiction, and a suffering artist, I expected to feel something about the film. I did not.
The opening scene moved me. After World War II, my aunt in Slovakia was gang raped by Red Army soldiers. Erzsebet’s letter referencing the Red Army’s abuse of millions of women had me fully invested in The Brutalist.
I began to disinvest just minutes later. In the brothel scene, three young, beautiful actresses were fully naked onscreen for no reason that advanced any plot or character development. There are three more scenes with full nudity of multiple young, attractive women. Corbet, like every other Hollywood pimp, was exploiting women to sell his work.
Every male part in The Brutalist, except for Van Buren’s son, is played by an actor over 50. The oldest is 76. Every female onscreen is conventionally pretty and forty or younger. Nivola is cast with a wife half his age. Zsofia is played, in 1947, by a 23 year old. Thirty-three years later, that character would be 56. She’s played by a forty year old.
Other than Adrien Brody there are no Eastern Europeans, and, I don’t think, any Jews in the cast. There are three Jewish characters. All are married to non-Jews. In the US in the 1950s, Jewish intermarriage rates were at seven percent. I didn’t believe Attila’s furniture showroom. It was sparse. Back in those days, especially in high-rent urban areas, stores were chock-a-block with merchandise and customers; check out these archival photos.
I didn’t believe Toth’s tidy, multisyllable, Marxist minifesto about art as a “political stimulus” to “spark upheavals” among the “peoplehood.” Toth is a recent immigrant with limited English. While Toth’s mouth was moving, I heard the voice of filmmaker Corbet.
No one mentioned music or food. I have never spent time with Holocaust survivors, with Eastern European immigrants from that generation, or with Hungarians at all, where food and music did not play a big role. I’m not just thinking about family reunions where relatives would walk in the door, catch the eye of a fellow immigrant, and immediately start singing a Slovak folksong. I’m thinking about Al Jolson, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, and of course Aaron Lebedeff, whose “Roumania, Roumania” was a hit record among American Jews in the 1940s. Check it out here – or some kids keeping his legacy alive in 2020 here.
In a tense and sweaty scene, a drunken Attila, Laszlo, and Audrey dance together in a way that threatens to become a menage-a-trois. I thought to myself, “This wouldn’t happen. There would be children and old people present and their presence would alter the atmosphere. It was the Baby Boom and everyone was having kids. We hadn’t started sending old people to nursing homes yet. Everyone was at least publicly religious then and someone would have nipped the sexual tension in the bud. A screaming match? Of course. A fistfight? Sure. A threesome? Nah.”
Even if Attila’s elders had died under Nazism, he would have connected with his landsleit – his countrymen. There is a cemetery in Paterson, N.J., for Jews from Lodz, Poland. Jewish immigrants from the same background found each other in American cities. Jews from Hungarian backgrounds would have attended the party celebrating Laszlo’s arrival.
“Where is the Joint?” I wondered. Jewish Holocaust refugees in the U.S., Europe, and Israel were aided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a massive, decades-old, multimillion dollar operation. Why did Corbet erase the Joint’s omnipresence from his fictional biopic? Corbet falsified history to make Toth isolated, powerless, and pathetic, because an isolated, powerless, and pathetic Toth served Corbet’s agenda. Middle class Americans today often live isolated lives – see this important article. But Toth’s isolation in The Brutalist’s early scenes makes no sense in post-Holocaust Jewish Philadelphia-area America.
Justin Davidson, New York Magazine’s architecture critic, points to other inaccuracies. Toth was a Bauhaus-trained architect.
“Bauhaus alumni did not arrive in America after World War II emaciated, indigent, and alone … they decamped en masse in the 1930s … they reshaped British architecture … they installed themselves at Harvard (Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer), Yale (Josef Albers), the Illinois Institute of Technology (Mies van der Rohe and Konrad Wachsmann), and won over a large swath of the educational, civic, and corporate Establishments … a hyper-talented Hungarian … would have found himself with tenure and a commission for a government building, not a subsistence-level job shoveling coal.”
About that coal job. Two of my immigrant grandfathers and also my father, as a child, mined coal in Pennsylvania. Corbet depicts Toth working high steel. High steel and coal mining are two different jobs. Corbet makes Toth a heroin addict. Heroin addicts would not survive long on high steel. Later, of course, Toth is a chief architect, eventually an old man with an impressive career behind him, and a heroin addict. Possible? Maybe. Plausible? No. It’s beyond implausible that Toth and his wife would experience the heights of lovemaking while high on enough heroin to send her to the hereafter. Heroin is a libido suppressant and it commonly causes men to lose the ability to have an erection.
