The Brutalist Pairs Modern Architecture and Postwar Trauma

After splurging the overdue payment on drinks and drugs at a jazz club with Gordon, Tóth takes the black car Van Buren has sent for him back to the estate, where he meets the rest of the family, including Harry’s twin sister, Maggie Lee (Stacy Martin), and Van Buren’s Jewish lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), who promises to help Tóth’s wife, Erzsébeth (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy and, later, Ariane Labed), to secure visas to emigrate via the Displaced Persons Act. What luck! Before the party comes to an end, Van Buren leads his guests to the top of a hill, where he publicizes ground breaking of a “community center” on this very site, to be designed by none other than Tóth. Doylestown is not a “cultural” place, he admits; for this reason, “money is no object,” but the “specific and meaningful” purpose is to serve a Christian congregation in apparent need of an auditorium, gymnasium (with a swimming pool), library, and chapel all in one. “It’s ambitious,” Van Buren concedes. “My father would like that.” Impressed by the ability of Tóth’s creations to withstand a war (Harry says his scale models “look like a barracks”), Van Buren enlists the architect to join him on a protracted ego trip in the hope that its fruition will immortalize them both, as if to refute F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives.”

Approval of the $850,000 project concludes the initial half of the film, which is interrupted by a built-in, 15-minute intermission (again, with the countdown), and a second act. Tóth is reunited with his wife and niece, though Erzsébeth is in a wheelchair (famine-induced osteoporosis) and Zsófia is a mute but stunning young woman, no longer a small girl. As husband and wife attempt an awkward reconciliation, the Tóths and Van Burens grow uncomfortably close; a veteran journalist, Erzsébeth gets a newspaper job in New York, while Tóth is left to fight penny-pinching engineers and consultants over the height of the ceiling. A train transporting materials derails, sending laborers to the hospital and convincing Van Buren to cut his losses and send the crew home.

It isn’t until 1963 that Van Buren once again fetches Tóth, underemployed as a draftsman in an architecture firm. They both want to complete the community center, though a pregnant Zsófia and her husband, Binyamin (Benett Vilmanyí), try to convince their aunt and uncle to make aliyah with them instead. Thus begins the film’s most arresting sequence, in which Van Buren and Tóth travel to Italy in search of marble. Functional as he may be, Tóth is still an addict, and Van Buren reveals that his interest in the brutalist exceeds the normal bounds of patronage or financial investment. What happens next is too deliberately shocking to spoil with summary—suffice it to say that Corbet does what he can to dispute Susan Sontag’s claim in On Photography that, even “at the farthest reach of metaphor,” the “camera doesn’t rape.” Corbet and Fastvold are more adamant than Fitzgerald was in psychologizing the depravity of privilege and wealth, and though there is truth in the caricature, the lack of subtlety feels juvenile, unbecoming of the film’s enterprising scope.