It is a big win for Brady Corbet’s epic drama, “The Brutalist” (2024) – as it bags three Oscars today. For “The Brutalist,” what continues to spur its popularity is the prolonged intermission and its employment of the VistaVision, an innovative wide-screen format that runs film horizontally in the camera. This choice is intentional, as none would endow it with the essence of colossality.
A movie like “The Brutalist” relies upon a wide range of themes, but more than that it relies upon an enduring span of time dedicated to history reading and making. While the context of war, like in many other dramas, constantly points to how it creeps in almost all human experiences, the trials and tribulations of the artist also bolster the statements on human deprivation.
The Brutalist (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
What causes László to immigrate to America?
László Tóth is a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp. He leaves Europe through the port of Bremerhaven, located in a region of occupied Germany under the United States. A ship bursting at the seams with displaced persons brings him to the States. His wife, Erzsébet, assures him that she will join him soon with their niece, Zsófia.
László, a seasoned architect back in his native land, finds himself lodging in Pennsylvania at the furniture shop of his cousin, Antilla, and a job to get by at the same establishment. While working at the firm, László’s minimalistic design is at full display, a jarring contrast to the excesses that define the new nation. One fine day, a new client’s arrival aligns László back to his long-lost proclivity. A rich businessman’s son, Harry Lee Van Buren, offers László a hefty sum to renovate his father’s library. When the businessman, Harrison Lee Van Buren, arrives, he is livid to see the men trying to tinker with his metaphorical shrine. Attila too turns against László and shows him the door, on account of his false belief that he tried to be too close to his wife, Audrey.
It is not too long after that Harrison Lee Van Buren ropes in László after observing his natural talent for architecture. Van Buren figures that the man he turned away is much revered in Europe. He bestows László with the task of erecting ‘The Van Buren Institute,’ as a tribute to his late mother. The institute will house a modern library, a gymnasium, and a theatre, along with a chapel.
Erzsébet and Zsófia arrive in America but in their emaciated and sickly state: Erzsébet has lost her ability to walk and Zsófia cannot verbally communicate anymore, pointing to the horrors inflicted on them. Soon it is given away that the American benignity is only a facade: as moving through the course of this project, László, and in part his family, would endure unspeakable violence from the country they call their home.
The Brutalist (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Why does László design the community center after the concentration camps?
In the end, the story takes a leap and touches down at Venice in the year 1980. We are here at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, where Zsófia, now an adult woman and a mother of a teen daughter, delivers a speech introducing her uncle’s retrospective. Through her words, Zsófia limns a visual imagery of the imposing structure that is ‘The Van Buren Institute.’ The structure’s characteristic claustrophobic nature mirrors László’s state of confinement in the concentration camps.
In tandem with that, the juxtaposition of the institute with the concentration camp is a subtextual commentary on the futility of this new American dream, an imprisonment away from imprisonment. László’s enduring and artful structures doggedly wage the war against the violence that gets transmuted. If the architecture of László is a counteroffensive, it is interesting how we are spared of the lengthy composition of the counteroffensive.
This detail is a narrative play on the final words of Zsófia, who again borrows from László, that it is never the journey that matters, but the destination. We are not made privy to the life after the sexual assault of László, neither do we know under what condition he resumes work for the Van Buren Institute. We are also not sure of Van Buren’s eventual state after his sudden flight: he is served with an omission and left at just that.
The Brutalist (2024) Movie Themes Analyzed:
How does the film tap into the Brutalist architecture for meaning-making?
One has to sift through the epic narrative of the film with care and diligence to uncover the symbols and themes at play. The first mission is to observe how the central focus of Brutalist architecture becomes one of the spokes for the projection of post-war sensibility. The ushering in of modern Brutalist architecture in the modern world heralded a strong idiosyncratic nature of architecture. Erstwhile, architecture was simply intricate and florid; the imposing structures of Brutalism, so uncompromising in their style and form, ensure that it does not get obliterated with the passage of time. The architecture is symptomatic of the attempt to build a new society from the detritus of the old order.
For László, his singular style is a whiplash to the American world, so conceited and complacent with its facade of progress. The ‘American Dream’ is an inflated myth, especially when it sets in motion a series of dirty wars and criminal behaviors in vulnerable countries. A distinction pointed out by Reynar Banham, Brutalism is seen as ‘morally reprehensible’ when pitted against ‘The New Humanism’: it is merciless, echoing the world that has sown its seeds, therefore less tolerant of the shallowness of the propagation of architecture as cultural relics.
How are the Van Burens symptomatic of long-standing power imbalances?
To get to the topic of the execution of László’s architectural dreams, one has to take a path through the question of the power imbalance of the society that surrounds and then engulfs him. László’s realignment with his suppressed creative capacity would not have been possible without the Van Burens’ innate interest in his skills. Although the Van Burens offer him a second chance at life, it is not without some sinister motivations. As the hapless architect tries to forge a path, what opens before him is a landscape of desolation. There is no partnership here, the American patron dictates the terms due to having the money and the industrial capacity. As László emerges as a force to be reckoned with, the bogey of a mere immigrant presiding over catches him off guard.
Harrison’s character embodies an ethos of the ‘free world’ which strategically only produces enormous unverified faith for the United States. There is a ring of falsity that permeates that kind of living or the dream of it, László’s arrival only bursts this false bubble. To assert such an ethos, a peculiar hypocrisy has to be secured.