Corbet positions Toth atop a picturesque mountain of coal. Toth is alone with a shovel. He is randomly plunging the shovel into the coal hill. That ludicrous image made me want to throw tomatoes at the screen. Why not just depict a chef making hamburgers by tossing them into an open fire? Corbet wants to champion the immigrant worker but he can’t be bothered to expose himself to what immigrant workers actually do, and how that work would look on camera.
A new Jewish arrival’s best friend, in 1947 Philadelphia, is a poor black man with a thick African accent? No. Isaach de Bankole is from Cote D’Ivoire. De Bankole is an independent cinema darling and the former husband of jazz singer Cassandra Wilson. He has a heavy accent. He’s playing a black American in 1947 Philadelphia, a man unlikely to have an African accent. Verisimilitude did not matter to the filmmaker here; what mattered was certifying Toth’s virtue by assigning him a black best friend. Van Buren refers to Gordon as a “Negro.” That certifies Van Buren as a racist. This is paint-by-numbers character creation. What would be less racist? Casting a black American actor as a black American character. And, give that black American actor something non-stereotypical to do. All Gordon does is supply Toth with heroin.
Similarly simplistic. Corbet cooks up beautiful blonde Audrey, the unlikely Catholic woman who married a Jew but who hates Jews. Corbet tosses in the Potiphar’s wife story. This folk tale is over two thousand years old. A powerful woman sabotages a defenseless wayfarer by telling her husband that the man he trusts violated her. As soon as we saw that Attila’s unlikely universe consisted solely of Toth, Attila, and Audrey, we knew she’d play the Potiphar’s wife card and falsely accuse Toth.
I didn’t believe the rape scene. I didn’t believe it of the character, Van Buren, and I didn’t believe it mechanically – think of the physical force and performance level required of an elderly man, older, shorter, and slighter than Toth, and of the necessity for lubrication. I didn’t believe that Toth would respond to being raped with eternal silence and passivity. During the rape scene, Toth and Van Buren were in a dangerous quarry. If Toth wasn’t ready to toss Van Buren off a precipitous drop, he would have at least confronted him and punched him out.
I didn’t believe the Zsofia implied rape scene. There is no other scene in the film where characters, especially dour Erzsebet, are shown laughing at length. But suddenly Maggie and Van Buren yuck it up long enough to distract Erzsebet from protecting fragile Zsofia, just long enough for Harry to rape her? Nah. Before I met my Slovak aunt who had been violated by Red Army soldiers, my mother coached me. “Don’t talk loud. Don’t mention anything that might trigger her. Let her initiate contact.” This was almost thirty years after the assault. I simply don’t believe that a few years after Zsofia’s victimization, protective Erzsebet would allow the younger woman to be alone in a wooded area long enough for a cocky, bigoted man who had already sexually threatened Zsofia to rape her.
A previously lame Erzsebet walks up to Van Buren’s mansion and shouts out that Van Buren raped her husband. This scene was not so much out of a daytime soap opera as it was out of a parody of a daytime soap opera. The film has established that Erzsebet can’t walk. The film has established that she is an Oxford-trained journalist with powerful connections. She’d publish, not confront on the enemy’s turf where she would be vulnerable and he would have the upper hand.
The film opening with an upside down Statue of Liberty and ending with an upside down cross is high-school level commentary. The clumsy coda where an unnaturally young Zsofia makes the case for Israel was incoherent. Is Corbet a Zionist? Not? I don’t know, and internet commentary reveals that other viewers are equally confused.
My friend John Guzlowski is the author of Third Winter of War: Buchenwald. John’s Polish father was a prisoner in Buchenwald; John’s mother was forced into slave labor by Nazis. John was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and came to America as a child. I asked John if any Buchenwald survivor would sacrifice money, dignity, and years of his life to recreating the site of his imprisonment in a giant American structure. John refused to respond and ended the conversation quickly. I take that not just as a “No,” but also as a “Why the hell did you ask me that?” So no. I don’t believe that any concentration camp survivor would endure what Toth endured to recreate on a massive scale the site of his daily gruesome torment. And I don’t believe that any committee would approve a concentration camp’s dimensions, visible in blueprints and pre-construction models, for a community center.
