Brute and Brutalist
Ugliness cloaks beauty and beauty cloaks ugliness in Brady Corbet's American epic.
This article contains spoilers for The Brutalist.
I find it difficult to look at Brutalist architecture and immediately think, “That looks nice.” At first glance, it feels more like a daunting slab of concrete imposing itself on the landscape. The Brutalist director and co-writer Brady Corbet doesn’t try to convince the audience that they’ve got Brutalism all wrong. Instead, he uses the architectural form to convey the character of his main character and artist, László Tóth (Adrien Brody). The film challenges our notions of beauty and what we value in America.
While László is a deeply flawed individual, there is an inner beauty to his struggle: a Jewish man who avoided the death camps during the Holocaust only to feel lost as a newly-arrived immigrant in America. But even here, American attitudes and the constant onslaught of time threaten László’s sense of identity. Left adrift by his deeply assimilated cousin Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), László seems like he’ll finish out his days anonymously shoveling coal and sleeping in a Catholic mission. However, a “benefactor,” the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) pulls him out of this fate.

We first meet Harrison in an ugly scene where he comes home early to see his library in shambles after his large adult son Harry (Joe Alwyn) tries to surprise his father by hiring László and Atilla to redesign the space. Harrison barks at the cousins, makes a vaguely racist remark about László’s friend and co-worker Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé) by repeatedly referring to him as a “strange negro man in my driveway,” and has no immediate appreciation for the work the cousins have done to modernize his stodgy reading room. Harrison’s instinct is to assert dominance rather than appreciate beauty or respect humanity.
Harrison only comes to László when the renovated library ends up profiled in a fancy magazine, which frames Harrison as a forward-thinking modernist. While Harrison does apologize to László and blames his temper on trying to care for his ailing mother, his true goal is to woo the once-famous architect to build a community center in Doylestown in his mother’s honor. It would be nice to give Harrison the benefit of the doubt. We all lose our tempers now and then, especially when family is concerned. He wants to pull an artist out of poverty and obscurity to let him build a new work. That’s good, right?
Except Harrison is a brute who manages to mask his behavior by putting on the airs of the wealthy patrician class. In one of his brilliant touches to the role, Pearce cleverly makes Harrison’s dialect sound forced like he took a few elocution lessons and never learned how to make the words sound natural. But the scene that quickly tips Harrison’s hand is when he’s relaying a story to László about how he had the chance to pull his grandparents out of poverty despite their shabby treatment of his mother. In Harrison’s telling, he tested them with an unsigned check for $25,000, but when he didn’t appreciate the manner of their gratitude, he tore it up and only gave them $500.
For Harrison, this is a story about how much he loved his mother—that he would ruthlessly spite her parents and use his money as a cudgel to remind them of their place. In the middle of the telling, one of Harrison’s guests comes in to tell László how much he admires the new library and asks if he’s working on anything else. In a quick and cutting manner, Harrison asserts that he is in the middle of telling a story and dismisses the man, showing that a kind word to László is not why the architect is here. He’s there to burnish Harrison’s ego under the auspices of honoring his mother.
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