TALES OF LOHR: "THE BRUTALIST"

Thoughts on Brady Corbet's large-scale American story; plus, "This Week in Warhol" looks at "The Homosexual in America"

“Oh, it’s intermission already?”

One presumes this is just the sort of reaction you’re hoping for from an audience if you’re the filmmaker behind the first American motion picture to be released with an intermission since the 70mm limited roadshow presentations of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight back in 2015. And it is exactly the reaction I had when the interim point arrived during Brady Corbet’s decades-spanning, expansively intimate drama The Brutalist. Corbet’s third feature film runs, including this 15-minute mid-film break, 215 minutes, a significant expenditure of time, attention, and emotional investment for any audience, particularly the average contemporary viewer used to taking their monumental narratives in more readily digestible hour-long chunks. But I honestly found the passage of these hours unexpectedly easy to navigate, the confrontation with Corbet’s film less demanding on my patience and comfort than either of Martin Scorsese’s recent three-hour-plus (not to mention intermission-less) dramas, 2019’s The Irishman and 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

But I must immediately follow my expression on the manageability of the simple act of viewing The Brutalist with the equally emphatic assertion that this is in no way meant to suggest that Corbet’s film is frivolous, insubstantial, or mere escapism or spectacle. Director / co-producer Corbet and his creative and life partner Mona Fastvold, with whom he penned the film’s original screenplay, have crafted a realistic yet subtly stylized, thematically demanding, emotionally shaved-to-the-nerves story of a Hungarian Jewish architect, displaced by the fallout of the Second World War and the Holocaust, whose quest for personal and creative resurrection in the neo-promised land of America proves to be a journey alternately quixotic and Faustian in its pivot points and brushes with calamity. The film harbors an enormous breadth of material under its umbrella: Not just the war and the Shoah, but modernist architecture, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual assault, interracial friendship, industrialization and its role in the Cold War, family tension, the forging of the state of Israel, toxic masculinity, the fraught nature of the creative mind, the schizophrenic hypocrisy of America’s relationship to its immigrant population, and the poisonous pas de deux of art and commerce. Oh, and it likewise finds time for one of the most complex, honest, and painful stories of marital, romantic, and sexual love I’ve seen in a motion picture in some time. This is a groaning smorgasbord of storytelling demands Corbet and Fastvold have arrayed for themselves, but they manage to do all of these threads diligent service in a 3 1/2 hour film with almost no seemingly extraneous scenes, and to wrap all of this in one of the most convincing and stylistically assured technical productions of 2024. I don’t know if I’m quite on board with the contingent hailing The Brutalist as a new American masterpiece. But I do know that, to quote another essential American tale of assimilation, disappointment, and regret, attention must be paid.

We first come across László Tóth (Adrien Brody), The Brutalist’s titular Bauhaus-trained architect, in 1947, as he is overwhelmed by his first vision of America: A ship-sighted Statue of Liberty canted inexplicably yet tellingly upside down and sideways. Having come to the States without his still-waylaid journalist wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and sole surviving niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), László takes on a humble job and meager lodgings at the Philadelphia furniture store of his fellow-refugee cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), whose own efforts to blend into his new homeland include an Anglicized name and an initially friendly-seeming Catholic wife (Emma Laird). László and Attila are soon hired by idle-rich industrial scion Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to perform a surprise remodel on the library of his filthy-rich father Harrison Sr. (Guy Pearce), but when the old man discovers this unexpected home project and unceremoniously fires the designers, Attila uses this as a pretense to do his wife’s covert bidding and kick László out. Along with his friend and fellow disenfranchisement victim Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), László slides into a life of flophouse living, backbreaking grunt-work wage slavery, and dope dependency, until, much to his surprise, Harrison Van Buren re-enters his life. The millionaire’s new library, now that it has been revealed as the work of the László Tóth, has become the toast of the town, and the plutocrat has a new job for László: The design and construction of a massive, multi-purpose community center dedicated to Harrison’s late mother. And as the carrot on the stick, Harrison’s sympathetic Jewish lawyer (Peter Polycarpou) will grease the wheels to expedite approval of Erzsébet and Zsófia’s immigration. It proves an irresistible proposition, but as the years wear on, and László and Harrison’s lives grow increasingly intertwined, the resultant interpersonal conflagrations threaten to destroy László’s marriage, creative spirit, and quite possibly his very soul.

