Hasta La Ideas

The Brutalist leads the Oscar nominations but as a film about architecture it’s a little underwhelming, writes Will Wiles.

You wait ages for an architectural epic and then two come along (almost) at once. Last year Francis Ford Coppola’s misfiring fable Megalopolis was released, with a story about a visionary architect struggling to realise a utopian project in the face of political intrigue and opposition. Now, from director Brady Corbet, comes The Brutalist, in which a visionary architect rises out of the horrors of the second world war and the grime of post-war poverty to realise a utopian project in the face of personal disasters and opposition.

The Brutalist and Megalopolis are very different films, but they are also very similar, not least in their relationship to a third film, in some ways the defining architectural drama: King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949), adapted from Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel of the same name, in which a visionary architect struggles to realise a utopian project in the face of scheming, petty rivals. The template, by now, is pretty clear: a singular genius, an architectural dream, and an unready world filled with meaner minds.

The Brutalist has been eagerly anticipated in architectural circles

Writing for Dezeen about Megalopolis last year I remarked that its celebration of the blank-slate architectural prophet was oddly old-fashioned, a mid-20th-century sort of story rather out of step with the present. And The Brutalist roots its own version of the myth in that time and milieu.

But perhaps it’s not so old-fashioned after all. If we’ve been given not one but two retellings of the same parable, then it might have more relevance than expected. It’s worth considering what that might say about architecture in the present moment.

In The Brutalist – which was written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold – Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect who survives the Nazis and arrives in the USA immediately after the second world war. Eventually, after various trials, he comes to the attention of wealthy industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren makes himself Tóth’s patron, and commissions him to design a community centre on a prominent hilltop, dedicated to the memory of Van Buren’s mother.

This ambitious project consumes both men. Tóth, ravaged by trauma, is stubborn and self-destructive, self-medicating with heroin and occasional debauches. The handsome and mannered Van Buren, meanwhile, is vain, capricious and philistine. His appreciation for Tóth’s work comes not from the designs themselves but from the fashionable praise they attract.

Although eager for Tóth to realise a great work, “something boundless, something new”, he lacks any real sympathy for the artist. Tóth, dragged into the project by the force of Van Buren’s personality, is fatally unsuited to the role of servant. The relationship is doomed.

The Brutalist has been eagerly anticipated in architectural circles. I anticipated it eagerly myself. These are anti-intellectual times. Art and architecture are battered by cultural headwinds and punishing economic conditions. Here, it appeared, was a grand statement against all that, which in addition was sticking up for a scorned architectural style presently experiencing a wave of political antipathy.

When a film like this addresses architecture, it is clearly talking about more than just bricks and mortar

The themes encompassed by The Brutalist couldn’t be weightier: the Holocaust, Jewish identity, the American Dream, the immigrant experience, the nature of art and beauty. Uncompromising seriousness seemed written into its very fabric, not least its substantial three-hour, thirty-five minute run-time (with intermission), and its tremendous score by Daniel Blomberg.

So when a film like this addresses architecture, it is clearly talking about more than just bricks and mortar – or poured concrete and cut stone.

Tóth is making things that have outlasted the extremists who tried to murder him, and will outlast the vicious snobs who exploit and violate him, and all the other dolts and yahoos. It is the revenge of the intelligent on the unintelligent.

This is distilled in the moment when Tóth confronts and insults the plodding commercial architect who Van Buren brings in to keep an eye on costs. In the cinema, this scene got a hearty laugh that was almost a cheer. It was the psychological moment the audience wanted, when the artist puts the value-engineer in his place. It is the kernel of the appeal of this whole fable.

To ensure that we ordinary folk can relate, the artist in The Brutalist, is not a rarefied aesthete. Like Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, Tóth is the genius as working man. Just as Patricia Neal finds Gary Cooper’s Roark labouring in a quarry, Van Buren finds Tóth shovelling coal. He’s no egghead. His art comes out of pain and when he is thwarted he rages and smashes things up. Brody sells this with a magnetic performance, splendidly complimented by Felicity Jones as Erzsébet, his wife.

“My buildings were devised to endure … [the] erosion of the shoreline,” Tóth says. He talks about them having an immovable “hard core of beauty”, a phrase which gives the second half of the film its title. One can see the appeal of all this mass, solidity and permanence to film directors, whose medium is light dancing on reflective fabric.

Tóth’s creation is a monumental, windowless hulk

Architecture in The Brutalist couldn’t be weightier, earthier and stonier. Railcars groan under the burden of it. But is it anything more than a giant work of sculpture? Does it have life beyond endurance?

Here is where things start to get a bit disappointing. Tóth’s creation is a monumental, windowless hulk. Is it beautiful? It doesn’t matter, because it’s a symbol. It just represents itself: a bold, uncompromising, obdurate creation, around which lesser men will cluck and cavil. It is the big, dumb object we are here to root for, just as – for all his human failings – there’s never much doubt that in the film’s moral cosmos the “ugly” Tóth is meant to have our full sympathy and his creation our full support.

We want to see the artist triumph, just as we want to see Captain America triumph. But the problem with this art-for-art’s sake approach is that it surrenders any actual sense of what Tóth is doing with his building and why.

Tóth promises that within the unadorned shell, extraordinary interior effects of space and light will play out, but they are only ever glimpsed. One of the compromises he is obliged to make early on is to include a Christian place of worship, which makes him uncomfortable. This chapel appears to consume the entire project, which ends up surmounted by a tower bisected by a cross, and the light effects he creates are cruciform.

What happens to the other functions? Presumably they are still there, but we don’t see much of them. The film wants to portray Tóth’s architecture as spiritual, but it can’t manage to do that without making it literally religious.

We are encouraged to feel that the building that Tóth designs is more than a building, but it ends up being rather less. It is just a gesture, a symbol.

I am not convinced it makes a meaningful case for architecture

The outward message here is that architecture really matters: it’s important, it’s lasting, it should be made with an eye on the transcendent, not the bottom line. So it’s strange that the actual building that Tóth makes seems to matter so little.

The aesthetic stakes – the difference between success and failure – are never really examined. A clunky coda tries to cover some of this with a curatorial lecture, which only really draws attention to the lack of explanation in the film. The Brutalist is a compelling human drama; as architectural drama it does not wholly convince.

It’s only natural that the architecture world should be enthusiastic about The Brutalist, when the profession is presently experiencing a good deal of indifference and scorn. And whatever their flaws, it’s genuinely terrific to see two big, fascinating films about visionary architecture in less than a year. But while it might raise morale among the brutalists in the cinema, I am not convinced it makes a meaningful case for architecture. It’s a depiction of creativity from the outside, not from the inside.

Will Wiles is a design writer and the author of four novels, most recently The Last Blade Priest.

The photography is courtesy of Universal Pictures.

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