Because of its extreme length (3 hours, 35 minutes), I hesitated at first to see The Brutalist (nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture), but I was eventually persuaded - by the presence of a 15-minute intermission - to allot the time and give the film a chance. Watching it is still a challenge on multiple levels, but definitely worth the time and the effort. The film seldom drags the way some other long movies do, but the Intermission is a true blessing, which makes it easier to appreciate the film in all its sumptuous scope.
The film depicts a previously successful Bauhaus-trained Hungarian architect, László Tóth (brilliantly portrayed by actor Adrian Brody), who immigrates to the U.S. as a Displaced Person after his having survived the Holocaust in World War II Europe. Even under better circumstances, immigration is inevitably an experience of loss and opportunity. Tóth experiences both. One gets a vivid sense of the once-successful architect's stressful sense of loss - of menial jobs, soup kitchens, and even drug addiction - as he struggles in a new society where he can always sense that, as a Jew and a foreigner, he may be unwanted, even if America does also offer amazing opportunities. (These opportunities are exemplified in the first part of the film by his assimilated cousin, Attila, with whom he first finds temporary, if stressful, shelter.) There is also the not unrelated subplot of the toll the experience takes on all of Tóth's relationships - especially with his immediate and extended families.
By chance, Tóth gets to remodel an old library in a rich patron's palatial residence. At first his patron is unimpressed, and Tóth is impoverished again. But then the rich man realizes the value of his new library, because pictures of it have been published in a magazine, and he learns more about his architect's fame. One wonders why these considerations should have so changed the rich man's judgment, why they made the architect's product suddenly more beautiful - or perhaps just more commercially valuable.
The film's title and the preeminence of architecture in the story inevitably invites comparisons with the "brutalist" architectural style, which disfigured so many buildings (including, alas, even churches) in the 20th century. One can, of course, see in such "brutalism" a metaphor for the ugliness and brutality of so much of modern life - a brutality which the movie dramatically depicts in human terms in the course of Tóth's own life, both in the war in Europe and the Holocaust, and (within the film itself) in Tóth's up-and-down life in the U.S. He eventually does get to continue his self-expressive artistic path, but he must do so within the constraints of modern capitalism and commerce, which he finds increasingly challenging, and which take their toll on him personally as well as on his family and few friends.
While relatively understated dramatically, the (initially secret but eventually exposed) rape scene seems to symbolize so much of the tension at the heart of the story, and particularly the cruelty and corruption embedded in capitalist commercial culture, in spite of all its real opportunities and potential benefits.
It is a very long film with many intersecting themes. Among them is the post-Holocaust restoration of Jewish nationhood in the creation of the state of Israel (which, as it turns out, is the principal place in the world where the Bauhaus architecture in which Tóth trained in pre-war Germany has continued most strongly). Tóth's niece and her husband choose to join the Jewish immigration to Israel, while he and his wife continue to make their up-and-down way in the U.S. This may reflect a real debate that occurred in certain circles between the two primary post-war Jewish destinations, the presumably easier U.S. and the more difficult, challenging new state of Israel. The film leaves open whether in Tóth's case the U.S. really was easier, or whether Israel. might have been a more fulfilling option.
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