The Power and the Damned, or the reckoning
Brady Corbet's third feature builds toward a moment of shocking violence. What does it mean?
Scenes from a marriage: Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Photographs courtesy of A24 Films.)
Part two
(Note: this essay reveals key details about the end of the film.)
Nobody ever sees exactly the same film. We arrive at art from different angles, intellectually, politically, personally. The emotional response—outrage, exhilaration, discomfort, indifference—is our immediate register
The question is not just what we see, but how it makes us feel.
Brady Corbet’s third feature The Brutalist is meant to astonish, thrill and provoke. The size and scope is daunting and expansive, the themes novelistic and complex, the sheer weight and breadth designed to separate it from much of the contemporary cinema, industrial and personal.
As I mentioned in part one, I’ve seen the film twice, at the same theater, the first in 35mm (with Corbet in attendance), the second time in 70mm.
The experiences were not the same. The first time was a jammed, overflowing crowd, and I felt the bodies pressed against me. At times, it was almost too intense, or claustrophobic, and I needed more breathing space, just to take everything in.
The second screening was packed for a Friday morning special screening, but it was much easier to move about. I was closer to the screen, at my preferred spot on the right side, with a couple of vacant seats on both sides.
The moment was loose and relaxed, and decidedly more comfortable. I obviously knew the ending, but I was better prepared for it, catching more details about conversations and dialogue than I remembered from the first screening.
The first thing you notice about the three films Corbet has directed is how astringent they are. They are also self-referential and solipsistic.
Those aren’t necessarily self-cancelling or bad qualities with the right director.
I’d rather a filmmaker take big swings and fail than simply try out something I’ve seen before. In that auteurist framework, I’m always reminded by something the great French director Olivier Assayas—a filmmaker Corbet has worked with—told me in an interview.
Assayas told me he’d rather see a failed film by a director he admires than a successful one by a director he doesn’t.
Naturally with an auteurist director, I’m looking at what he’s doing with the frame, with objects and image, of sound, tempo and rhythm, production design and the work with actors.
I write a lot about sports, and I learned a long time ago not to get bogged down in play-by-play. The same with movies.
The perfect sports story, I thought, would eliminate it completely; the perfect film review, I think, would have no discussion of the story or plot. I’ve often struggled or argued with myself about the story, given how it’s the least involving aspect of any great or interesting film.
I’m breaking with that for this second part of my two-part essay.
As previously mentioned, The Brutalist is a deeply subjective two-part film about a Hungarian-Jewish emigre architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody).
The first part, called “The Enigma of Arrival,” tracks his quick rise from designing furniture at his cousin’s modest Philadelphia store to being commissioned by the swaggering industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) to design an ambitious arts and community center.
The second part, called “The Hard Core of Beauty,” moves from Eisenhower to Kennedy, adroitly yoking together the personal and artistic, with the arrival of Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).
he two-part structure is not arbitrary. It establishes a series of rhyming motifs—power and submission, artistic ambition and exploitation—that reverberate across the film’s timeline. What begins as an exploration of artistic freedom in part one becomes, by part two, an inquiry into the cost of that freedom, both personal and moral.
Intriguingly, Tóth and Van Buren are variations of the same figure: prideful, cocksure and convinced of their superiority. Tóth is the purist and aesthete who obsesses over every detail of his public commission, disdainful of the engineers or a more traditional architect brought on as a second authority.
Corbet said after the Chicago Film Festival screening that he saw the film as a portrait of a marriage. Family, power and relationships are the governing principles of the narrative. Part of what makes the second part more enigmatic and peculiar is the divide between the known and unknown, by what is intuited and grasped at.
Corbet’s aesthetic is not to reassure but grapple with, and explore the fallout. The following is my personal take on the late stages of the film that many find so inflammatory and unsettling.
If money, power and art are the shaping actions, sex is the subversive art that threatens to rip everything apart. As I said earlier, the creative and artistic energies of Tóth seems inseparable from his sexual urges, like his adventures at a whorehouse or jazz speakeasy during the first part.
Not much of anything is divulged about Van Buren’s personal life, but we are constantly made aware of the accoutrements of his wealth and lifestyle, the extravagant estate and its impersonal, detached mansion. His two adult children, Harry (Joe Alwyn) and Maggie (Stacie Martin), float in and out of the story.
The most withering line in the movie is Harry’s cold remark to Tóth, “We tolerate you.” (Maggie, for what it’s worth, appears to have a deeply unconsummated sexual attraction to Tóth.)
In a film about crossing lines and boundaries, from Old Europe to New, from totalitarianism to capitalism, from Jew to Gentile, The Brutalist stares into the fallout of the emotional, personal and social transactions that have passed between the main characters.
It comes together in a late sequence. After an industrial accident shuts down the commission, the two men are brought back together after Van Buren resurrects the project. The two have traveled to Carrara, Italy to procure the marble. The ideas and concerns, about money and power, the destabilization of sex, come to a horrifying conclusion.
Drunk and unsettled by László’s flirtation with a beautiful Italian woman, Van Buren asserts his dominance in the most brutal way possible: by raping him. It is not just an act of sexual violence, but a final declaration of ownership—of László’s talent, his body, his very being.
During their first extended encounter in part one, Van Buren tells the story of how he used the promise and allure to money to humiliate his grandparents.
The scene has its double here. In leading up to his rape, Van Buren reduces the architect’s formidable talent to that of a whore, “a lady of the night,” who’s stripped of any worth or deeper meaning, blithely suggesting his entitlement to László’s body since he is literally bought and paid for.
The violation itself is relatively discretely staged and handled, not in punishing close up but a modest medium shot, covered in shadow and darkness. It’s a shocking and stunning action, a moral reckoning that alters so many perceptions and ideas about what preceded it.
A friend of mine, otherwise sympathetic to the film, suggested that Corbet veers into shock value in the final act. Is the film pushing provocation for its own sake, or is this moment the culmination of the tensions that have simmered throughout?
I think what he is trying to do is rhyme the two parts, and allow the power, themes, and emotional associations to deepen the material. It all comes together in the climax when Erzsébet confronts Van Buren, with his family present, at a dinner party at their mansion and denounces him as a rapist. The generational complicity of father and son is unavoidable.
Harry races up the stairs after his disgraced father, unable to shirk the horrible shame of what I believe was his (unseen) rape or sexual assault of Zsófia at the same estate years earlier. In the end, no matter how ruthlessly Harrison Van Buren Sr. has optimized his power and importance, his money is wildly insufficient at his punishment and damnation.
It ends, again in Italy, with an epilogue. Art endures, but at what cost? For László Tóth, the work survives, but the man is left broken. His life, in many ways, was unendurable. And yet, it goes on.