Sick art for a sick view of America.
In the 1966 essay “Movie Brutalists,” Pauline Kael criticized those filmmakers who rejected established cinema conventions for deliberate crudeness that “make[s] your eyes swim.” It was a response to the ill-informed avant-garde and now reads like a prediction of the grim, coruscating art cinema in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which has been praised as an impressive new standard. Fact is, The Brutalist is one of last year’s ugliest movies — not just in terms of aesthetics but in the moral perversity that is the basis of its acclaim.
Corbet has made a fetish of ambition — the actor-turned-director’s own attempt at grandiloquent filmmaking and the ambition of his protagonist Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a refugee from Nazi oppression. Toth migrates to the United States, where he resumes his career as an architect. Toth’s success comes at the service of evil which Corbet suggests is the basis of Western civilization: Corbet quotes Goethe’s epigram: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
The Brutalist’s first chapter, “The Enigma of Arrival,” presents an upside-down image of the Statue of Liberty — Toth’s view from steerage on his way to Ellis Island in 1947. This foul beginning to Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour attack on American exceptionalism is the first sign of brutalism — not in the style of Scandinavian architecture that became a post–World War II vogue, but through Corbet’s abuse of 70mm composition, a once-grandiose cinema format that he reduces to a boxy aspect ratio with drab, nearly monochrome lighting. This is also the beginning of Corbet’s aberrant artiness, employing the VistaVision trademark to diminish expectations. Call it “Eyes Wide Shut.”
The brutalism of The Brutalist fits millennial, anti-Western decadence. Toth’s journey to fame requires ethnic Jewish self-denial: slighting a cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who has assimilated in Pennsylvania coal country; hiding a heroin addiction (caused by medics on the boat over); venturing in the sexual underground; then his fateful encounter with wicked American tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Toth accepts Van Buren’s commission to design a monument for his dead WASP matriarch — “a place her soul might inhabit.” This necessitates Toth’s own Faustian struggle — manipulating the deal with Van Buren to transport his disabled, wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and an emotionally damaged niece Zsofia (Ariane Labed) who carries on the family’s legacy.
It’s in Chapter 2, “The Hardcore of Beauty 1953–1960,” that Corbet hypes up the mulish artiness. Voice-over narration resembling an industrial documentary makes a hipster’s reduction of Edna Ferber–style sagas (So Big, Giant). This wildly unsteady The-Fountainhead-meets-There-Will-Be-Blood plotting follows the most noxious strain in contemporary cinema.
Corbet’s brutal aesthetics twist and turn between epic spectacle, unclear sex scenes, and violent recriminations. The lack of dramatic clarity is a trendy form of incoherent exhibitionism. Things go badly for Toth, his wife, and Van Buren — from both homosexual and heterosexual rape to suddenly intense class antagonism. (“This whole country is rotten!” screams the invalid wife, apparently forgetting she barely escaped Europe’s gas chambers.) It only makes sense as Corbet’s appeal to decadence. A closer look at the references to architecture and artistic inspiration in Toth’s insistence of erecting American buildings that evoke Nazi concentration camps, specializing in the faithless construction of cathedrals, is not only false to the meaning of the Brutalist design movement, but a sneaky offense to Western Christianity. Corbet’s coup de grace is an epilogue, set at the first architecture biennale in 1980, extolling Toth as a pioneer whose ambition “defines an epoch and transcends all time.” The final shot pans up from inside one of Toth’s prison-like structures to reveal his use of negative space in the design of an inverted cross.
***
The Brutalist is a disappointing follow-up to Corbet’s Vox Lux, which linked the personal and career crisis of an American pop star, Celeste (Natalie Portman), to the 9/11 trauma of her violent, spiritually lost country. (A crucifix shadowed young Celeste’s performance at the memorial for a mass shooting.) Vox Lux appeared to exert a cultural imperative that The Brutalist neglects for repugnant elitism.
Reviewers who dismissed Vox Lux clamor for The Brutalist’s dark view of America’s dysfunction; it shows the political confusion that infects movie culture. Unlike Celeste, and unlike Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, who stood for the artist’s right to individual integrity, Toth’s psychosis derives from a pessimistic view of history. Both Toth’s notoriety and his victimization stem from Corbet’s flirtation with diabolism as the essence of civilization. (Consider Toth’s exploitation of his black shipmate and later toady played by Isaach de Bankolé as a facile anecdote on Western racism.)
Lacking the pop cultural connection of Vox Lux, The Brutalist’s pomposity becomes unrelatable, if not repugnant. The characterizations are absurd in both concept and performance. Brody turns the ethnic entrepreneurship of Cadillac Records, where he played Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records (whom Nivola also played in Who Do You Love?), into a perversion of American achievement while Pearce doesn’t just act the villain but hams it up — a dismal misconception, like Alec Baldwin’s SNL Trump parody.
This is Brutalism as gas-lighting. Corbet’s profile in the New Yorker tried to sweep him into cinema’s Pantheon by interpreting The Brutalist as a post-election anti-Trump allegory. It’s more likely that the film’s ugliness owes to a certain anti-art, hipster portentousness that misunderstands art and distrusts the glorious perception of the world Andrei Konchalovsky gave to even Michelangelo’s lowlife travails in Sin. (It’s a sick jape that his protagonist is named after Lazslo Toth, the psychopath who vandalized Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1966.) Corbet’s avant-garde effects reveal a fondness for Eurotrash nihilism. Much as I admired Vox Lux and his debut The Childhood of a Leader (titled after a Sartre short story), their style indicated a possible philistine route. His background as an actor in such deviant films as Mysterious Skin, Funny Games, and Melancholia surfaces in how The Brutalist evokes an apocalyptic worldview. It’s as if the warped ambition of directors Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier and their trite acolyte Yorgos Lanthimos finally became Corbet’s own. Erzsébet’s cry “This whole country is rotten” states the film’s essence. That upside-down Statue of Liberty image is catnip to nihilists.