The Brutalist (2024)

Plot of the Brutalist: László Tóth, A Jewish Hungarian architect, famous in Europe but also a survivor of the Holocaust, flees to America and falls on the hospitality of his cousin Attila in Philadelphia, who runs a furniture store. They get the job of rebuilding the library of a rich industrialist which allows László to use his creative capabilities but the man comes home early to find them at work and throws them out. Attila blames László and throws him out, and László ends up sleeping in a hostel and working as a manual labourer. He becomes a heroin addict. Later the industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren seeks out László after his new library is feted in style magazines, and hires him to design a memorial building to his mother. László’s wife, who was stuck in Hungary, also travels to America, but she is wheelchair bound due to her suffering in the camps. Their various problems make any sexual activity between them difficult. Van Buren hires another architect to ‘help’ László, and after a train crash involving items being brought to the building site, shuts down the job and sacks László. Later he changes his mind and the job carries on but even then it is not all sweetness and light. There is more distress to follow.

Content: One way and another there is a lot of sex and nudity, particularly when László visits a brothel, and later sees an old fashioned pornographic film. There is also some masturbation and a male rape. László smokes all the time which is quite distressing and also injects himself with heroin and drinks himself into oblivion. In episodic presentations we see him arrive in America, work for his cousin, be well treated by Van Buren, but worse treated by Van Buren’s son who seems to have some sort of adversarial relationship with his twin sister. The work starts on the memorial building with László going to meetings and making presentations using a model of the finished structure. He and Van Buren go to Italy to buy marble, and get drunk with unfortunate results. There is more but I’m trying to avoid spoilers.

A View: This extremely long film, which includes a fifteen minute interval has been feted by the critics and so far its box office returns have just exceeded its moderate production costs. It has been nominated in ten categories at the Oscars. At its opening in Madrid at 4pm last Friday the screen at which we watched it was pretty full of people. This does not often happen, and may have been due to Oscar fever. One of the amateur critics suggested that it was presented as a succession of episodes, not very well strung together, and that was exactly what I thought. I went to the film having no real idea about it, so I thought that it was a biography of a real architect. I found it to be gruelling stuff and was quite angry when I found that I had sat through three and a half hours of complete fiction. Surely it could have been shorter.

Fun Fact: Felicity Jones, also star of Rogue One: A Star Wars Tale, had once been an actor on a British long time radio soap, The Archers.