"The Brutalist"
Next week's epic movie sounds good, but seems historically ridiculous.
Next week is the debut of the acclaimed epic The Brutalist about how viciously anti-Semitic American capitalists exploited immigrant Bauhaus Jewish architects during the postwar period. It looks good in a There Will Be Blood sort of way, although as I pointed out in 2007, that movie didn’t have much to do with actual history. Same here:
Historically, however …
Here’s a representative review in The Hollywood Reporter:
Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn also star in the epic story of a Hungarian Jewish architect who flees Europe after the war to build a new life in America.
By David Rooney
September 1, 2024 6:05am
The past comes to life as a whole enveloping world in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s fine-grained, novelistic third feature as director, about a man of genius who gets to taste the American Dream but also feel the stinging humiliation of a conditional welcome that turns ice-cold. While there are echoes of The Fountainhead, this expansive story of a brilliant Bauhaus-trained Hungarian Jewish architect [Adrien Brody] who survives World War II and starts a new life in Pennsylvania is a provocative original. …
The fictional protagonist was partly inspired by the life of Marcel Breuer, with Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe also among Corbet and Fastvold’s references. …
The Van Burens [rich WASPs led by Guy Pearce] are revealed to be the quintessence of moral corruption bred by wealth and power; only Harry’s twin sister Maggie (Stacy Martin) seems to value genuine kindness. The Brutalist becomes a scathing critique of the ways in which America’s moneyed and privileged class gains cachet through the labor and creativity of immigrants but will never consider them equals.
Okaaaaaaay…
My longshot guess is that The Brutalist was inspired by a weirdly personal exchange in a 2016 presidential debate when Hillary claimed that Trump stiffed the architect he hired to design the clubhouse of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester, where Bill Clinton is a member:
CLINTON: We have an architect in the audience who designed one of your clubhouses at one of your golf courses. It’s a beautiful facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn’t pay what the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do…
TRUMP: Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work…
I can imagine Brady Corbet running with his Trump Derangement Syndrome to make up a tale about a genius Bauhaus Holocaust survivor Jewish architect who is mistreated by his rich WASP client.
But that’s not what happened to Bauhaus architects like Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Breuer’s mentor Walter Gropius when they got to America in the 1930s (contra The Brutalist, seldom after the War).
I’ll put the paywall here:
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