Coming of Age in the Land of the Free

This piece was written in response to a prompt, chosen by the Cambridge University Film Association: 'Coming of Age'.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is an intricate meditation on story, witness, and the triumph of good over evil among the travails of diaspora and assimilation. László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, is a Hungarian-Jewish Bauhaus-trained architect, who escapes the Buchenwald camp to arrive in Philadelphia ahead of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). Tóth’s talent, at first dismissed given his migrant status, catches the eye of the egotistic nouveau riche Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pierce), from whose shallow clutches Tóth struggles to disentangle. The events of the film centre around Tóth’s agreement to build Van Buren’s vanity project: an enormous community-centre building on a hill above the parochial Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

It is useful, I think, to consider the film a bildungsroman or coming-of-age, that preciously-kept genre entailing the pitfalls of youth as encountered by its protagonist. Typically, completion of a journey means that youth has entered into the knowledge associated with adulthood: hard-fought wisdom replaces innocence. Corbet’s film holds firm to these tenets. Yet, immigration to America under such circumstances means Tóth is by no means a child, and in his adopted homeland he struggles: a smorgasbord of alien terrors and local prejudices unsettle Tóth and refuse him complacency in what is a truly haunting portrayal of diasporic itinerancy from Brody. He is a poor swimmer battling upstream, situated neither where he left or where he will end up. Tóth quickly learns lessons about a harsh world, redolent of the more common adolescent protagonist.

Yet the terms of a coming-of-age story are not fixed solely to the protagonist. Vaunted coming-of-age films, among them Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, evidence a genre grappling simultaneously with the furious cognitive and emotional growth of their budding adolescent subjects alongside the context of a changing nation, aligning the two in a metonymic dynamic. In The Brutalist, bad faith actors like Van Buren represent the new money and opportunity behind the post-war construction boom, exploiting the circumstance of migrants like Tóth as economic role players and cheap labour rather than individuals with agency. Under such circumstances, Tóth must refuse archetype in the interest of actualisation, or become himself archetypical.

Though this tussle is adroitly exposed by Corbet and lauded one of the film’s great virtues, Tóth’s is not the only bildungsroman hinted at over the course of The Brutalist. I refer to the offscreen inauguration of modern-day Israel, and the resulting expropriation of Palestinian lives. There are, by my count, two references that fold Israel into Corbet’s narrative. A radio clip from David Ben Gurion announcing the UN’s 1947 vote soundtracks Tóth’s lay of the land in America, which is later followed by a quiet dinner scene in which Zsofia informs her aunt and uncle at the dinner table of her intention to complete Aliyah and relocate to Israel. I am not interested in ladening Corbet’s storytelling with the obligations of current affairs, but because the turmoil is subtly hinted at in the former reference, and somewhat contested by the latter, I am surprised that Corbet alludes to without addressing sincerely so significant a presence.

It must be said that the film covers an array of themes—addiction, assimilation, trauma, American exceptionalism, post-war migrancy, subaltern labour, and so on, contributing to its significant run time—and is often lackadaisical in seeing many of them through. The director points to this thematic chaos in dismissing claims of Zionism, suggesting that such criticisms should be directed toward the film’s actual plot: Tóth’s escape from fascism and into capitalism. This is what gives the film its compelling depth, yet it also means that the 1948 partition of the British Mandate for Palestine and the (offscreen) colonisation by Israel serves only as contextual white noise throughout the film, with little obligation to flesh out its terms, ramifications, and devastation. These bildungsroman narratives taking place offscreen are, we know, in conflict and competition with one another. It begs the question: is this a purposeful act of erasure in the film, or an unintended elision arising from Corbet’s awkward storytelling?

A fairly convincing defence for not looking too deeply into the Zionist elements of the film occurs two-fold. Firstly, the references to Israel peppered throughout The Brutalist might only be to better explain the film’s unusual epilogue and bestow The Brutalist with historical accuracy. Critic Joseph Fahim of Middle East Eye argues that Tóth did in fact follow Erzsébet to Israel after the events of the film, inspiring brutalist work there and abroad. It makes sense,then, to pepper-in references to where Tóth will find haven once antisemitic aggressions exhaust him entirely in the land of the free. Secondly, Tóth is not particularly religious, and because having escaped the camps, Judaism’s import is for him cultural rather than religious, the peripheral presence of Israel functions as a contextual background rather than a point of inflection. These soften any violence in Corbet’s storytelling, leading The New Yorker’s Richard Brody to attenuate Israel’s presence to be, more simply, ‘the lure of Israel as a homeland…when, as Jews, [Tóth’s family] come to feel unwelcome in America’.