Some observers might characterize Corbet’s willingness to extend László’s journey over such a generous running time as The Brutalist’s greatest gamble, but this pales in comparison to the screenplay’s frank willingness to present László as a person of prickly, often suffocatingly uncomfortable complexity. László is ushered onto our screens accompanied by heartfelt voice-over from one of Erzsébet’s letters, establishing their bond as a critical component of the impending story. Almost immediately after this, as virtually his first act as a newly arrived American, we see László receiving a painstaking hand job from a placating yet no-nonsense prostitute. It is this way throughout The Brutalist, the better angels of László’s loving, creatively committed nature sharing screen time with rawer, less rationally motivated appetites. He exalts in the potential of his designs as wholly as he sinks into the blessed relief of his latest shot of smack; he weeps over his inability to perform sexually for Erzsébet as sincerely as he absorbs the grainy tumblings of the stag-film porno performers he watches in a drugged haze. His outbursts of rage during the construction of the community center come from an artistically engaged place, even as their intensity threatens to swamp his own role in the project (at a low point, he ends up angrily firing Gordon, his dearest and least critical friend). Even his arguably biggest blunder, attempting to ease the osteoporosis-stricken Erzsébet’s pain with a shot from his own heroin works, comes from an impulse that, if you step back and glean his intentions, makes at least a rough sort of sense. Corbet makes it clear that much of László’s frequently frustrating inconsistency arises from the ineffable traumas he weathered as an inmate of Buchenwald concentration camp, but the filmmaker is also astute enough to neither use this fact as a mere excuse for László’s failings or to simply play a burden-of-genius apologist. He simply gives us László Tóth as a man in full, and allows us to draw our own conclusions about who he is, as a creator and human being. It’s a heavier workload than many American filmmakers are willing to place on their viewers, but it goes a long way towards justifying the rapture with which many critics and awards bodies have thus far greeted The Brutalist.

Much of the credit for László’s power as a character must likewise go to Brody, who expands upon the impact of his Oscar-winning turn in 2002’s The Pianist with an even more nuanced representation of creative brilliance in extremis. Sporting a notably pronounced yet generally convincing Hungarian accent (Harrison at one point asserts that László sounds like he “shines shoes for a wage”), Brody is note-perfect at every turn and twist of László’s fortunes, facing his pain with sensitivity and greeting his triumphs with abashed, heart-rending humility and strength. Brody is well-paired with what is, for my money, career-best work to date from Jones, the performer’s assumed physical frailty (she memorably enters the film at the top of the second part, surprising László by arriving from Europe now in a wheelchair) offset by a personality that combines steel-spined integrity, genuine empathy for her husband’s creative self, and deeply felt erotic hunger that finds sublime, bracingly explicit expression in a long-deferred late-film coupling with Brody. Pearce, in a performance that has brought speculation of a possible first-time Oscar nomination, is all oleaginous ease mingled with moments of authentically thoughtless cruelty, culminating in an encounter with Brody during which his metaphorical purchase on László’s being becomes unexpectedly, stunningly literal. Among the supporting cast, notable standouts include Laird, whose convivial mask shifts so smoothly as to be terrifyingly imperceptible; Alwyn, who exudes to-the-manor-born failson privilege like a fetid musk; Ariane Lebed, striking in the film’s epilogue as the fully matured Zsófia; and Salvatore Sansone, mesmerizing as the master of a Carrara marble quarry where László and Harrison’s relationship reaches its fateful inflection point.

Corbet surrounds these performances with technical components that richly serve the material while frequently flexing aesthetically exploratory muscles. Costume designer Kate Forbes and production designer Judy Becker conjure a rock-solid mid-20th-century landscape, making the film feel fully lived-in and entirely beyond the relative modesty of its reported $10 million budget. These visions are bolstered by the cinematography of Lol Crawley, working in the old-school VistaVision film format, which gives the images just the right touch of grain and grit, a feel further enhanced by his intelligently judged usage of unsettled hand-held camera work. The film also benefits mightily from its more pronounced modernistic qualities, such as the highly stylized title design that bisects the screen at unanticipated, occasionally horizontal angles; Dávid Jancsó’s anxious editing, occasionally evoking abstract city-symphony-style films in its incorporation of hyper-fixated architectural detail; and the brilliant, alternately angular and anthemic musical score by Daniel Blumberg, the Brutalist contributor whose potential Academy Award victory I am most enthusiastically cheering on.

Far too many people, however, will look at a film like The Brutalist, a very long period drama whose main characters are Holocaust survivors, and regard it as a film cynically designed to do nothing but win awards. Indeed, I have seen some critics call out Corbet for the apparently heinous crime of attempting to pre-fabricate a masterpiece. As I earlier stated, I myself am not yet willing to put myself in the “The Brutalist is a masterwork” club. But I’ve seldom stopped thinking about it in the three days since I’ve seen it. I have every intention of viewing it again when I can. And for all of the accolade-friendly attributes of its narrative, performance, and production elements, it is hard to argue that Corbet has not synthesized those qualities into a work that, like László Tóth’s buildings themselves, is likely to endure past the Oscar season, and to be remembered as a work of sincere ambition, bracing contours, and, at moments when you would sometimes least expect it, piercing, powerful illumination.