I enjoyed isolated elements of The Brutalist. I remained invested in the film’s soundtrack and dense sound design long after I gave up on the narrative. Guy Pearce has never let me down. In 1994’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert he was a “cock in a frock on a rock;” he played a drag performer in the Australian outback. In 1997’s L. A. Confidential he was equally convincing as a hyper-hetero, straight-arrow cop.
In 2002, Pearce was Fernand Mondego in The Count of Monte Cristo. Mondego was very like Van Buren; he is the villain to Jim Caviezel’s martyr figure Edmond Dantes. Dantes is very like Toth; both are high-minded but helpless and hapless. In Monte Cristo, though, Caviezel’s Edmund Dantes descends from his cross, learns to duel, and stabs Mondego to death. And the audience cheers. Melodramatic villains like Mondego exist so we can watch pure-hearted heroes like Dantes impale them. There is no such catharsis in The Brutalist. Van Buren never even learns that his beloved monument is actually a concentration camp.
Pearce’s Mondego and his Van Buren are both old-school, mustache-twirling villains. They are Snidely Whiplash types. I love Adrien Brody. In The Brutalist, though, I got bored looking at Brody. He’s in almost every scene, and he’s always weepy / intense / tragic / and blindly walking right into whirling blades. The Brutalist does not position me, the filmgoer, to respect a character who lacks agency and common sense, and who denies me the satisfaction of seeing Van Buren, metaphorically, impaled. At least Van Buren exercised agency; Toth can’t even leave the table and walk away when his host publicly humiliates him for being Jewish. A movie that makes the villain more entertaining to watch – even though that villain eventually metaphorically impales the adorable Adrien Brody – is a big fail for me.
I appreciated how Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn sounded like they’d stepped out of a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama. Movie actors talked differently in those films. Vowels were rounded, each word was discernable, and sentences were so grammatically correct you could diagram them. The problem is, while watching a movie, if you start thinking about Douglas Sirk, or Ingmar Bergman, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lean, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Andrei Tarkovsky. or any of the other directors whose work is compared to The Brutalist, you have lost the “willing suspension of disbelief” necessary for immersion in the plot, and an emotional reaction to the characters.
The question remains. Why are viewers gaga over a movie that purports to be about Jews, about immigrants, about midcentury Doylestown Pennsylvania, but isn’t really about any of those topics?
Brady Corbet’s worldview and biography offer insight. Corbet says he was a film fan in the womb. His grandfather gifted him with a VHS of Citizen Kane when he was in first grade; he was obsessed with Turner Classic Movies. He was a child actor and had an agent at age seven. He dropped out of high school. He’s been in show business his entire conscious life. He has never, say, mined coal.
He acknowledges that The Brutalist is a metaphor about his own life as a filmmaker. While promoting his film, Corbet has repeatedly emphasized the grueling, life-destroying labor he performs as a filmmaker. It makes me fat and bald, he says. It cuts me off from my family. When Toth dicks around with coal in The Brutalist, that’s really Corbet, doing hard, hard work.
Corbet says that his movie is about “Every sadist I’ve ever worked with.” He also says it’s about Trump, xenophobia, and Nazism. Corbet says that Trump wanted to make federal buildings beautiful again; this desire, Corbet says, is comparable to the work Albert Speer performed for Hitler. Trump falls “right in line with neo-fascist strongmen” and xenophobes who “reject anything that is unfamiliar to them.” Corbet can think what he wants about Trump, but invoking Trump to sell – and to justify – his movie strikes this viewer as easy, cheap, and inept.
Why did Corbet choose an architect as his cinematic representative? Because Corbet’s uncle is an architect and Fastvold’s grandfather was also one. “We are all immigrants,” Corbet insists. He named one chapter of his movie, “The Enigma of Arrival.” That title is taken from a novel by V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul was a Trinidadian of Indian descent. He had little in common with Ashkenazi immigrants to Pennsylvania. Corbet might have read Thomas Bell’s Out of this Furnace, about immigrant laborers in Pennsylvania, or post-Holocaust Jewish immigrant authors like Eva Hoffman and Ruth Gruener. He almost certainly didn’t, because honoring the real experiences of real people was not his agenda. We are not all immigrants, any more than we are all child actors.