Nonetheless, does this explanation sufficiently justify Corbet’s storytelling devices and navigate the poisoned waters of this conflict? Almost. There is a competing objective to Corbet’s storytelling that I struggle to overcome: that Tóth is the ultimate marker of goodness and decency within the film, when his lone contribution to the question of Zionism is to imprecisely mention the unrest to which his niece is heading in Israel. Tóth reveals an understanding of what is taking place and a willingness to shy away from it.

Tóth may be troubled but above all he is a kind man. He is motivated to help the marginalised despite listing himself among them, and through no apparent sense of duty other than because he is a human being. This point is made repeatedly. New to Philadelphia and in line for bread, he meets the homeless African American Gordon and his son. After the trio go hungry, Tóth promises to line up early the following morning for their bread so that they may both sleep. Tóth later hires Gordon and brings the pair to Van Buren’s estate to live and work. Whatever successes Tóth achieves, small or significant, he shares them with America’s most oppressedclass. Tóth refuses to absorb American bigotry and at all times reflects compassion, antagonising the Van Buren archetypes in refusing to yield to them. He suffers emotional, physical and sexual abuse throughout the film, and these trials come to conceive a kind of cinematic proof of his goodness: despite these afflictions, he builds the centre in Van Buren’s name and with Van Buren’s money to reveal in fact a towering memorial to the Holocaust.

What are we to make of it, then, when Tóth laments Zsofia’s decision at the dinner table and only warns her that things are difficult for the Jewish diaspora in Israel? He intonates, without naming, the violence of the Nakba against Palestinians and the retaliatory tensions that make it less safe than America’s insidious racism. This acknowledgment of hard times in Israel is only punctuated by further silence from Tóth, neither condemning the Muslim population who refuse to leave or elaborating on why it might be hard for an emigrating Jewish population to establish themselves in this new land. This is a character who doesn’t feel compelled by Aliyah, the film’s flawed but altruistic hero, motivated to help the marginalised on the basis of deontic human decency. It is the same character who has been brutalised by one of the greatest horrors perpetrated against a people in history and yet will only limply acknowledge further brutalities being committed in his name. Intentional or simply lost among Corbet’s cacophony of obstacles that work to destabilise the American dream, I am struck by the ease with which even decent and well-intentioned people are forgiven a lack of care over Palestinian lives.

The crutch of this film and the reason this omission is so damaging is the obscure relationship of The Brutalist to truth. Despite having doubts about the legitimacy of the gargantuan brutalist building towering over Doylestown, but indulging some creative licence for Corbet’s anti-capitalist messaging, I was surprised and disappointed to find that the story of The Brutalist was more or less fabricated. The film is based rather loosely on a number of lives, sources, and Corbet’s own Hungarian family lore, which is to say its veracity is not one fixed to an easily identifiable source.

Yet Corbet takes great lengths to suggest that this is based on fact. The sincerity of Tóth’s trauma unavoidably leverages the cruelty of the Holocaust in service of its own truth-telling capability. One also suspects Corbet doesn’t mind greatly that Brody’s work in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (based on the very real Władysław Szpilman) forms a kind of accompanying paratext to legitimise the film’s raison d'être. What’s more, the grainy footage of the epilogue—a ceremony commemorating Tóth accompanied by a basic PowerPoint presentation—is styled as if it were an assembly of archived footage, the type addended so frequently to the credits of biopics but in this context just another technique to boost suggestions of credibility. Corbet wants the film to leave you with the sense of realism rather than metaphor.

But what happens when we contrive fiction within the context of well-documented events is that those fictional aspects become pointed. Metaphor can be messy with ambiguity, while such historical fiction reaches out from its context to speak to the present, saying look, here I am: among all this rubble of the past, it is here, to this story, that I need for you to attend. It becomes unlike life, each direction is a force, each element intentional, for if it is not intentional it threatens to undermine the project entirely. Every decision is sharpened, its implication heightened. How damaging is it, then, when a story dedicated to the idea of posterity raises a compelling lead only to swiftly bury it?

When asked of his work in Budapest, where he likely will never return, Tóth replies in a now strange moment of irony penned by Corbet, that he expects the buildings ‘to serve instead as a political stimulus, for sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.’ His fear that the world might move on from the Holocaust was allayed by his titanic architectural testament to suffering and to genocide, the point being that none in provincial Doylestown could look away or escape its long shadow. Time champions Tóth’s story, as it should, while cinema then immortalises it. Corbet’s intention is not to destabilise pro-Palestine rhetoric with revisionist historicity, yet the silence of his fiction remains, fairly or otherwise, inseparable from contemporary debate. We should be wary and critical of the deleterious outcomes of such a motion. Fiction is pointed, and so is its silence.

By Joshua Klarica for CRoB Digital, in collaboration with Cambridge University Film Association, edited by Lulu Rehman

Photograph by Steve Pancrate, Pexels