The Free Press
Before October 7, 2023, The Brutalist would have been one of those very smart, very subtle, beautifully made movies that have had approximately zero impact on the wider world.
As it turns out, the three-hour-and-35-minute film—which stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a talented yet utterly depleted Hungarian Jewish architect who has just arrived in America in the year 1947—is hugely consequential.
It is not just that The Brutalist, which premiered in September 2024, is expected to snap up Best Picture at Sunday’s Oscars, and that Brody is up for Best Actor, and that, with a paltry $10 million budget, it reeled in more than $36 million at the box office.
It’s that The Brutalist dares to ask a question that would have been unfathomable to most American Jews before Hamas attacked Israel and, more importantly, before that attack was met with exuberance by much of progressive America.
The question is: Do American Jews belong in America? Or have we deluded ourselves into believing that this is our home? Viewed through the prism of right now, the story of László Tóth, which mostly takes place in the 1940s and 1950s, is remarkably—painfully—prescient.
As is the case with many (most?) great Eastern European characters, the most important things in Tóth’s life have already happened to him. By the time we encounter him, he has already studied at the famous Bauhaus art school and emerged from the embers of the Holocaust. Like Milan Kundera’s Tomáš, Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and Roman Polanski’s Władysław Szpilman—the protagonist of The Pianist, also played by Brody—Tóth seems to carry a Sisyphean yoke around his shoulders, trudging through the mists of Europe, across the Atlantic, all the way to the New World.
It is in Pennsylvania that he meets Harrison Van Buren (played by the classically handsome Guy Pearce)—an archetype of the mid-century American industrialist.
Hyper-ambitious, hyper-confident, exuding that mainline-Protestant crispness and dapperness that defined the American aesthetic in the early decades of the Cold War, Van Buren is the bulldozer bulldozing the frontier, manipulating his many subordinates with the usual mix of charm, guile, and manly arm-twisting.
That includes, apparently, László Tóth—cerebral, wandering, broken, with a badly damaged nose, a “broken face,” as Tóth puts it. He appears the perfect, concave-mirror reflection of Harrison Van Buren.
Van Buren, recognizing Tóth’s ability, asks him to design a community center on his estate, meant to be an ode to Van Buren’s late mother. Tóth agrees, almost reluctantly, moving into Van Buren’s guest house. Eventually, Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones), and his niece, Zsófia (played by Raffey Cassidy), make their way to America and move in with Tóth, and soon he comes to suspect, like Erzsébet, what we all suspect: That this is a bad idea wrapped in a fantastic opportunity.
There is an arc to this sort of story, that of the outsider brought in from the cold by the charismatic insider. We are meant to be wowed by Van Buren—his money, his swagger—before discovering, gradually, that he’s a fiend and a hypocrite, a symbol of a soulless America that its many skyscrapers and church steeples cannot conceal. It’s unclear, at moments, whether “the brutalist” in The Brutalist is the architect or his American patron, with his big, overpowering, and “brutal” vision of the world.
We expect that Tóth will design the greatest community center in the history of community centers—he does, and when it’s finished, it includes a chapel and a floating, illuminated cross—and we expect that, despite all this, Van Buren will ultimately spit Tóth out into the cold from which he came, and we will be left a little more cynical. A lesser movie would do this.
Instead, we are permitted to travel down this avenue—through Tóth’s many upheavals and consternations, his anguish, his fear, his isolation, through the rage and even violence. We can feel the proverbial walls pressing in on him. We are encouraged to believe we know how this is going to end.
And always, always dangling in front of Tóth is an escape hatch, a way out of his looming destruction—the deal of the century, as Donald Trump might say: Jettison your former self, your old ways; play nice, smile, and you shall be granted a bland, bourgeois, “happy,” one-dimensional life like the one enjoyed by Tóth’s cousin, Attila, a furniture salesman who has changed his surname and sleeps beneath a crucifix with his Catholic wife in Philadelphia. Stop with the existential dread, the artistic obsessing over how high or low this bar or wall or ceiling should be—assimilate to the ways of America—and America will love you back.
But that is not the way things unfold. It is not America that bends László Tóth to its will, but Tóth who refuses to be bent, cast aside, forgotten.
It is only at the very end of The Brutalist, in 1980, that we learn that the community center Tóth designed for Van Buren so many years before is modeled after the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Tóth spent much of the war. The memorial to the industrialist’s mother serves as a clandestine memorial to the millions of Jews who perished in the crematorium, and reminds us that, in America, Jewishness, as Van Buren’s son suggests, is merely “tolerated.”
Of course, Tóth doesn’t want to be tolerated. He wants to achieve himself, and, as he contemplates letting go of America—and sailing for the new world of Israel—he forces the question that so many American Jews have been asking themselves, if only behind closed doors, for the past year and a half: Do we really belong here?
On Sunday night, it’s the biggest party of the year in Hollywood: the 97th Academy Awards. In the last couple of months, we’ve sent several Free Pressers to the movies, to report back on Best Picture nominees. Michael Moynihan thought “A Complete Unknown,” the much-hyped Bob Dylan biopic, “misses a major point.” Paula Froelich wrote that “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore, perfectly captures the horror of being a woman who ages in the spotlight. Finally, River Page took one look at “Émilia Perez”—“a musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord and her underappreciated girlboss defense attorney”—and called it out for being “Oscar bait.”