That Corbet is really making a movie about himself, not about Hungarians or immigrants or Holocaust survivors, is emphasized in the song that plays over the closing credits. “One for You; One for Me,” is a 1978 Italian disco hit. Corbet says that successful people advised him to manage his career by making “One for you and one for me,” that is a box office hit followed by an “artistic” passion project. As a martyr to art, he decided that in his career, he would make only artistic films for himself, and not for the market. The idea that a film can be artistically worthy and also commercial seems foreign to him, as does the idea that artists can be wrong and their work can benefit from expert input. These truths epitomize the leftist elitists’ dilemma. The leftist elite speaks for the “peoplehood.” But it’s the people, the ticket buyers, who determine commercial success.
Corbet says, “It’s easier to imagine life after death than life after capitalism … whenever you look under the hood of the car, you always find capitalism … if you follow the money, it generally doesn’t come from a great place.” The Brutalist is “about a character who flees fascism only to encounter capitalism,” Corbet says. “I’m constantly searching for another solution [to capitalism]. All of my films are about this. So far I don’t think we’ve found one and I find that really, really unsettling.”
The Brutalist’s fans are gaga for the grandeur of the Carrara marble quarry scenes. I, too, found those scenes arresting and the sound design of the scenes equally exceptional. I would gladly rewatch those scenes if I could do so without rewatching the movie. Instead, I’ll just watch Il Capo, a documentary about Carrara. Corbet, who shot these scenes, does not assess them as gorgeous as his audience does. Carrara marble, he mourns, “lines our kitchens and bathrooms and yet it is a material that in five hundred years will be gone. That’ll be it and those gorgeous mountains will be like Swiss cheese … We’ve taken a bite out of Mother Nature and she’s extremely pissed off. There’s constant rock slides and people are constantly getting crushed by these stones and cutting their hands off and stuff in the process of extracting this material.”
Corbet is a critic of Christianity as he is of capitalism. Being a Christian is “dreadful, morbid.” Christianity is “the first sort of fanaticism or fandom.” Teaching children about God sets them up to become fans of celebrities, he says, because “we are taught that there’s always something or someone bigger and better than us. I think it’s really unhealthy.” He bases his understanding of Christianity on his career as a child actor, because he was always “surrounded by a lot of celebrities.”
Given Corbet’s view of Christianity, one can better understand why he named his fictional hero “Laszlo Toth.” Laszlo Toth was a Hungarian-born geologist who hammered Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1972 while shouting “I am Jesus Christ!” Toth did serious damage to one of the most famous and beautiful works of art in the world. Given Corbet’s jaded view of Christianity, one can see why he closes his film with an upside cross in a reconstruction of a Nazi concentration camp on American soil. Michelangelo sculpted the Pieta of Carrara marble, which Corbet assesses as a crime against Mother Nature.
Corbet doesn’t seem to be a fan of Judaism, either. He told Brody to look “bored” in synagogue scenes. Corbet’s comments about religion may explain why his Jewish character devotes his life to building a concentration camp in America. Corbet’s Toth could have built an affirmation of Judaism: Genesis 12: 1-3, or the contributions of the Ten Commandments to world legal codes, or a salute to Jewish contributions to secular culture. Instead, he recapitulates a non-Jewish machine of Jewish genocide.
Corbet has been praised for choosing to work with the director Michael Haneke. Haneke says, “Capitalism best brings out the negative characteristics of humanity … the problem that we’re all facing today, that of immigration … our forefathers and their predecessors were to blame for that situation … Colonialism … brought about those waves of migration … The bourgeoisie has … a very short memory when it comes to our own faults and failings.” Under Haneke’s direction, Brady Corbet starred in Funny Games, a 2007 “art house torture porn” film that depicts Corbet and his co-star Michael Pitt torturing Americans to death. Michael Pitt was arrested in 2022 for irrational attacks and outbursts.
When researching my book Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, I interviewed dozens of immigrants, and children and grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Some were Jewish, some were not Jewish. Some were children of recent immigrants. Some were children of concentration camp survivors. Some were of peasant stock; some descended from urban intelligentsia. Some escaped czars, Nazis, and Soviet tanks. Some immigrants worked steel, others coal, others sweatshops and peddlers’ carts. As diverse as these stories were, there were a couple of themes I heard again and again, from all demographics.
If I asked my informants if they or their ancestors faced prejudice or even danger in America, they’d usually shrug and say, “No, not really.” I developed a way around this denial or amnesia. I would ask, “Did anything ever happen that made you go” – and then I would cringe. That body movement was like a can opener.
