"You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row" - Bob Dylan "Desolation Row
When a filmmaker creates a docudrama there is an unspoken contract between the writer/director and the audience that the viewer can trust the film to portray its subject matter accurately while closely matching the actual events. This doesn't mean they have to make a history book. Just that the audience can trust the important facts, places, dates, and people, to be correct. Writer/Director Brady Corbet goes in a different direction. He makes films that look like docudramas but are actually works of pure fiction. His films are filled with the same wealth of details, and period references, as films like Oppenheimer, Ali, and Malcolm X, but in Corbet's case, it's all a carefully constructed fantasy. It's an interesting approach to filmmaking, and not one I'm completely comfortable with. Corbet seems to be luring us into the docudrama's contract, while cheating us with historic falsehoods and misinformation.
The Brutalist is a massive, three-and-a-half-hour film that could be called an epic if it had just explored its story a bit more. It's hard to imagine a 210-minute film being underdeveloped, but here we are.
The film tells the story of Laszlo Toth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who's just emerged from a Nazi concentration camp. Believing his wife and family are dead, Toth emigrates in 1947 to live with his cousin in Philadelphia. Not long after joining his cousin's business Toth is told by the man's Catholic wife that he is unwanted in their home, but not before Toth is taken along to visit a potential customer who wants their father's study rebuilt. Cast out of the cousin's home, he is forced to work on the Philadelphia docks for room and board, Toth is actually a student of the Bauhaus school of architecture and was once a famous and highly sought-after architect in Hungary. Naturally, he creates a spectacular room in the brutalist style for the wealthy man, only to be cast out without pay. Realizing his mistake, eventually the home's wealthy, art-loving owner seeks Toth out in order to have him design a magnificent community center in memory of his late mother.
We've now arrived at the film's 15-minute intermission.
It's hard to define a film that swings so far to each side of the artistic spectrum. On one hand the film is beautifully shot, using a rare technique of shifting focus. This means that in most scenes only one character is in focus while the others are not. As a character begins talking the focus shifts to the one speaking, while leaving the rest out-of-focus. The likelihood that someone will be in the wrong spot, or the camera will shift focus too far makes this a difficult and tedious way to shoot a movie. Actors hate it, because it means most takes will fail due to malfunctions. Here it works, and it's never been displayed to better purpose. I'd even go so far as to say it's magnificent.
At the other end of the spectrum is a script so devoid of context and subtlety it feels incomplete. One gets the impression that every other scene is missing. Important points are dismissed with a single line. When she arrives, Toth's wife is wheelchair-bound because of "the famine". His niece is mute because of "her mother's death". That's it. That's all that Corbet allows us to know. It's frustrating, and it makes the film feel underwritten.
Then there's the trust issue I mentioned earlier. The Brutalist is presented as a docudrama, but it's filled with falsehoods. Toth is shown as the designer of the classic chrome-and-leather-strap chairs that were so popular in the 1960's and 70's. That's a lie. They were designed in Denmark in the mid-1950's, a decade later and halfway around the world. Because Corbet knows he's creating fiction he seems to have no problem filling the movie with historical inaccuracies, even as he takes great pains to convince us otherwise.
It irritates me that there was so much Corbet could have done to educate us. During WWII Hungary had the second largest Jewish population in Europe. They were left untouched until 1944, long after it was clear that Germany was losing the war. Half a million people were killed in concentration camps while Germany was in retreat. That story has never been told. The real story of the brutalist movement in architecture was also there to be told. It became the style of the Soviet Union's rebuilding program throughout Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. Had Toth remained in Hungary he would likely have become the nation's top architect. Had he emigrated to America, an architect of Toth's status and renown would have had six different architectural firms waiting for him the moment he got off the boat. That Toth is shown as a starving dock worker makes The Brutalist more fantasy than fiction.
Corbet's style serves him by not restricting his storytelling to how the world really works. One comes away from The Brutalist delighted by the visuals, and the acting, but aching for more substance and meaning I learned nothing from The Brutalist. Not about architecture. Not about the Holocaust. Not about the role Jewish immigrants played in post-war America. I saw a stunning and beautiful work of fantasy.
Nothing more.