The Brutalist (2024)

Rated R for being intensely A24.  The big red flags in the movie is the intense sexuality in the film, which also includes a visceral rape sequence.  One rape is on camera; one rape is off camera.  While the three-and-a-half-hour movie has quite a bit of sex, the movie is not about sex necessarily.  Some of this sex has nudity, some of it doesn't.  The entire movie does get quite bleak as well, dealing with racial and ethnic fallout from the Holocaust.  One of the more recurring visuals is regular drug use.  This is unabashedly an R-rated movie, which always makes me nervous when it comes to recommendations.

DIRECTOR:  Brady Corbet

I haven't seen a movie like this in a long time.  Honestly, I was lamenting the mediocrity of this year's Academy Award nominees.  This movie?  I almost have no words (which is probably not even remotely true because I'm going to fill this blog).  This movie destroyed me.  Absolutely destroyed me.  I'm often not one to assume that a Holocaust movie will gut me one way or another.  It's depressing to think that we've been so overwhelmed by certain images and concepts that we can become guarded to such ideas.  The Brutalist --a movie that I keep wanting to call The Machinist, even though those are different movies --hits in a way that only There Will Be Blood has hit.  Geez, both of those movies, while having similarities in their respective DNAs, are movies that shouldn't get to me in the ways that they do.  But The Brutalist is going to stick with me.  I'm going to have to own this movie and explain to my wife that we have to watch it every so often, despite the graphic sexual nature of some of the scenes.

For those worrying about The Brutalist, the three-and-a-half somehow flies.  Very rarely has a long runtime like The Brutalist has come across as easy.  As much as I love The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions, I have to get ready to get comfortable for a long and slow journey through Middle Earth.  Only Avengers: Endgame and The Brutalist did I feel like I could keep watching for longer and still be filled artistically.  Like no other movie before it, The Brutalist somehow feels like the most meticulous movie ever made.  It made me look at cinema differently.  I'm in no place to throw it on the Top Five list yet, just due to recency bias.   I have so much unpacking to do with this movie.  But this is one of those movies that lets you know that something special was created.  Man, if I haven't overhyped it, then I don't know what I did.  If I need to temper your expectations, my wife wasn't as obsessed as I was by the end of it.

Part of my sense of wonder comes from the specific time period that the movie is set in.  There have been all these snide remarks about Adrian Brody doing Holocaust movies for Oscar bait.  Is there truth in it?  I have no say.  I'm trying to stay in the world of the film, so let's keep it at that.  I've seen my fair share of Holocaust films.  They seem to have varying tones while reminding us of the atrocities that the Nazis committed during this era.  What we don't tend to see is the life of the refugee after the Holocaust.  This is my take on this at the moment, but we acknowledge intellectually that the life of a refugee is hard.  What we don't make the logical leap to is the notion that it is the politics and attitudes of the refuge that make life difficult for the refugee.  The Brutalist is --as the name would suggest --brutal on the United States for its treatment of its refugees.  (I'm aware that the title The Brutalist is a reference to the architectural movement that Laszlo champions.  There can be a double meaning, guys.)

It comes from the following attitude:  "Haven't I done enough?"  There might not be a more condemning phrase when it comes to treating the misfortunate.  The Brutalist is about how after giving even a modicum of civility, demanding a wealth of servitude in return.  Our national crimes in America are those of racism and sexism.  With racism, it was born out of slavery.  Slavery took the notion that white people took Black men out of the jungle and gave them clothes, food, and a bed.  White people, by their logic, gave backwards people civilization and thought that work was the least repayment was only in due course.  However, while our national soul struggles to understand that slavery and the byproducts of slavery still exist in 2025, the intellectual story of slavery is out there.  Again, we're going through some messed up stuff, so I don't want to speak in absolutes.  Instead, the root message of exploitation has still to be absorbed by White America.

Everything in Laszlo's life is a repeated ask on the part of Americans of "Why haven't you thanked me yet?"  "Why haven't you reimbursed me for my troubles?"  Corbet's no dummy for structuring his movie the way that he has.  The first place of refuge he has from the death camps is his cousin's.  Attila seems like the safest place for Laszlo.  They seem genuinely happy to see each other.  They have authentic stories.  At one point, they were incredibly close.  Yet, it is Attila's betrayal that sets the tone for the rest of the movie.  Laszlo did the right thing, but it lost him money.  It's exactly what he was asked to do. Yet Attila decides to not only distance himself from Laszlo, but wants to demonize him leaving him the moral high ground.  That's the movie.  It's duplicity.  