A Slovak immigrant in Pennsylvania was the valedictorian of her high school class, but she was not allowed to be so named publicly. They named a lower achieving native-born American with a WASP last name. A Jewish boy’s friends would toss pennies at him. A highly placed lawyer, even after her divorce, kept her WASP husband’s last name because she recognized her own Polish last name as a professional liability. Catholic and Jewish informants reported KKK threats. When I finally sat my parents down and interviewed them, they shared nightmares, including the racist lynching of an immigrant family member.
The second shared feature was this. My father, who went through hell in America, insisted, as did many others, “America is the greatest country in the world. In Poland we had nothing.” “Oh,” Jewish informants insisted. “We are lucky. That abusive teacher, those bullying street thugs, nothing. We have it made in America!”
The Brutalist isn’t about Holocaust survival or Eastern European immigrants. It isn’t about Doylestown. The Brutalist makes no attempt to honor its history and character. Doylestown was largely a quaint home to Americans of Protestant, Northwestern European ancestry; in 1953 it became the site of a massive shrine for Polish Catholics. That’s a headline event in American immigration history. In 1892 and again in 1897, largely Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian strikers were shot dead in Lattimer and then Homestead, Pennsylvania. There had been anti-Catholic riots in nearby Philadelphia in 1844. A thousand troops were called in, Catholic churches burned, and hundreds were killed or wounded. Contemplate that immigration trajectory: from “Bohunk” “Papists” who could be beaten and killed with impunity to powerbrokers able to, at the Doylestown Czestochowa Shrine, devote 170 acres to the very faith and a culture that got them killed a few short generations previously.
Not a few Hungarian Jews also achieved the American Dream. The Pulitzer Prize is named for Joseph Pulitzer (1847 – 1911), a Hungarian-born immigrant who became a powerful publisher and congressman. Another success story – Sylvia Plachy, Hungarian daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor mother, became a successful photographer in the U.S. after escaping the doomed, anti-Soviet revolution of 1956. Plachy is Adrien Brody’s mother.
Reviewers say that the outlandish rapes in The Brutalist are symbolic of how America rapes immigrants. They say that Toth’s heroin addiction is a symbol of how America poisons immigrants. The upside down Statue of Liberty is a symbol for how the American Dream is a big lie.
Brady Corbet isn’t mocking America in The Brutalist. He’s mocking immigrants. The American Dream is not an abstraction. It’s my immigrant mother working two jobs in one day, as a cleaning woman and a factory hand, so that her six kids who often go without meals can get a private, Catholic school education. Corbet’s mocking my father, who carried rich men’s bags in a country club, but who could read and who had leisure time to read. My grandparents, from czarist controlled, semi-feudal Polish villages could not read. Corbet’s mocking my informants, who survived and thrived, who focused on achievement rather than self-pity and revenge, who made a place, however humble or grand, for themselves in America.
I love movies because they make me feel. I was surprised when, at the end of The Brutalist, I felt nothing. In interviews, Corbet says he is more interested in important themes than human stories. He doesn’t start with character. He starts with an idea and creates a character he can manipulate to convey his idea. “I never bothered trying to find the heart and soul of a character in a film. That feels mushy to me.” Corbet’s refusal to acknowledge the full humanity of immigrants is evident in the clumsy, glitchy, implausibilities in his work. That’s why his characters felt hollow, implausible, and poorly motivated to me. They aren’t flesh and blood; they are marionettes manipulated by Corbet to make Corbet’s points. Toth is passive not because a driven, brilliant architect convinced of his own genius would be passive; not because a Buchenwald survivor gritty enough to travel to America alone would be passive. Toth is passive because Corbet needs him to be passive to render Toth’s opponent, racist, evil America, more villainous. Erzsebet suddenly laughs and becomes care free not because that is true to her character, but because that allows a rich WASP a chance to rape a tragic immigrant. A concentration camp survivor sacrifices money, happiness, and his own body to create a massive reconstruction of a concentration camp on American soil, not because any sane survivor would do that, but because Corbet wants to say that America equals Nazi Germany.
The Brutalist has been compared to many films; it reminds me of Andrzej Wajda’s 1977 masterpiece, Man of Marble. In that film, Soviet propagandists exploit a Polish bricklayer, appropriating his image and his life story, to sell the Communist takeover of Poland. The real man behind the propaganda poster does not matter.
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
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