THIS WEEK IN WARHOL

JANUARY 21, 1966

This is the publication date of a new issue of Time Magazine, one of the preeminent news and commentary organs of America’s Fourth Estate. This issue features an editorial essay that, while it does not mention Andy Warhol by name, nevertheless contains a great deal of relevance to both his personal life and creative output. The article in question, unattributed as are most such general editorial pieces in magazines and newspapers, purports to examine a rising “problem” of contemporary culture: “The Homosexual in America.”

Warhol’s own relationship with his sexuality has been a fraught, not always clearly delineated one. In the 1950s, when he is balancing his commercially minded advertising illustration work with more ambitious fine-art aspirations, the latter is most openly appreciated and explored by representatives of New York’s largely covert but thriving gay community. His work is frequently presented in the gay-owned art and coffeehouse space Serendipity, and early series such as his “Studies for a Boy Book” showcase indisputably homoerotic imagery and themes. Even with all this, and despite a demeanor so openly “swish” it renders even other LGBTQ+ arts figures of the time, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, markedly uncomfortable, Warhol is by necessity never fully “out” in these days. Even as the years pass and his art more explicitly traffics in gay imagery and themes, he maintains a personal veneer of asexual unknowability that at least calls all the gay-favoring material in his paintings and films into some public question. The movies show off just as many nude women’s bodies as men’s; his social rounds are often made in the company of beautiful, sexually alluring women like Viva and Edie Sedgwick. Even as late as 1975, when he is dividing his studio time between his striking studies of transvestites and trans women for Ladies and Gentlemen and the harshly homo-pornographic Sex Parts, his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol still discusses the subject of heterosexual marriage as a very potential possibility for his future (this as he is living, as he has been for four years at this point, with studio assistant / budding interior designer Jed Johnson). Like much else about his past, personal dealings, and public self, Andy Warhol chooses to present his sexuality, to the extent that he is able, as a giant glowing question mark.

“The Homosexual in America” nevertheless casts its gaze upon a world and creative community with which Warhol himself is intimately familiar, and what it finds there is, in its estimation, cause for considerable alarm. The piece notes the growing public awareness of gay individuals and subject matter (Warhol again is never explicitly mentioned, but there is a now bitterly ironic reference to gay-themed humor in the latest Rock Hudson film), and pays some grudging lip service to gay contributions to the creative community. It cites the prevalence of LGBTQ+ creative talent on Broadway, and says that in theater, dance, and music generally, the presence of “deviates” is pervasive to the point of constituting “a closed shop.” The piece grants the undeniable talent of numerous gay creative contributors, while nevertheless asserting that the idea of the tendency within the community towards creative genius is but a myth, instead calling their increasingly assertive presence in American aesthetics and art a “vengeful, derisive counterattack” on “normal” life. In the article’s arguably most pointed attacks on Warholian philosophy, the idea of “pop” is tarred as the reducing “of art to the trivial.”

“The Homosexual in America” goes on to offer a number of spurious speculations on the causes of homosexuality, whether it be a question of genetics or a Freudian-centered “disabling fear of the opposite sex.” The article ponders whether homosexuality is “curable,” noting the to-them shocking reality that many contemporary gay men and women do not want their “condition” to be reversed or removed. The piece works through a number of the religiously focused objections to the LGBTQ+ “lifestyle,” while claiming that, questions of spiritual concern aside, acts of gay sexuality represent “a misuse of the sexual faculty” (while nevertheless finding space to quote pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who avers that “the only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform”). In its final paragraph, the Time editorial team takes off its gloves and renders its verdict: Homosexuality, they say, is “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality,” and that it deserves “no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.”

Warhol, as far as is known, never comments publicly on “The Homosexual in America,” if he indeed ever reads it. But it is a bluntly unsparing representation of the fully celebrated mainstream perspectives against which his work, for all his own ambiguities, pushes against during the time of the article’s appearance and in the two-decades-plus beyond. A few years after the editorial’s publication, in the early summer of 1969, the Stonewall uprising pushes LGBTQ+ America into a new, powerful cultural position, and the attitudes expressed by the Time Magazine piece begin their inexorable descent from mainstream consensus to reactionary, reductive hate speech.