The Hard Core of Beauty
by Alexandra I.Mas
The Brutalist is a searing epic, a monumental fresco of 3 hours and 35 minutes, charting the brutal aftermath of war. Through the eyes of László Toth, a genius architect emerged from the inferno of a concentration camp, the film dismantles the American Dream piece by piece, exposing its decay and hollowness. The declaration of the Israeli state by the United Nations offers a fleeting glimpse of salvation. From the very first frame, the signature of this cinematic masterpiece is unmistakable – a work of haunting beauty and raw, unflinching reality.
With a budget of $10 million and over seven years in the making, this 70mm marvel unspools across 26 reels, with each frame as essential as the last. Every second feels earned. The film’s rhythm, expertly punctuated by Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar-worthy composition, envelops the audience in constant turmoil. The Ouverture – direct and unforgiving – immediately roots us in both time and space. We are thrust into the disarray of displaced souls, immigrants adrift in search of an uncertain future.
Adrien Brody
The Silver Lion, 81st Mostra di Venezia, Best Director, Brady Corbet for ‘The Brutalist.’
Adrien Brody delivers the role of a lifetime as László Toth, gripping the viewer with a performance so raw and vulnerable it strikes both heart and mind. The chilling refrain, “Enjoy your freedom,” resonates like an alarm, and the camera’s lingering shots on numbered refugees invoke the haunting echoes of concentration camp tattoos. The closeness of the camera feels suffocating, creating a visceral discomfort.
Brody’s portrayal of Toth – the wounded idealist – is staggering in its complexity. A man shattered by Buchenwald, he navigates the fractured American landscape as a foreigner in every sense. His only goal is to reunite with his wife Erzsébet and niece, a family he must rebuild. “I had no expectations,” he admits, heavy with pride and resignation. His spirit, though battered, refuses to yield to ideological assimilation. The American Dream offers nothing but betrayal: his cousin Molnar becomes Miller, forsaking their Jewish heritage for Catholicism. Their fleeting moments of familial camaraderie are fraught with an undercurrent of unease that festers into betrayal.
The genius of the film is revealed in its portrayal of Toth’s brutalist architecture – buildings that mirror the rigid lines and moral strength that once defined him as a Bauhaus maestro in pre-war Hungary. His one moment of happiness, a brief creative frenzy with his cousin, flickers and dies under the weight of betrayal. The uncultured arrogance of a wealthy American magnate leads to his rejection, with the final blow coming from his cousin’s cowardice, leaving Toth destitute.
Recognition for Toth’s brutalist genius finally arrives, ironically, through the twisted admiration of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a narcissistic pseudo-intellectual who initially rejected Toth’s magnificent library design. Van Buren feeds on Toth’s brilliance, draining him of his essence until even the unthinkable – a violent transgression – takes place. Together, they traverse a landscape strewn with human misery, reflecting America’s darkest impulses: manipulation, drugs, sex, and violence.
Toth’s architecture becomes an extension of his tormented soul – his buildings as scarred and enduring as he is. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its own construction?” His work, like his soul, is designed to withstand the wars of time. Brady Corbet’s visual mastery elevates the film to new heights, especially in the colossal scenes where Toth’s constructions rise, monumental against the sky. The procession of characters follows Van Buren, the megalomaniac feeding off the attention of his mindless flock, while Toth, the lone idealist, stands apart – an artist lost in a soulless world.
“It is no coincidence that fate brought us together,” Van Buren proclaims, imagining their relationship with a mystical quality. Toth becomes part of a larger intellectual community, but the brutal realities persist. Between life and death, there exists only sex – an eternal interplay of brutality and beauty.
The love story between Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and László is raw, pure, and unwavering. As she gazes at his creations, she sees him – the essence of his being, inseparable from the structures he has built. His masterpiece mirrors the horrors of the camps, with each volume echoing that past. These spaces, forcing the humans to gaze upward, offer a chance – however fleeting – for elevation.
“I am looking at you,” she says, “when I look at this project.”
The film’s power also lies in its lingering shots of landscapes, allowing the viewer time to absorb the emotional gravity. As Toth retreats into the marble quarries of Carrara, the birthplace of masterpieces, a profound connection between matter and spirit is revealed. The lightness of genius and the crushing weight of the world intertwine. Here, the magnate’s final betrayal unfolds – a violation not just of body, but of soul – as his greed cuts into the purity of Toth’s vision.
“If you resent your persecution, why do you make yourself so easy to get?”
It feels better to escape through drugs – his vulnerability stands in stark contrast to his strength, which is undeniably real. That beauty, which Van Burhen tries to stole from him – into the silence, into the coldness of the marble and the wind – the absolute indifference of this magnate who walks ahead of his victim without remorse, the camera follows with the illusion of a vertical tomb, carved from living marble – standing yet lifeless.
In the end, Toth’s creation, a monumental altar of light and marble, transcends the petty minds that sought to contain it. His vision soars above the limitations of his patrons, a celestial beacon of human resilience. The culmination of his work – the brutalist architecture in its purest form – becomes an altar to himself and the world’s forgotten, a timeless structure that defies the ignorant and the weak.
NOTE :
László Tóth was the geologist who infamously attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer in 1972. A metaphor within the film, illustrating the idea that a powerful creator is, in many respects, also a destroyer. Brady Corbet underlignes the often unwholesome relationship between the art patron and the creator.
The complexities of his marriage, strained by the malnutrition his wife endured at Dachau, paint a tender, difficult portrait of love in the shadow of trauma. Erzsébet’s fragility contrasts sharply with her luminous intellect, her fierce pride a match for his artistic vision. She sees the truth beneath the magnate’s power, illuminating the toxic jealousy that courses through their lives. “Everything that is ugly, crude, and stupid is your fate,” she declares, a damning indictment of their oppressor.
The body, too, becomes a landscape – a desolate one at first, entwined with the rejected prostitute. Yet here, within this sublime marital connection, love flourishes in its purest form, where everything is permitted and deceit has no place. Truth flows through the skin, an unspoken bond. “What has been robbed from you?” she asks. Her skin, much like the flawless walls of his architectural masterpiece, conveys profound truths. This verity exists solely to affirm life, mirroring nature, echoing the marble quarries, and embodying the warrior spirit of the woman who seeks to restore his honor.
The film closes with a leap to the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. The past is present, the pain softened by time, yet never forgotten. His niece declares at the opening of his retrospective in the Israeli pavilion , “It is the destination, not the journey,” as the legacy of genius, pain, and love endures, speech that offers every missing key, should you need them. The change of light and texture is an aesthetic manner to link this destiny to our every day life. She speaks of the beauty imbued with meaning that will endure eternally, from the concrete to the veins of these women, inheritors of both this talent and this pain, and of a future shaped by this past.