My wife pointed out weird performances around the movie.  I didn't see weird performances.  I saw people who are characters playing characters.  Attila isn't known by his Hebrew name.  He's known for being "Miller" for "Miller & Sons."  As the movie points out, "No Miller.  No sons."  Attila has a mostly great American accent, knowing that people wouldn't buy from a Jewish man.  All of this is foreshadowing for the Van Burens.  While Attila embraces the notion that he's playing a different man than he really is, the same holds true for the Van Burens.  Harry Van Buren, Jr. is perhaps the most telling with his performance.  My wife kept on commenting that he sounded like he was in a play.  But all of that comes off from the notion that the true persona of the Van Burens is so awful and despicable that they have to adopt the evolution of the Transatlantic accent. 

Are there no likable characters in the movie?  Kind of?  I mean, I'm a big fan of Death of a Salesman.  Sure, Linda is pretty great in that one, but she also enables the crap out of Willie and somewhat shares the delusion that the family holds onto.  With Zsofia, there's a character that is mostly great, but she's a judgy Zionist who looks down on Jewish people who don't want to make the return to the Holy Land.  Laszlo is the protagonist.  Everything that he does is under the microscope of morality.  If I listed the awful things that he does in this movie, it would be pretty damning.  I don't want to give him a pass, but considering that this movie is about how a man's humanity is stripped throughout the piece, I have to look at morality through his eyes.  Corbet starts Laszlo at the place where most Holocaust movies end.  The survivors of the camps saw the worst of humanity and many of them came through it shells of their former selves.  While Anne Frank did not survive the camps, she held onto --as far as we know --the belief that people were inherently good.  Laszlo starts the movie that way.  He's broken, but he ultimately sees the value in humanity.  While he's waiting in the breadline, he sees the hungry child and sacrifices for that kid.  He is a good man.

But it is in that poverty that he discovers opium and drug addiction.  It's pretty easy to throw that stone at him, saying that no one made him do those things. But there's only so much a man can go through before he is desperate to find some emotional change beyond the misery.  Yeah, it's destructive, but there's a sense of empathy there behind the character choice.  It leads to his downfall because there's something in him that will always be broken.  But for so much of the movie, we're looking at a man who seems to be ignoring the trauma of surviving when he's actively addressing it with everything that he has done.  BIG SPOILER: I have to talk about the reveal in the epilogue.  I have to.  Like, it's so tied into my love for the movie (which I loved before, but the jaw drop was intense).   The movie feels like it is just about the dangers of capitalism and being seen as a person of value, not just the shell of a man.  It is that.  It is never not that.  But the fact that Laszlo is condemning the Van Burens to the mantle of ignorance is a hot-dang moment.

The first time that Laszlo meets Mr. Van Buren, an absolute monster of a concept, Van Buren yells him out of the house.  While he says it is because of the surprise of people in his sacred space, there is the coloring of bigotry in the wrath.  It's only when Van Buren realizes the accolades that his library gets that he becomes a big fan of the space.  He chases that need to be progressive and cutting edge.  By trying to recreate a moment, he gets into Laszlo's life.  And for a while, it seems like Laszlo is accepting of Van Buren's lesser traits.  The recurring gag is that Van Buren is a faux intellectual, repeating how intellectually stimulating his conversations with Laszlo are.  But the rest of the movie is him trying to make a temple to his own worth.  He says that it is for his mother, but his mother remains an amorphous characters besides being an obsession for her son.  If anything, he's celebrating the notion that she gave birth to him, champion of industry.

But Laszlo's obsession with this center can be misconstrued as an attempt to return to normality when it is, in fact, a condemnation for fascists.  I can't even divorce the image of the cross coming down in the middle of it as something that White America views as the role of God.  The fact that he intentionally made a perverted version of the concentration camp  for the entire movie is his accusation to the Van Burens.  He gives up his salary to ensure that the building is made the proper way, a reflection of his own status as a Jewish laborer under a bigoted dictator.  It's a knockout punch that didn't even need to happen, but it makes the movie all that much more important.

I feel almost like a prude commenting on the sexuality of the movie.  The sexuality could almost be cut.  I secretly wish it was because I want everyone to watch this movie.  And it's intense.  Again, the movie is called The Brutalist and he wants to live up to its name.  But I also have no right saying that the movie has no right being that sexual.  It kind of has a purpose.  It's all tied to Laszlo's sense of personhood.  He is degraded when he cannot perform with a sex worker, but that's only an indication that intimacy has lost all meaning for him.  It has its payoff for when Erzsebet comes and eventually returns to him.  He seems mortified by who he is and is unable to attach to his wife.  But even beyond that, he is only able to reciprocate when she too is as broken as he is.  It also is fundamentally tied to Van Buren's dehumanizing rape of Laszlo, revealing for a moment what the man behind the mask looks like.  Admittedly, Erzsebet's clairvoyance seems a little out of place in a movie so grounded, but it does seem to match with the messaging of the film.

Yeah, I'm going to own this one.  It might be the most powerful film I've seen in a long time and, content and all, I encourage anyone to see it who can.  See it on the biggest screen you can in the best situation you can.  It's worth it.